Chapter 2

Three years ago, I had truly loved Kael Blackthorn.

He was still the young wolf lord returning victorious from the northern frontier then, his black tail cutting across the snowfields and moonlight spreading over his silver armor. I stood at the highest point of the altar and watched a hundred clans bow to him. I thought a man that proud would at least never trample another person's sincere heart.

My father, Aldric Silvercrest, was the Silver Moon High Priest. The old king died without warning, and Kael Blackthorn took the throne on the strength of his victories. The war-wolf clans and the priestly elders distrusted one another. To bind the two factions, I accepted the Moon Goddess marriage bond and became the court's Moon-Bound mate.

I entered the Wolf Keep carrying a hope I refused to admit.

At our bonding rite, Kael Blackthorn took my hand before all the clans. He said the Silver Moon priesthood and the war wolves would share glory and loss from that day forward. He also said I would never suffer for the sake of their alliance. Moonfire lit his young, resolute face, and I mistook a political oath for a personal promise.

For the first few months, he was gentle with me. He came to Moon-Tide Hall after council sessions to share supper, and he remembered that I disliked berries that were too sweet. When the first snow lotus arrived from the north, he had it placed outside my window. I believed respect might slowly become love. I even made excuses for Seraphine Voss's coldness: she had fought beside him for years, and it could not be easy to accept a woman brought into their lives by an alliance.

Only later did I understand that compassion flowing forever in one direction becomes a river that carries harm forward.

When I was four months pregnant with Rowan, I heard Kael Blackthorn speaking to Seraphine Voss behind the Moon Goddess temple. "Seraphine, you are the only mate I have ever chosen. Elara is a marriage bond, nothing more, and the means by which the royal line will continue. Once the child is born, he will be yours."

That night, no tears came.

Instead, I reread every clan history I had studied as a girl. The old maternal laws of the wolf clans had been buried beneath generations of war, but one clause remained unmistakable: a cub's first breath of moon belonged to the birth mother, and no contract could take it from her.

Kael Blackthorn and Seraphine Voss had violated more than my will. They had violated an ancient law the court had chosen to forget.

I took the history to Kael Blackthorn. He was consumed with problems on the northern grain route. He glanced at one page, then closed the book.

"That law came from the old maternal clans. It no longer suits the court we govern today," he said. "Seraphine lost her moon-vein saving my life. Letting her raise the children you bear is the compensation I owe her."

"And what do you owe me?"

After a moment's silence, he promised the Silvercrest clan two rich grazing territories and assured me that I would possess honor for the rest of my life.

I saw clearly then that we were not speaking of the same thing. I spoke of a mother and her child. He calculated land, prestige, and the balance among clans. On his scale, my heart could be folded into a price, and my children could be used to settle a debt.

After Rowan was born, I once slipped into Moonlight Hall while the wet nurses changed shifts. He was only three days old. They had laid him on a silver tray carved with Black Moon sigils, and Seraphine Voss had painted his brow with her own blood. When Kael Blackthorn arrived, I held my son and refused to let go. Six royal guards surrounded the door, every blade pointed at me.

"Give the child to Seraphine," Kael Blackthorn said.

I asked what would happen if I refused.

He pried my fingers open one by one. Rowan's cries receded from my arms while bruises darkened around my wrists, until my palms held nothing. I never again tried to storm Moonlight Hall openly.

I had not surrendered; I had finally learned that a mother's love alone could not break down the gates of royal power.

At the time, the northern frontier remained unstable and Father stood nearly alone on the council. If I resisted in public, the war-wolf clans would accuse the priesthood of attempting to seize power. If I fled, the Silvercrest clan and dozens of dependent tribes would be purged.

So I learned to wait.

Every morning I attended the rite at Moonlight Hall. On the surface, I came only to hear Rowan's voice through a screen. In secret, I memorized the guards' rotations, the entrances to hidden passages, and the amount of scent-severing herb being used. I sent sewing thread to the nurses, shared moon-salt with the kitchens, and remembered every servant Seraphine Voss had ever punished.

Within three years, half the servants in Moonlight Hall owed me a favor.

Nor did I cultivate only servants. While copying ritual texts for the court, I befriended the deer-clan elder who managed the storehouses. When I performed funerary rites for warriors killed in the north, I noted every war wolf who resented the Voss clan's trade in black obsidian. At each Moon Council, I waited for Father in the corridor and listened to the clans argue over food shortages, borders, and marriage bonds.

Power was never a single blade held only by a king. It lay scattered across ledgers, testimony, grain roads, and countless overlooked people. Kael Blackthorn and Seraphine Voss believed I did nothing but weep for my children, so they never guarded their words around me.

Their contempt was the first gift the court gave me.

At my daughter's full-moon feast, Seraphine Voss finally placed the child in my arms. The moment the bundle settled against me, the little girl opened her silver-gray eyes and twitched her nose.

She recognized me.

Then the silver bell hidden in Seraphine Voss's sleeve rang. My daughter screamed as if startled. Seraphine Voss snatched her back and soothed her in a tender voice. "Do not be afraid. Mother is here."

Whispers moved through the room. Birth was nothing beside nurture, they said. The Moon-Bound did not even carry a mother's scent.

I lowered my eyes and pretended to be ashamed, while from the corner of my vision I studied the bell.

Black Moon witch-marks had been carved into its surface. Where an ordinary clapper should have hung, a splinter of severed-bond bone had been fixed to a short silver stem. The stem ended in a worn metal bead darkened by medicine.

So they were not merely afraid that my children would recognize me.

They were using forbidden magic to force my children to forget me.

After the feast, a young wet nurse collided with me in the gallery. She apologized again and again, but a matching metal bead slipped silently from her sleeve. I covered it with the toe of my shoe and waited until everyone had gone before picking it up.

The inner wall of the bead was smeared with the same black medicinal paste.

The nurse's name was Willow. As a child, she had been sold into the court under one of the Voss clan's debt contracts. When her mother fell gravely ill the previous year, I had asked Mira to send medicine. Willow did not dare testify openly, but this was her way of telling me that she had seen what happened and would speak if the need became great enough.

I looked up at the high lintel of Moonlight Hall and suddenly no longer felt alone.