Chapter 3

"Have you thought about your apology?"

Odalys's voice slid through the attic door at dawn, thin and brittle, the voice of a woman who had not slept.

I was already dressed. Boots laced. Tamsin's letter folded inside my bra. The moon-silver key hung on a cord against my collarbone, cool and strangely heavy, as if it had a heartbeat of its own.

"Yes," I said. "I have."

A long pause. Then the lock clicked halfway.

"Good." Relief crept into her tone. "Then say it."

I looked at the window.

"I'm sorry," I said, "that you ever thought I belonged to you."

The lock stopped. Her breath hissed through the wood.

I did not wait for her answer. I pushed the window wide, swung one leg over the sill, and dropped onto the shed roof. Wet slate shifted under my boots. Fear licked up my spine, and I bit down on it. Behind me, Odalys began to scream my name, high and shrill, pounding on the door.

Six feet to the woodpile. Three to the fence. I counted them as I moved.

A young wolf in a Blackthorn jacket leaned against the lane wall, chewing a match, staring at the butcher's cart. Marlowe's man. He was supposed to be watching the front door. Instead, he was watching a girl deliver ham.

I slid off the shed roof, crossed the woodpile, and vanished into the gap between the feed store and the chapel.

Nobody shouted. Nobody followed.

My heart hammered so loud I thought the whole village could hear it.

Moonhollow lay four miles north of the pack town, up a switchback road nobody used. I climbed it on foot. Mist crawled between the pines and dripped from every needle. My legs burned. My lungs burned. My body was soft from six years of kitchens and sickrooms, and it complained with every step.

I kept going.

Twice I doubled back. Once I hid in a ditch while a Blackthorn truck rumbled past on the lower road. I waited until the engine faded, then climbed on, and I scrubbed my scent from the trail with pine sap the way my mother had taught me.

Do not let them see the ridge.

By the time the trees opened, my hands were raw, and my thighs were shaking. The mist thinned. Ahead of me, the road ended at a wall of black iron.

The gate stood twice my height. Rust ate the bars. Ivy strangled the posts. In the center, above the lock, someone had forged a crescent moon with a wolf's head curling inside it.

It matched the bow of my key.

I stepped closer. The key grew warm against my chest, then hot. Faint silver light pulsed under my shirt.

I pulled the cord over my head and pushed the key into the lock.

Nothing happened.

I twisted. The mechanism did not move. I shoved harder. Frustration rose in a hot wave. The iron sat silent and blind.

"Come on," I whispered.

Silence. Wind in the pines.

Then a thought surfaced, small and cold, from the last thing my grandmother had ever told me when I was seven years old and did not understand.

Blood remembers what paper forgets, little one.

I looked at the key. The bow had a tiny, sharp point where the crescent's horn curled. I turned my palm up and dragged it across the point.

Pain flared. A bright line of red welled across my skin.

I pressed the wound against the lock.

The gate drank.

I felt it. A pull, deep and strange, as if the iron were a mouth. The red drained from my palm in a rush. Silver light exploded across the ivy and rust, racing along every bar like fire along a fuse. The wolf's head lifted its forged chin. The hinges groaned, and the gate swung open, slow and silent, as though it had been oiled yesterday.

I stumbled forward, dizzy, my hand throbbing.

Behind me, the gate swung shut. The lock clicked.

I turned and looked.

The road had vanished. Where a dirt track had been, there were only trees, thick and dark, and a wall of mist.

Hidden, I thought. All this time, it was hidden.

The manor rose out of the fog like a ghost.

Three stories of grey stone. Tall windows. A collapsed porch and a roof half swallowed by moss. It should have felt abandoned. It did not. It felt like a house holding its breath.

I found the cellar door around the back, exactly where the letter's faint map had promised. Stone steps led down into darkness. I lit the candle stub from my pocket and descended.

The air changed at the bottom. Cold. Clean. It smelled of snowmelt and old silver.

A corridor opened ahead, wide enough for a cart. Doors lined both sides, heavy oak, banded with iron. I pushed the nearest one open and my candle flame caught on rows of shelves stretching into the dark.

Grain sacks. Barrels. Tins of oil. Dried herbs strung in bundles from the rafters.

Granaries.

I walked slowly, dragging my fingers along the shelves. Every door I opened held more. Salted meat. Jars of honey sealed in wax. Crates of medicine stamped with a symbol I did not know. Coils of rope. Lanterns. Blankets folded in neat squares, untouched.

Someone had stocked this place for a very long time. Someone had planned.

My throat tightened.

Grandmother.

At the end of the corridor, the tunnel opened into a round chamber. The ceiling arched high overhead, carved with stars. In the center, on a raised dais, stood a circular stone well ringed with runes, its water black and perfectly still.

The moon well.

Beside it, on a lectern of pale wood, lay a book.

I crossed to it. My boots echoed. The book was huge, bound in dark leather, the cover stamped with the same crescent and wolf. When I opened it, the pages were thick as cloth, and each line was written in the same slanted, bold hand as the letter.

A ledger.

I read the first page, and my hands went cold.

Debts owed to the Royal Line, and by whom.

Below it, names. Dozens. Hundreds. Packs, families, houses. Each with a date, an amount, a promise.

My finger slid down the list until it stopped.

Blackthorn Pack. Debt of protection. Four hundred and twelve years unpaid. Sealed by Alpha Aldric Rourke, ancestor of the present line. Collateral: the territory of the river valley, in full.

I read it again.

Then a third time.

The entire river valley. Cassian's pack, his lodge, his hall, his so-called birthright. All of it was collateral. All of it, on paper, belonged to whoever held this book.

I laughed. It came out cracked and breathless and half a sob.

"Oh, Grandmother," I whispered. "What did you do?"

The candle flame guttered. I looked up.

Near the wall, half hidden behind the dais, sat a single wooden crate. Old. Sealed with black wax. A crescent pressed into the lid.

Something in me pulled toward it.

I crossed the chamber, set down the candle, and laid my bleeding palm flat on the lid.

The crate vanished.

No sound. No flash. One heartbeat it was under my hand and the next there was only air and my own fingers, spread against nothing.

I stumbled back. My heart slammed against my ribs.

"No," I breathed. "No, no, where did it..."

Warmth spread up my arm. Not pain. A gentle, humming heat that pooled behind my breastbone. My palm tingled. The blood on it glowed faintly silver.

I opened my hand.

The crate sat in it, small as a matchbox, the black wax still perfect on the lid.

I stared.

Behind me, the moon well began to glow.