Chapter 4: The Night They Forgot Me (4)

The hall seemed to fall away around me.

"What?"

My mother pressed a trembling hand over her mouth. Tears stood in her eyes, real ones, the kind I had heard through closed doors on those nights when she said she didn't know why she was crying.

"How could you know about her? Who told you about my girl?"

"I didn't die," I said. "I'm standing right here. I'm right here."

Her face twisted, grief and fury fighting for the same space. "My daughter is dead. I buried her. I buried her."

Daniel pulled her down a step and put himself between us.

"Mother, don't listen to her."

He looked up at me, and he wasn't confused anymore. He was furious, with the cold kind of fury he had inherited from her. As though I had walked into his home and deliberately torn open an old wound.

A wound that, until tonight, had never existed.

Run, Mira, Lyra whimpered.

I couldn't move.

My mother remembered having a daughter. She remembered losing her. She remembered a grave.

But she didn't remember raising me. Twenty years of birthdays, arguments, scraped knees, late suppers, and ordinary mornings, all gone. In their place: a small coffin, and a grief she had been carrying without knowing why.

They hadn't simply forgotten my name.

Someone had rewritten my life.

The guards reached me and seized my arms. I fought them without thinking, twisting, and one of them wrenched my wrist up behind my back until pain shot through my shoulder like a lance.

Ronan turned away.

He didn't even watch.

And that was when something inside me finally broke.

Not my heart. That was already gone, torn out with the bond.

Something deeper. The part of me that had always believed the people I loved would come back if I just waited long enough, if I was patient enough, if I was good enough.

I stopped struggling.

The guard holding my wrist relaxed his grip, just slightly.

I drove my heel into the side of his knee.

He went down with a shout. I twisted free, ducked beneath the second guard's outstretched arm, hitched my skirts up in both fists, and ran.

"Stop her!" Ronan's voice thundered behind me.

I didn't look back.

Except once. Just once, at the side door, as I hit it with my shoulder.

The man in royal black was still standing by the eastern pillar.

He hadn't moved to stop me. Every other wolf in the hall was on their feet, shouting and pointing, and he stood perfectly still with his arms folded.

He was smiling. Faintly. The way a hunter smiles when the hare finally chooses a direction.

* * *

I knew the palace better than most of its guards.

For seven years I had worked in the royal archives, cataloguing treaties, bloodlines, trade disputes, and records too old for anyone else to care about. Archives are the forgotten bones of a palace. To reach them, you learn the servants' passages behind the public corridors, the staircases linking unused galleries, the doors that haven't appeared on any official map in two hundred years.

I had loved those forgotten places. I used to eat my lunch in them.

Tonight, they saved my life.

I slipped through a narrow servants' door behind a tapestry, pulled it shut, and stumbled down a spiral staircase in total darkness, one hand dragging along the cold, damp stone. My breath sounded enormous in the narrow space. The broken bond throbbed beneath my breastbone like an open wound, and every step jarred it.

Halfway down, I had to stop. I pressed my forehead to the wall and fought to breathe.

Lyra?

My wolf answered faintly, from somewhere far back in my mind. I'm here.

What happened to them? What did he do?

A long silence.

Someone took us out of their memories.

Not him?

He turned the ring. But the magic wasn't his. It was too old. Too practiced. She hesitated. It felt like it already knew the way.

I closed my eyes. Can we get back in?

I don't know.

Above me, boots pounded across stone. Voices. Someone shouting orders about the east stairs.

I forced myself on.

At the bottom of the staircase, I found the iron latch by touch and pushed through a heavy wooden door into the Hall of Fallen Kings.

Moonlight poured through the tall arched windows and lay in long silver panels across the floor. The hall was empty, as it always was. No one came here but cleaners and archivists. Twenty-three kings and queens stared down from their gilded frames, each one painted larger than life.

At the far end hung the last of them.

King Elias Blackmoor. The Last Wolf King.

Dead for twenty years.

I knew his face better than any other in the room: black hair threaded with silver, pale grey eyes, a scar slicing through his left eyebrow. I had spent weeks on his reign for the archive's centennial catalogue, because his death had never made sense to me. The official records said he fell during a border rebellion. Yet no surviving document named the rebellion's leader. No battlefield was ever recorded. His burial chamber had been sealed the night he died, and it had never been opened since.

After his death, his line had ended, the High Crown had passed to a council of Alpha Kings, and every document from the last year of his reign had been ruined by a flood.

The same flood that had ruined the ledger with the scraped-out name.

I walked toward his portrait without quite deciding to.

Something about it was different.