Chapter 4

Wren's POV

I lifted her hand off my belly and gave it back to her.

"You're kind, Luna. But I'll see to the pup myself."

Her face cooled. "Don't be a fool. Keep it, and you carry the stain for life. Do you think Adrian could look at you and not see it?"

"I'm not fit to be his Luna, and I won't shame him," I said. "I want the Rejection and a roof of my own somewhere far from here. I'll swear to the barrenness. It's the best reason he could have. It will even help his next binding."

The last pretense of warmth left her. "Very well. You'll have your Rejection, on terms. You'll swear never to act against Duskmere."

"I'll swear to whatever you like. The letters, the daybook pages and my father's field book come back to you once I'm safely past the walls of Silverkeep." I held her eyes. "But you'll keep your word too, Luna."

She looked at me the way she looked at the household accounts when a sum came out wrong. Then she gave one short nod.

"I want Briar back," I said. "She comes with me. Nessa I leave to you. You'll know what to do with a maid who sold her lady."

Nessa dropped to the flagstones. "My Luna, you promised! You said when Lord Adrian came home—"

"You thought I'd put a girl who sold one mistress into my son's rooms?" The Luna didn't turn her head. She went out, and Pell got up off her knees and hurried after her with her face swollen.

Nessa crawled to my feet and knocked her forehead on the stone. "Take me with you, my lady. If you leave me here, she'll sell me down to the river quarter, or worse."

"You chose your road, Nessa."

The gate banged open before she could answer, and Briar stumbled in.

Her hair was stuck to her temple with dried blood. One eye was swollen shut and her lip was split. She saw Nessa on her knees at my feet and went straight for her, and her kick sent Nessa sprawling and nearly took Briar down with her.

"You faithless little snake! After everything she did for you!"

I caught her arms and then let go at once, afraid of hurting her. "Briar, what did they do to you?"

"Bruises, my lady. It's nothing." She was crying anyway, the tears running into the cut on her lip. "It's my fault. That night at Hollowbrook, I never should have left you to fetch that cloak. And all these months I thought your courses were only late, the way they always are. I never once thought—"

"Neither did I." I drew her toward the door. "Come and let me see to your face. We have to be ready to leave, and she hasn't finished with us yet."

* * *

The Luna came back at dusk without a single servant behind her. She held two sheets of paper up in the last of the light so I could see the writing, a narrow, slanting hand that had worked hard to look like Sera's. The ink was fresh.

"This was left at my gate this morning," she said. "And this one at Hollowbrook's gate this afternoon. My daughter found it before her mother-in-law did, by the Moon's grace." She closed her fist on both pages. "So you have someone outside."

Posy's bandage had reached the right hands. I kept that off my face.

"My terms," the Luna said. "You take nothing from this house but the clothes on your back. You sign a declaration in your own hand that you are barren, that you go of your own will, and that you will never speak against Duskmere or stand in my son's way. And you leave Silverkeep the morning after you're rejected, and you never come back."

"I accept them all." I bent my knee. "You never needed any of this, Luna. If you had asked me plainly, I would have let him go."

Her mouth thinned. "Moonrise," she said, and left.

* * *

Alpha Gerard sat in the high chair that night, with three gray elders beside him. In three years he had barely spoken to me, and he looked at me now as if he were trying to remember my name.

"Wren Ashdown asks to be released," the Luna told the hall, her voice heavy with regret. "She cannot give Duskmere an heir, and she will not keep my son from one. We are sorry to lose her."

I knelt at the moonstone where I had knelt the night before and said the words of rejection. When I finished, the Alpha spoke for his absent son. "Duskmere accepts it."

Old Corwen, the eldest of the three, took a knife to the red cord on my wrist, the one Adrian had knotted there three years ago. It parted easily. He weighed the cut end in his palm.

"The other half's still on the boy's wrist," he said, low. "He'll have to cut his own."

"He will," said the Luna, "when he's home."

Then she raised her voice for the walls. Duskmere would not send a war orphan away empty-handed. There would be five hundred silver marks, and riders to see me safe to my mother's people in the Lakelands.

"Send two more riders," the Alpha said, rubbing his eyes. "And more silver. She's old Ashdown's granddaughter."

I bowed to him, and to the elders, and to the Luna last of all.

In the morning I signed the declaration on the stone table in my yard and pressed my thumb into the red wax under my name. The Luna watched me do it.

"You won't forget the rest," she said.

"I won't, Luna. And you've found me an escort, haven't you? All the way to the Lakelands."

Her face didn't change. "Four good riders, and Mistress Ivers to see to your comfort. The cart is at the side gate at second bell."

Nessa caught at my skirts in the passage. Briar pried her fingers loose, and I walked on without looking back.

The cart had dark canvas and four riders I had never seen before. Mistress Ivers stood by the wheel with her company smile. The lane behind Duskmere Hall was empty at that hour, too empty, and I knew someone was watching it to see who came to meet me. My note had told the right person to stay away.

Ivers rode inside with us, so Briar and I held hands and said nothing all the way through the Southgate to the posting yard. We had waited there half an hour when a man on a lathered horse found Ivers at the tailboard and spoke in her ear.

I knew what he was telling her. A bundle had been left at the Luna's gate with a note I had written myself. At the posting yard, call off your riders, and you'll have the rest.

Ivers climbed back in with her face gone a mottled red and threw our bundle into my lap.

"Clever, aren't you? The Luna sends you an escort out of pure kindness, and you throw it in her face. Get out. Whatever becomes of you now is nothing to do with Duskmere."

She pulled me down by the wrist. The riders and the cart were lost in the crush of the yard before Briar had our bundle on her back.

"Are we free?" Briar whispered, shaking.

"Hurry. The south mail leaves at noon."

We bought two inside seats with the coins sewn in Briar's hem and wedged ourselves between a wool trader and a weaver's wife. The coach lurched, and the walls of Silverkeep began to slide past the window.

Briar let out a long breath. "The Lakelands, then."

I put my mouth close to her ear.

"We get down at the first stop," I said. "We're going back to Silverkeep."