Chapter Five: The Silver Luna

The throne room was lit like it was midday.

Torches on every pillar, every elder in the kingdom, and half the banquet crowd who had followed the gossip up the hill. Damien stood at the foot of the throne with Isolde at his shoulder. Her eyes were red and wet. She was playing it beautifully.

"Your Majesty," Damien was saying, "my wife has deceived this kingdom. She has no wolf. Tonight she dragged our marriage through the mud with a recording nobody can verify."

"It's verified," Seraphina said.

Every head turned.

She walked down the long carpet with Lucian on one side and Vivienne on the other. Corvin came behind them holding the vial in both hands like it might go off. Her silver dress was still creased from the carriage. She didn't care. For once she didn't speed up to get through the staring.

Damien's face went tight. "You've got nerve."

"I've got a summons. You asked for me." She bowed to the king. "Your Majesty. I'm here to answer the charge."

The king hadn't taken his eyes off her since the doors opened. He looked like a man watching someone walk out of a grave.

"The charge is that you have no wolf, Lady Seraphina."

"Then let me answer it."

Isolde stepped forward, voice wobbling. "She's confused, Your Majesty. She's always been unwell. Everyone knows she was born with nothing."

"Is that right?" Seraphina turned to her. "Then tell the king what was in my tea."

Isolde went the colour of milk. "I don't know what you mean."

Corvin lifted the vial. "Silver-root tonic, Your Majesty. I took it from Beatrix Vale's dressing table the week she died. One drop a day keeps a young wolf asleep for life. Lady Seraphina was given it from the age of seven."

A noise went through the court, low and ugly. An elder near the front muttered something that sounded like a curse.

"He's lying!" Isolde said. "He's old, he's confused, he'd say anything for her."

"Then drink it," Vivienne said.

Isolde stared at her.

"Go on. You handed her a cup every single morning. Have one yourself."

Isolde didn't move. Her eyes flicked to Damien, begging, but Damien was looking at the vial, and something in his face was starting to come apart.

"Isolde," he said slowly. "Tell me that isn't true."

"Damien, I did it for us."

"For us." His voice cracked on it. "You told me she was hollow. You told me her blood was cursed."

"Her blood is silver," the king said.

Nobody breathed.

He came down the steps one at a time, an old man suddenly, and stopped in front of Seraphina. "I knew your mother," he said quietly. "She had a mark behind her left ear. A small crescent, like a new moon. May I?"

Seraphina nodded.

He moved her hair aside with two careful fingers. The torchlight found it, a thin pale curve against her skin, faintly silver, just as he'd said.

The king shut his eyes. When he opened them they were wet.

"Marguerite," he whispered. "She wrote to me before she died. I spent twenty-six years looking for her daughter."

The room went off like a struck bell. Elders on their feet, a woman crying at the back.

Damien took a step toward her. "Seraphina."

She turned.

"I didn't know," he said. He sounded like he'd been punched. "I swear I didn't. Isolde lied to me. We can still fix this. The rejection can be undone, you're still my wife in the eyes of the elders, I can—"

"Damien."

He stopped.

"I'm not your wife." She said it quietly, and that was worse than shouting. "And you're not sorry because you were tricked. You're sorry because it turned out I was worth something. You were happy enough when I wasn't."

He opened his mouth. Nothing came.

Inside her, Selene rolled over like something vast waking up, and Seraphina felt her rise the way warm water fills a basin.

"Do you want to see what you threw away?" she asked.

She stepped into the empty space at the centre of the floor and shut her eyes.

Silver poured out of her. It spread across the marble, climbed the pillars, and every torch in the room leaned toward her like it was bowing. It didn't hurt. It felt like finally breathing out after holding it for twenty-six years.

When the light settled, there was a wolf where Seraphina had been.

She was huge, taller than any Alpha in the room, with a coat the colour of moonlight on fresh snow. She lifted her head and howled, one long clean note, and every wolf in the hall felt it in the spine.

Then they knelt.

The elders first. Then the warriors, then the guests, all of them going down at once like grass in a wind. The king himself bowed his head. Damien stayed upright the longest. When his knees finally gave, he looked like a man watching his whole life slide out of his hands.

Isolde ran. She didn't get five steps before two guards had her by the arms.

"Hold her," the king said, voice shaking with fury. "And find me every name that touched that tea. Every one."

Seraphina shifted back, shivering, and Lucian was already there with his coat around her shoulders. His hands were not quite steady, she noticed. She decided not to mention it.

"All right?"

"I think so." She laughed, thin and tired. "I think I just stopped being invisible."

"You never were."

She looked up at him and remembered the kiss, and heat crawled up her neck. "About the proposal—"

"It was a statement," he said gently. "You don't have to keep it."

"I don't know yet."

"Then I'll wait. I'm very patient."

She was about to answer when the king appeared beside them. The room was still buzzing, people on their feet, guards leading Isolde out, and under all of it his voice dropped to almost nothing.

"Lady Seraphina. A moment, alone."

Lucian's hand left her shoulder. She followed the king through a small door behind the throne, into a narrow stone room with one lamp and a locked chest in the corner. He knelt, unlocked it with a key from his own neck, and took out a folded letter, the paper gone soft and yellow.

"Marguerite sent this to me before she died. I was told to give it to her daughter if she ever came forward, and to no one else." His hand shook as he held it out. "I've read it a thousand times. I never understood the last line."

"What does it say?"

"Read it."

Seraphina unfolded the page. The handwriting was small and slanted and urgent, and she found herself thinking, stupidly, that this was the closest she had ever been to her mother.

She read it through once, fast, and her breath snagged.

The final line sat alone at the bottom, pressed so hard the pen had nearly torn the page.

Whatever they tell you, my darling, do not trust Lucian Blackthorn.

Seraphina looked up.

Through the half-open door, across the crowded throne room, Lucian was watching her. Still. Unsmiling.

He had been watching her the whole time.