The Wolfless Luna

Chapter 1: The Moon Rite

Every year on the night of the Moon Rite, Silvercrest pack lit two hundred torches along the ridge and pretended I didn't exist.

I had made my peace with that. Mostly. There is a kind of freedom in being overlooked. Nobody expects anything from you, so nobody is disappointed, and you can spend the whole afternoon of the biggest night of the year in a small stone room at the bottom of the hill, grinding yarrow, without anyone coming to fetch you.

The herb room had been my mother's for twenty years. It still smelled like her: dried lavender, beeswax, the green bite of crushed comfrey, and underneath all of it something I had never been able to name, a cool, faint scent like river stones. Her jars lined the shelves in tidy rows, each one labeled in her small, slanted handwriting, in the old healer's script that almost nobody in the pack could read anymore. Valerian. Willow bark. Feverfew. Goldenseal. She had taught me to read those labels when I was six, sitting on her lap at this same worktable, tracing the letters with a finger stained yellow from turmeric.

She had been dead two winters now. Winter fever, the Alpha's physician said. It went through the eastern dens that year and took eleven wolves, and my mother had nursed every one of them until it took her too. By the time they let me see her, the coffin was already nailed shut. Fever-dead were sealed and burned the same day, by Alpha Roderick's order, so the sickness couldn't spread. I had understood. I had nodded and thanked them and stood at the pyre until it was ash.

I still dreamed sometimes that I had pried the lid open. In the dream, the coffin was always full of river stones.

"Wren."

I looked up. Pip was leaning through the doorway, cheeks red from the cold, hair sticking up in every direction. He was fifteen and all elbows, the youngest of six children in a family with no rank to speak of, and he worked in the kitchens and came to me whenever he burned himself, which was often. He was the closest thing I had to a friend.

"You're supposed to be on the ridge," I said.

"So are you." He came in and shut the door behind him. "That's why I came. Alpha Roderick says every unmated wolf over eighteen walks the circle tonight. Every single one. He read out the list himself." Pip swallowed. "He read your name."

The pestle stopped.

I was twenty-one years old, and I had never shifted.

Most wolves in Silvercrest felt their first change at sixteen. Some came early, at fourteen or fifteen, and their families threw feasts. Some came late, at seventeen, and their families pretended not to worry. When I turned sixteen, my mother made me honey cakes and told me not to listen to anyone. When I turned seventeen, she started brewing me teas that tasted like dirt and moonlight. When I turned eighteen, the elders came to the cottage, sat at our table, and spoke to her in low voices while I waited outside. I never found out what they said. She came out with a white face and held me so tightly I couldn't breathe.

By twenty, the pity in people's eyes had turned into something harder. There was a word for people like me. Wolfless. It meant you were born to a pack but could never truly belong to one. You could not run with them under the moon. You could not hear the pack link, the silent voice that tied every Silvercrest wolf to every other. And you could never, ever be anyone's mate, because the moon did not bind wolves to things that weren't wolves.

"It's a mistake," Pip said. "It has to be."

"Roderick doesn't make mistakes with lists." I set the pestle down and wiped my hands slowly on my apron. "He wants them to watch the moon pool stay dark when I walk past it. He wants it settled. In front of everyone."

Pip didn't argue. He was kind, not stupid. "You could say you're sick."

"Then they'll say I was too scared to walk." I untied my apron. "I'd rather they laughed at me than said that."

I changed into the only good dress I owned, gray wool that had been my mother's. It was a little too long and a little too loose in the shoulders, and I loved it more than anything else I had. I braided my hair the way she used to, tight against my head so nobody could grab it. I don't know why I did that. Habit, maybe. Or maybe some animal part of me already knew I was walking into a fight.

The ridge was loud when I got there. Drums. Laughter. The smell of roasting venison and pine smoke and spilled cider. Children were chasing each other between the torches in half-shifted forms, all ears and tails and wild yellow eyes, and their mothers were shouting at them to behave. The elders sat on furs along the north side of the circle, wrapped in their best cloaks. The warriors stood in a ring along the south side, arms folded, showing off their scars.

In the middle of it all sat the moon pool.

It was old. Older than the pack, the elders said, carved into the bare rock of the ridge by whoever had lived here before wolves came. A round basin, perhaps ten feet across, filled with water so still and black it looked like a hole in the world. On the night of the Rite, when the full moon stood directly over it, the water showed you your mate. Two unmated wolves walked past each other along the edge of the circle, and if the bond was meant to be, the pool lit silver and the whole pack saw.

On a poor year it lit twice. On a good year, five or six times. My mother told me that on the year she came to Silvercrest, it lit nine times in a single night and the pack talked about nothing else for a month.

I took my place at the very end of the line of unmated wolves. In front of me stood Selene Marrow, the Beta's daughter, wrapped in a cloak of white fox fur. She smelled of honey and expensive rosewater. She turned her head and looked me up and down, slowly, from my braid to my boots.

"Brave of you," she said.

"I was told to come."

"I know." She smiled. She had a lovely smile. It never once reached her eyes. "I asked him to put you on the list."

"Why?"

"Because I wanted everyone to see the difference between us." She turned back around. "Tonight of all nights."

I didn't have time to ask what she meant. The drums stopped all at once, and the ridge went silent, and Alpha Roderick Thorne climbed onto the speaking stone.

He was a broad man, gray at the temples, with a face like a closed fist. He had ruled Silvercrest for twenty-two years. In all that time, the pack had grown richer, its borders wider, its warriors stronger, and nobody had ever once seen him laugh.

Beside him stood his son.

Cassian.

I hadn't been this close to him in three years.

When we were children, we were never apart. His mother, Luna Isolde, had been sick for most of his life, a weakness in the lungs that no medicine could cure, and my mother had nursed her. That meant Cassian spent half his childhood in our cottage, eating our bread, sleeping by our fire when the Luna was too ill for him to be home. He taught me to climb the old cedar behind the herb garden. I stitched his knee when he fell out of it. When we were twelve, sitting on the highest branch we could reach, he made me a promise. He said that if I never shifted, it didn't matter. He said he would carry me on his back on every pack run, so I wouldn't miss a single one.

I believed him. I was twelve.

The Luna died when we were sixteen. Cassian stopped coming to the cottage after that. And when I turned eighteen and the change didn't come, he walked past me in the square the next morning as though I were a post. He didn't look at me. He didn't speak to me. He has not spoken to me since.

He was taller now. Harder in the jaw. He had his father's dark hair and his mother's green eyes, and when he stepped down to take his own place in the circle, his gaze moved along the line of unmated wolves and slid over me without stopping.

It still hurt. That annoyed me more than anything.

"The moon is high," Roderick called. "Let it choose."

One by one, the wolves walked. Two warriors lit the pool on their very first pass, and the ridge roared and stamped. A shy girl from the eastern dens matched with the blacksmith's son, and they both looked so stunned that people laughed out loud. The water flared silver, faded, flared again. Somebody's grandmother wept. Somebody's father pounded the new couple on the back so hard they staggered.

Then it was Selene's turn.

She walked slowly, chin high, white fur bright against the dark, straight toward Cassian. Everyone on the ridge knew what they were hoping for. The Alpha's heir and the Beta's daughter. It would be tidy. It would be strong. Garrick Marrow, her father, was already smiling from his place beside the speaking stone.

She passed Cassian close enough to touch.

The water stayed black.

A murmur ran around the ridge. Selene's face didn't change, but her hands closed into fists inside her sleeves, and Garrick's smile went thin and flat.

And then it was me.

I walked because I had been told to walk. I kept my eyes on the farthest torch and counted my steps the way my mother had taught me to count heartbeats at a sickbed. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. Cassian was standing three paces from the edge of the pool. I would pass him, and the water would do nothing, and they would all have their laugh, and I would go home and finish the willow bark.

Fifteen.

I smelled rain.

Not the torch smoke. Not the venison. Rain on cedar bark, cold and clean, the exact smell of that old tree behind the herb garden after a storm. It went through me like a hand closing around my heart. My knees nearly buckled. I looked up before I could stop myself, and Cassian was already looking at me, his face white, his lips parted, his hands shaking at his sides.

The moon pool exploded into light.

Not silver. Brighter than silver. It went white, a pure, blinding white, so bright that people threw their arms over their eyes and children screamed. It lit the whole ridge as though the sun had come up at midnight. It lit the trees on the far hills. For one long second I saw everything: every face, every open mouth, Selene's eyes wide with something like terror, the Alpha on his stone with his hand raised against the glare.

Then it was gone, and the ridge was dark, and every wolf in Silvercrest was staring at the wolfless healer's girl and the heir to the pack.

"Mate," Cassian said. Barely a whisper. It sounded like it had been pulled out of him with a hook.

For one second, one stupid, shining second, I thought it was going to be all right. I thought, He remembers the cedar tree. He remembers the promise.

Then his father spoke from the stone, very quietly. "Son."

Just that. One word.

I watched Cassian's face change. I have seen fever break and I have seen men die, and I have never seen anything as terrible as that. The shock drained out of him and something closed behind his eyes like a door slamming in a high wind. He straightened his shoulders. He took one step toward me, and his voice, when it came, carried to every corner of the ridge.

"I, Cassian Thorne, heir of Silvercrest," he said, "reject you, Wren Halloway, as my mate."