Chapter 3: The Girl Without a Wolf

Wren POV

The Luna of Silvercrest liked her tea at exactly the temperature of blood.

Not hotter. Not cooler. I had learned that at fourteen, the first time I brought it to her too warm and she poured the whole pot over my hands to show me what too warm felt like. The scars had faded to pale, shiny patches across my knuckles. I barely noticed them anymore.

Celeste noticed them. She noticed everything.

"You're late," she said, without looking up from her mirror.

"Forgive me, Luna." I set the tray on her dressing table and kept my eyes down. "The kitchen fires were slow this morning."

"The kitchen fires were slow because Alpha Lucian sold the good firewood to the Marsh Pack." She pinched her cheeks, frowning at her reflection. "Not that you'd know anything about that. Pour."

I poured. My hands didn't shake. They had stopped shaking years ago.

Silvercrest was beautiful from the outside. White stone towers along the river. Silk banners on every balcony. Fountains in the courtyards that used to run with fresh water day and night. But I'd lived inside its walls since I was eleven, and I knew where the beauty ended. The fountains had been dry for a year. Half the servants had been sent away. The silk banners were the same ones that had hung there for a decade, turned so visitors wouldn't see the fading.

Silvercrest was rotting from the inside out, like a peach left too long in the sun.

And Luna Celeste was getting crueller every day it rotted.

"Wren." She sipped, and her lip curled. "This is almost acceptable. You're improving."

From her, that was nearly a compliment. It made my stomach twist with dread.

"Thank you, Luna."

"Go. Alpha Lucian has guests tonight, and I want the silver polished until I can see my teeth in it."

I curtsied and fled.

In the corridor outside, I stopped and pressed my back against the cool stone wall and made myself breathe. In, out. In, out. It was a trick Mother taught me when I was small and frightened of thunder. Count the breaths, Wren. The storm always passes.

Celeste was a storm that never passed. But I counted anyway.

  *

In the servants' wing, nobody looked at me.

That was how it had always been. I was the wolfless girl. Every she-wolf in Silvercrest shifted for the first time at sixteen, under the full moon, with her pack howling around her. I had stood in that circle at sixteen, and seventeen, and eighteen, while the moon rose and nothing happened. No pain. No fur. No voice in my head.

After the third year, they stopped waiting with me.

A wolfless she-wolf was worth less than a human in Silvercrest. Humans at least didn't pretend to be something they weren't.

Only Old Bess, the head cook, had ever been kind to me. She was a heavy, slow-moving woman with flour permanently caked in the creases of her knuckles, and she slipped me the heel of the bread loaf every morning without a word. Today she caught my arm as I passed the ovens.

"You're pale, girl," she muttered. "She at you again?"

"No more than usual."

Bess clicked her tongue. She glanced around the busy kitchen, then leaned close, her voice low. "Listen to me. There's talk upstairs. The Alpha's in debt to half the river packs, and the Luna's been in a foul temper for a week. When the big ones are scared, it's the small ones who pay. You keep your head down. You hear me?"

"I always do."

"Do it lower." She pressed a warm roll into my hand and pushed me toward the door. "And eat something, for the Goddess's sake. You're all bones."

I ate the roll on the back stairs, and I thought about my mother.

I didn't remember much of her anymore. That frightened me more than anything. I remembered her hands, quick and gentle, braiding my hair by the fire. I remembered the cottage deep in the southern woods where we'd lived, so far from any pack that we sometimes went a whole season without seeing another wolf. I remembered that she never shifted, not once in all the years I knew her, and that when I asked her why, she only smiled and said some wolves sleep a long time.

And I remembered the night the light first came out of my hands. I was seven. Finn hadn't been born yet. A fox had caught one of our hens, and I'd found the bird bleeding in the yard and picked it up, crying. Silver light had spilled out between my fingers, and the hen had shaken herself and flapped away.

Mother had seen. She'd gone white. Then she'd knelt in the dirt and held me so tight I couldn't breathe, and she'd whispered over and over that I must never, never do that where anyone could see.

I hadn't understood. I still didn't.

But I'd kept the promise. For fifteen years, I'd kept it.

"Wren!"

A small body slammed into my legs, and I staggered and laughed for the first time all day.

"Finn." I crouched and pushed his messy dark curls out of his eyes. My little brother was nine, all knees and elbows, with our mother's grey eyes and none of her caution. "You're supposed to be in the stables."

"I finished." He grinned, gap-toothed. "I mucked all six stalls. Master Corin said I'm faster than the grown-ups."

"Master Corin should be paying you more, then."

"He doesn't pay me at all."

"Exactly my point."

Finn giggled. Then his face fell, and he tugged my sleeve, pulling me toward the back stairs. "Wren. You have to come. It's Pip."

Pip was the runt of the hound pack, a scruffy grey mongrel that Finn had decided belonged to him the day it was born. I followed my brother down into the cellar behind the kennels, where the light came through a single high window, and my heart sank.

Pip was lying on a pile of sacking, breathing in short, wet gasps. One of his back legs was twisted at a sickening angle. Blood had soaked through the cloth beneath him.

"The guards' horses," Finn whispered. His voice cracked. "He ran under them. Master Corin said he's going to put him down tonight. He said he's not worth the trouble."

I knelt beside the dog. Pip's eyes rolled toward me, cloudy with pain.

"Wren." Finn's small hand gripped my shoulder. "Do the thing."

"Finn—"

"Please. Nobody's here. I checked. I checked twice."

I shouldn't. I knew I shouldn't. Mother had made me swear, on the last night before the Silvercrest guards came to our cottage in the woods. Never let them see it, Wren. Never. Not for anyone. Not for anything.

She hadn't told me why. She'd only held my face in her hands and made me swear it three times. The next morning she was gone, and Finn and I were wards of Silvercrest, and I was eleven years old and had no one left to ask.

But Pip was dying. And my brother was looking at me like I could fix the world.

I closed my eyes and placed my palms on the dog's twisted leg.

It started the way it always did. Warmth first, gathering in the centre of my chest like a small sun. Then it flowed down my arms, into my wrists, my fingers. When I opened my eyes, a soft silver light was spilling from beneath my hands. It was the colour of moonlight on water.

Finn sucked in a breath. He'd seen it before, but he never got used to it. Neither did I.

Under my palms, bone shifted and knitted. Torn muscle wove itself back together. Pip's breathing slowed, deepened, steadied. The light faded, and I sagged back on my heels, dizzy and cold, as if I'd given away something I needed.

Pip lifted his head. Sniffed. Then he stood up on four good legs and licked my chin.

Finn burst into tears and threw his arms around the dog. "You did it! You did it, Wren!"

"Shh." I pressed a finger to my lips, but I was smiling, my eyes stinging. "Nobody can know. You remember?"

"Nobody can know," he whispered back solemnly, then buried his face in Pip's fur.

I sat in the dim cellar and watched them, and for one moment I let myself believe that we would be all right. That one day, somehow, I'd get us out of Silvercrest.

I didn't hear the footsteps on the cellar stairs.

I only heard the slow, deliberate clap of two hands.

I spun around. My blood turned to ice.

Luna Celeste stood at the bottom of the stairs in her pale blue gown, a lantern in one hand and an expression on her face I had never seen before. Not anger. Not disgust.

Delight.

"Well," she said softly. "Well, well, well."

"Luna, I—" My mind went blank. "It wasn't— The dog wasn't as badly hurt as—"

"Don't." She stepped closer, and the lantern light swung across Pip's healed leg, across my trembling hands, across Finn's frightened face. "Don't insult me, Wren. I know exactly what I just saw."

She crouched in front of me, silk pooling on the dirty cellar floor, and took my scarred hand in hers. Turned it over. Studied my palm like it was a jewel.

"Eleven years," she murmured. "Eleven years you've been pouring my tea, and you were hiding this. Your mother was a clever woman. I'll give her that."

My heart stopped. "You knew my mother?"

Celeste smiled and didn't answer. She released my hand and rose.

"Get up. Both of you." She looked at Finn. "The boy goes back to the stables. You come with me."

"Luna, please, Finn didn't do anything—"

"Nobody is hurting Finn." Her voice was sweet as honey. "Not today."

She led me up through the servants' passages into her private chambers and closed the door. Then she went to her writing desk, opened a small drawer with a key she wore on a chain around her neck, and took out something that fit in her palm.

A glass vial. No bigger than my little finger. The liquid inside was clear as water.

"You've heard, I suppose," Celeste said, "that our idiot warriors started a fight with Thornvale."

I had heard. Everyone had. Thornvale. The name alone made Silvercrest servants lower their voices. I'd heard stories of its Alpha all my life: that he had rebuilt his pack with his bare hands, that he'd once killed four rogues alone, that he had no heart.

"They say he's a monster," I whispered before I could stop myself.

"Do they?" Celeste laughed softly, as if I'd said something charming. "I knew him once, you know. Long before you came here. He was sweet. Earnest. Poor as a church mouse and twice as dull." Her smile sharpened. "Five years can change a man. I suppose we'll find out how much."

"Thornvale demanded a blood debt," Celeste continued. "We can't pay it. So we're going to pay it the old way. With a tribute bride."

She turned and looked at me, and I understood a heartbeat before she said it.

"You leave for the northern border in three days, Wren. You belong to Alpha Kade Ravenmoor now."

The floor tilted beneath me. "Luna, I can't—Finn—"

"Finn stays here." She took my hand, almost tenderly, opened my fingers, and pressed the cold glass vial into my palm. Then she closed my fingers over it one at a time.

She leaned in until her lips were at my ear. Honey and white roses.

"On your first night in Thornvale, you'll pour the Alpha's wine," she whispered. "You'll put every drop of this in his cup. And you'll watch him drink it."

I couldn't breathe.

"And if you don't—" She drew back and smiled at me with perfect white teeth. "Your little brother will have an accident in the stables. Under the horses' hooves. Just like that poor dog."

She patted my cheek.

"And this time, sweet Wren, you won't be there to heal him."