Chapter 2: What Was Left

Elara

Elara was pounding on her bedroom door before the sun had cleared the hills.

"Open it!" Her fist hit the wood again. "I know you're out there!"

She had spent what was left of the night sitting on the edge of her bed and listening to the house move around her. She had heard footsteps in the hall and low voices behind closed doors. She had heard the scrape of a chair, as if someone had stood up too fast. But nobody had come to tell her anything. And now, near dawn she had tried the handle and found it locked from the outside.

After a while, a key turned and her mother stood in the hall, dressed and pinned and composed, a folded gray cloak over one arm.

"Put this on."

"Why was my door locked?"

"For your safety." Mother held out the cloak. "Wear the hood up. Tell no servant what you heard last night, or what you felt. If anyone asks, you are unwell and frightened for your sister."

"I am frightened for my sister."

"Then it will be easy." Mother's voice did not rise. It never did. "Keep your eyes down, Elara. Do not look at anyone longer than you must."

"Why?" Elara took the cloak, because to refuse would mean standing in a hallway and arguing with a wall. "What exactly do you think they'll see?"

Mother looked at her for a long moment. The silence said more than any answer would have, and none of it was kind.

"Put on the hood," she said and kept walking.

The Silvermoon healing wing sat at the north end of the great hall, behind a courtyard of pale stone. Servants bowed as they passed. Elara kept her chin tucked and her gaze on the flagstones, she counted the cracks between them to keep her hands from shaking.

The air inside smelled of lye, boiled linen and crushed mint. The head healer, Orla, met them at the door with her sleeves rolled to the elbow and her gray hair coming loose from its knot. She was a round, tired woman who had delivered half the pack, including Elara and her sister.

"She's over there," Orla said gently. "I've kept the room quiet. Take as long as you need."

Mother stopped in the doorway. "Go on, I'll wait here."

Elara went in alone.

Serena lay on a white bed beneath the window, with the morning light slanting across the blanket. Someone had braided her hair and laid the braid over one shoulder. A bandage wrapped her forehead and her left arm was splinted to the elbow. Her lips were dry and slightly parted, and her face had the smooth stillness of someone carved from candle wax.

Elara had seen her sister sleep a thousand times. Serena slept like she did everything else, neatly, and with her hands folded. But this was not the same.

"Hey," Elara whispered. Her voice broke. "I'm here now, please wake up."

She sat on the edge of the bed and took Serena's hand. It was cool and dry, and the fingers did not curl around hers.

She drew a breath to steady herself, and her stomach dropped.

Something was missing.

All her life, Serena had smelled like sunlight on cut grass, with a bright, clean edge of cedar beneath it. It was the scent of the room she had grown up in. It was the first thing Elara noticed whenever her sister walked into a room, and the last thing that lingered when she left.

But now it was gone. Now there was only soap, lamp oil and the flat, faint warmth of a body breathing. A person. Not Serena.

Elara pressed her free hand against her mouth.

Inside her chest, something stirred.

Empty, the second voice said. It was quieter than it had been in the night, and every word seemed to cost it. Cold. Home.

Empty. Cold. Home?

Elara felt the grief roll through her ribs like a tide going out. But it was not her own. It was too old, too exact and too deeply worn into its shape, the grief of someone who had stood at the door of their house and found it empty.

"Who are you?" she whispered, so low that no one outside the room could have heard. "What are you?"

There was a long, aching pause.

Vesper, it said.

The name settled inside her like a stone dropping into a well. Elara knew the name. She had heard it only once, at the naming ceremony when she and Serena were seven, when the elders had named her sister's wolf in the old tongue and Serena had cried with happiness. Vesper. Meaning evening star. The brightest wolf the Silvermoon pack had seen in a generation.

"That's Serena's wolf," Elara breathed.

Vesper did not answer. But Wren, the small shy wolf who had lived in Elara's chest all her life, pressed forward toward the sound, trembling, as if she wanted to curl up against it.

And Vesper's grief turned toward the bed. Toward the still, pale body on the sheets. To the one place in the world it wanted to be. It wanted to go home but sadly, it couldn't 

"Elara?"

She jumped. Orla stood at her shoulder with a cup of water in her hand and concern in her tired face.

"You're shaking badly, child."

"No I'm fine." Elara wiped her cheek with the back of her wrist. "I'm just tired. I didn't sleep."

"None of us did." Orla set the cup on the table and squeezed her shoulder. "She's strong, your sister. I've been checking her since they carried her in. Her pulse is steady and her breathing is good. Her wolf has gone very deep, that's all. It happens after a hard shock. The wolf pulls so far inward that you can barely sense it."

Elara stared at her.

"Very deep," she repeated.

"It may come back to the surface when she wakes." Orla smiled, kind and confident and completely mistaken. "I've seen it before. Try not to worry."

Elara nodded because she could not trust her voice. Behind her ribs, Vesper shifted. It was  a slow, bruised movement, like someone turning over in a sickbed.

She was still holding Serena's hand when the door opened again.

She knew the footsteps before she saw him. They were unhurried and even, with a faint tap of a cane on stone. Elder Lucian came in first, silver at his temples, his gray coat brushed clean, his face full of soft concern. Then two other council elders followed a pace behind, their expressions solemn and careful.

"Ah," Lucian said quietly. "Forgive the intrusion."

He crossed the room and bent over Serena. He laid two fingers briefly against her forehead, the way a priest might bless a child. His eyes were gentle.

"Poor girl," he murmured. "So much was asked of her."

He straightened and turned.

Elara had meant to keep her eyes lowered. She had meant to count the cracks in the floor. But Lucian's voice was soft and kind and patient, the voice that had calmed pack disputes and soothed grieving widows for as long as she could remember, and some small, stupid part of her wanted to look up and be comforted.

She lifted her head.

The hood slid back an inch. A beam of morning light caught her face, and the gold in her eyes flared bright as a struck coin.

Lucian did not flinch. He did not look surprised. He looked, if anything, relieved.

Lucian looked at Elara's eyes and said, "Good. Then we can begin discussing the wedding."