Night Without Moon

The hooded man was gone.

I realised it only after the last grey wolf had fled over the rooftops, yelping, its leash snapping loose behind it. The archway where he had stood was empty. A single wet footprint remained on the cobbles. Whoever he was, he had watched the whole fight without lifting a finger, and then slipped away like smoke.

"Majesty!" Dorian came limping out of the alley mouth, back in his human shape, a ragged gash across his forearm and blood running down his sleeve. He had dragged Corin with him. The young guard was alive, but barely, with a torn shoulder and a face the colour of tallow. "Majesty, they are gone. The rest scattered when the first one fell. I think—"

He stopped.

I had turned, too, and I saw what he saw.

Kael was kneeling in the mud.

He had shifted back to a man, naked to the waist, his rough trousers torn at the knee. His coat lay forgotten in a puddle several feet away. Rain ran down his bare back in pale streams. And along his left side, from ribs to hip, ran four ragged, parallel gouges, deep as a hand's width, black at the edges.

"It is nothing," he said. His voice was steady. His face was grey.

"It is iron," said Dorian hoarsely.

I knelt beside him. Up close I could smell it, a sour, metallic reek. The wolf's collar had been studded with iron, and its claws must have been dipped in it too. Iron was poison to our kind. It stopped the healing, slowed the blood, ate through flesh like acid.

"Kael," I said. "You are hurt."

"I have had worse."

"You are bleeding on the street."

"Then we will not stand on the street." He tried to push himself up. His arm buckled, and he caught himself on one fist. A muscle jumped in his jaw. "Dorian. Take Corin back to the citadel. Quietly. Find Mara. Tell no one where I am."

"I am not leaving you," said Dorian.

"You are not helping me by dying of blood loss in the gutter. Go."

"Majesty—"

"That is an order."

Dorian looked at him. Then at me. A whole conversation seemed to pass between us in that one glance. I nodded.

"I will take care of him," I said.

"If anything happens to him—"

"I know."

The Beta swore under his breath, swung Corin's arm across his shoulders, and half-carried the boy up the alley at a stumbling run. His footsteps faded into the rain.

"You should have gone with him," Kael muttered.

"I know."

"You do not listen very well."

"I have been told." I slid an arm around his back. His skin was shockingly hot. "Can you stand?"

"I can walk."

"That was not the question."

His laugh turned into a cough. But he leaned on me, and together we got him to his feet.

There was a dye-works across the alley, a long, ramshackle building with a sagging roof and a rusted padlock on the door. The padlock took me thirty seconds. Brenna had taught me how to pick locks at nine. A Veyra, she used to say, should never be locked in, or locked out.

Inside, the air was warm and heavy, thick with the stink of old woad and madder. Wooden vats stood in rows, their surfaces stained blue and red and ochre. A loft ran along one wall, reached by a ladder, with a heap of old sacking at the far end. I got Kael up the ladder one rung at a time, with his arm over my shoulder and his teeth clenched.

At the top, he collapsed onto the sacking with a ragged groan.

"Stay there. Do not move."

"I do not take orders from my wife."

"Today you do." I tore off my shawl and pressed it against his ribs. It soaked through in seconds. "Goddess, you are bleeding terribly. The iron is stopping it from closing."

"Mara will know what to do."

"Mara is an hour away. At best." I looked around the loft. There was no moon. The sky outside the broken skylight was a solid sheet of grey cloud, and night was coming on fast. Wolves healed best under moonlight, and the lack of it was draining him, I could see it. His breathing had grown short and shallow. His eyes kept fluttering shut.

Then I will do it myself, I thought.

I had been warned never to. Brenna had spent years drilling the lesson into me. Never use it where anyone might see. Never use it unless you have no choice. The gift was a secret, a weapon, a curse. It cost more than anyone knew.

But there was no one here. Only a dying king and a dim grey light.

I took a long breath, and I held out my hands.

I had never done it for anyone but myself.

The old Veyra technique was called threadmending. My mother had practised it in secret on injured wolves in the village, in the years before the fire. It did not work on flesh, exactly. It worked on the thin, shining lines that ran through every living creature, the tiny threads of life that held a body together. When they were torn, the body bled. When they were stitched, the body healed.

I laid my palms on either side of the wound, and I let my sight open.

Kael's body lit up before me like a tapestry.

Silver-gold ribbons ran through his flesh, hundreds of them, thick as ropes along his spine, fine as hair around his heart. Most were bright and strong. But along his side the threads were ragged and black, frayed to nothing where the iron had burned them through. They twitched and spasmed, like a sleeper in a nightmare.

Easy, I thought. Easy. I have you.

I caught the first frayed end between two fingers of light. I tied it to its neighbour. Tied the next. Slowly, patiently, I drew the broken strands together, thread by thread, the way you mend a net.

The glow poured out of my fingertips in a thin, pale stream. My hands began to shake. A warm trickle ran from my nose. I wiped it away on my sleeve and kept working.

I do not know how long it took. Minutes, maybe an hour. The skylight went from grey to black. The only light in the loft was the soft silver glow that spilled from my hands and lit the dye-stained rafters like the inside of a dream.

When the last black thread was tied, the wounds closed. Not perfectly. Four long pink scars remained, tender and puckered. But the bleeding had stopped, and the poison had been drawn out of the flesh, and Kael's breathing had grown deep and slow.

I sat back on my heels. My head spun. My fingers felt as though I had dipped them in ice.

Done, I thought, and the whole loft seemed to swim.

Kael began to mutter some time after midnight.

I had wrapped him in the sacking and tucked my shawl under his head. He was burning with fever, drenched in sweat, and his eyelids flickered as he dreamed. I sat beside him with my back against a wooden post and held a cloth to his forehead, and I tried not to think about how his hair curled when it was damp.

"No," he said hoarsely. "No. Not that way."

"Kael?"

"The door. I cannot... it is stuck." His hand knotted in the sacking. "Fire. There is fire in the house. Run."

My stomach turned over.

"It is all right," I said. "You are safe. You are in the loft."

"Burning." His breath hitched. "The roof is coming down. There is a child. A little girl. She is so small. She is..." His voice cracked. "Run. Run, do not look back. Go. I have the ribbon. I have it. Go."

I went rigid.

The cloth slipped from my fingers.

A fire. A little girl.

My own nightmares had worn that shape for sixteen years. A wooden house, an orange glow, hands pressing me down into a cellar. Smoke so thick I could not see. The smell of my mother's hair burning. The sound of her voice, calm and clear, calling my name from somewhere above: Run, Elena. Run, and do not look back.

It was a coincidence. It had to be. The Alpha King had lived through a hundred fires. His family had burned half the kingdom.

But he was weeping in his sleep.

Silent tears slid sideways from the corners of his eyes and into his hair. His face, always so hard and controlled, had crumpled like a boy's. I had never seen anyone look so lost.

Without thinking, I reached out and took his hand.

It was hot and rough. It tightened around mine at once, fiercely, as though I had thrown him a rope.

"I have you," I whispered. "It is only a dream."

He did not wake. But the muttering stopped. His breathing eased. And the two of us stayed that way for a long time, a king and a spy, hand in hand in the dark.

Dawn found us there.

Pale grey light spilled through the skylight. Somewhere outside, a cart rattled over cobbles. I had fallen asleep sitting up, with my head against the post, and a crick in my neck, and Kael's hand still folded in mine.

I woke to the feeling of being watched.

His eyes were open. Clear. Steady. Amber in the dim light, and very, very awake.

"Good morning," I said, and cleared my throat. "How do you feel?"

He did not answer. His gaze dropped slowly from my face to my hand, still holding his. My fingertips were glowing. A soft silver radiance clung to them, faint but unmistakable, the last traces of the threadmending, pulsing gently in time with my heartbeat.

I yanked my hand away and hid it behind my back.

Too late.

Kael sat up. He moved carefully, one palm pressed to his side, where four pink scars ran across skin that should have been ripped to ribbons. He looked at them. Then he looked at me. His voice, when it came, was low and rough and utterly calm.

"What are you?"