Chapter 1

Hazel's POV

The great hall at Shadowpelt could seat four hundred wolves. On the night of the Harvest Moon Gathering it held closer to six, and every one of them knew exactly where I was standing.

Not one of them looked at me.

That is how a pack tells you it has made up its mind. There is no shouting. The noise simply learns to move around you, the way a river moves around a stone.

I kept my hands folded low over the front of my dress. Mrs. Hale had let out the seams herself the night before, sitting on the edge of my bed with a mouthful of pins, and neither of us had said why. She could hold an entire conversation with one eyebrow. When she finished, she'd smoothed the hem flat and said, "There. Nobody sees anything they weren't invited to."

In my pocket, against my hip, sat a cedar wolf no bigger than a walnut. I had bought it that afternoon from an old man at the market stalls outside the gates, who carved them from fallen branches and sold them for two coins to children and to women who couldn't think what else to do with their hope. I'd told myself it was foolish. I had bought it anyway. Tonight, after the last toast, when Blaine slipped out to the east balcony the way he always did to get some air, I was going to follow him, put the wolf in his palm, and tell him.

Three months. I'd known for six weeks and carried it alone for every one of them, the way you carry a candle across a windy yard. Cupped. Slowly. Hardly breathing.

"Eat something."

Mrs. Hale had appeared at my elbow with a water jug I hadn't asked for. She pressed a twist of paper into my hand. Ginger candy. "It's boar again. I can see you turning green from here."

"I'm fine."

"You're a liar, and not a good one." She topped up my cup, though it was already full, and moved off toward the kitchens before I could thank her.

I slid the candy into my mouth and looked toward the high table.

My nose had turned traitor these past weeks. The smell of the roast rolled down the hall like a wall, all fat and smoke and something underneath it I didn't want to name, and I swallowed hard until it passed.

Blaine sat at the center of the high table, in the Alpha's carved chair, because his father was up on the northern border with the patrols and his mother was upstairs burning with a fever the pack healer couldn't break. My husband looked as though he had been cut from the same dark wood as the chair. He had his father's jaw and his own way of sitting very still when he was tired, as if stillness could be mistaken for strength. An elder was talking into his ear. He nodded in the right places. He had not looked in my direction once since we'd come in.

To his right stood the lower chair. Not a throne, only a good chair, a little narrower than his, with a blue cushion someone had been kind enough to add. It was where the Luna-elect sat.

I had sat in it for three years.

Three years is a long time to be almost something.

In Shadowpelt, a Luna isn't crowned by marriage. She is crowned by the moon. On the Blood Moon of the year she's mated, her wolf comes forward and answers the sky with one clear note, and the pack bows, and it's done. Mine had never answered. Mine had never so much as stirred. Other girls spoke of their wolves as a voice, a second pulse, a warmth under the ribs. Mine was a room I could feel the shape of but never enter, the kind of quiet you hear in a house where somebody has stopped all the clocks.

The elders had given me a year of grace. Then another. Then a third, each one a little thinner than the last, like bread cut for too many mouths. Behind my back the pack called me the Quiet Luna. They were kind enough to say it softly.

The doors at the far end of the hall opened, and the temperature changed.

Eloise had come from the orphans' table, where she'd spent the first hour of the feast cutting meat into small pieces for children who weren't hers. She wore white. Of course she did. Silver moon-combs in her hair, a sleeping toddler on her hip that she passed to a girl at the door with a whisper and a kiss on the head, and all the way down the hall, wolves turned toward her like flowers to a window. Old men touched their hearts as she passed. A pup tugged her skirt and she knelt right there on the flagstones to fix its collar.

I would love to say I hated her for it. It would have been so much easier. But I remembered her at six years old, standing in the doorway of my father's house with her whole life in a paper sack and the smell of the rogue attack still in her hair, and I remembered giving her my second pillow. For years I was the only person alive who could make her laugh. That's the trouble with losing someone slowly. There is no day you can point to.

"Haz."

She kissed my cheek. Jasmine, and beneath it something cool and green. She held me at arm's length and her lovely face creased with worry.

"You look so tired. Have you been sleeping? Blaine, doesn't she look tired?"

Blaine's gaze passed over me and kept going. "She's fine."

Eloise pressed two fingers to her collarbone and coughed, a small, silvery sound, and a dozen heads turned to make sure she was all right. She'd had that cough since she was twelve. It came whenever a room needed reminding that she was fragile.

I used to bring her soup when she coughed. I'd like to say I stopped when I stopped believing in it. The truth is I never stopped. I only stopped being thanked.

A spoon rang against a goblet, three times, and the hall went quiet.

Elder Wynn had risen. She was ninety if she was a day, small as a sparrow, with a voice that carried like a dropped plate. "Shadowpelt has been patient," she said. "The Blood Moon comes in twelve nights. On that night the Luna-elect will stand at the Moon Stone before the whole pack, and her wolf will answer, or it will not." She let the pause do the work. "If it does not, this council will consider the marriage seat vacant, and the alliance sealed at the wedding open to renegotiation."

A sound went through the hall, low and hungry. I kept my face still. It's a skill, if you practice for three years.

"Alpha of Night Howler," Elder Wynn said. "You sit at our table as our guest and as this girl's father. Have you a word?"

My father stood. He wasn't a tall man, but he'd learned to arrive as though he were. All evening he had said nothing to me. He'd nodded once at the door, the way you nod to a neighbor.

"Night Howler gave Shadowpelt its daughter and its warriors in good faith," he said. "We would like to keep giving them. But my daughter's wolf was to wake three years ago, and the rogues do not wait on the moon." He paused and folded his hands. "I am a practical man, Elder. I have more than one daughter."

He didn't look at me as he said it. He looked at Eloise, and so did half the hall.

Beside him, my mother studied her lap.

The words didn't hurt at first. What I felt was the odd, weightless calm of a person who has stepped off a stair that wasn't there.

"Prince Blaine." Elder Wynn turned. "You've been quiet. Do you stand by the mate the moon gave you?"

A log split in the fire. Six hundred wolves held their breath.

I looked at my husband. I didn't beg him with my eyes. I'm not built that way. I only looked at him, and I thought of the one night I had been his wife in something more than name: a storm, his head against my shoulder, his hands shaking around my wrists. I had never spoken of it. Neither had he.

His eyes found mine, and for one second they held.

Then Eloise coughed, softly, and his gaze slid toward her the way water finds a slope.

"I stand by my pack," Blaine said.

It wasn't a no. That was the cruelty of it. If it had been a no, I could have hated him cleanly.

"If it would ease things," Eloise said into the silence, in the tone of someone offering to carry a heavy bag, "I'd be glad to hold the Luna's place at table until the Blood Moon. Only to hold it. Haz has been so unwell, and an empty chair looks so unkind."

"So ordered," said Elder Wynn.

And my sister climbed the steps of the dais and sat down in my chair, on my blue cushion, and smoothed her white skirt over her knees.

Blaine didn't stop her. He didn't look at me, either.

I could have ended it with three words. I knew that even then. I could have stood in that hall and said I am with child, and the elders would have gone soft as warm bread, and my father would have found another tone, and the chair would have been mine again before the toast was poured. But I would not use my baby as a key to a door that should have opened on its own. Pride, my mother would have called it. Maybe it was. I called it the last thing I owned.

So I did what the Quiet Luna does. I inclined my head to the council, and I walked out.

The night air hit me like cold water. I went down the steps and across the trampled grass, between tents and torches and stalls still selling roasted chestnuts, where nobody knew me from anybody. My eyes were stinging. I hadn't decided to cry. It was just happening, the way rain happens.

Somewhere behind the tents I put my hand in my pocket and closed it around the little cedar wolf.

That was when the pain came.

It was low and dragging, a hand slowly closing in my belly. I stopped walking. I bent over. Not tonight, I thought, very clearly, the way you talk to a horse about to bolt. Not tonight. Please, not you too.

It ebbed. Then it came back with teeth.

I tried to straighten and couldn't. The ground swung under me. Through the blur of torchlight I saw a large white tent with a blue wolf's head stitched on the flap and a lantern hung at its entrance, WolfCare's field station, set up for the feast in case of drunks and burns, and I put one foot in front of the other toward the light, because it was the only thing I could do.

The last thing I saw was a man in a white coat, running.

His hand was already reaching out.