Chapter 3

Kael Blackthorn came that night.

He told me Seraphine Voss had begun calling our daughter Faye and intended it to be her nursery name. Rowan would soon begin his first lessons, he added, and it would be better if I saw him less often. Otherwise the boy might discover that someone else had given birth to him.

"It is best for everyone if he knows only the Wolf Queen as his mother," Kael Blackthorn said.

He lowered his head to refill my tea as he spoke, as though we were discussing the replacement of a nurse rather than the erasure of my existence. A red berry floated in the cup, once my favorite flavor. He remembered preferences that meant nothing, yet refused to remember what I had cried out on the birthing bed.

I pushed the cup away.

I met his eyes. "Is it best for me as well?"

He had clearly not expected the question. A line appeared between his brows. "Elara, do not act on emotion."

"I only want to know whether the 'everyone' my king speaks of includes me."

The chamber fell so silent that only the snapping of charcoal remained.

After a long silence, he said the royal line required stability. Seraphine Voss had destroyed her moon-vein for him, and he owed her his entire life. Taking me into the Wolf Keep had already broken the vow they made to belong to one another alone.

Once, those words would have kept me awake all night. Now I found them absurd.

"If my king's love is so profound, you should never have bound yourself to me for an alliance, much less made me bear your children," I said calmly. "If your perfect vow can exist only through the sacrifice of a third person, it is not devotion. It is selfishness."

Kael Blackthorn surged to his feet, gold flooding his wolf eyes. "Elara Silvercrest, are you accusing your king?"

The pressure of his royal aura descended, and every lamp flame on the table bent low.

I remained standing.

Weakness after childbirth left my fingertips cold, but my Silver Moon blood was slowly waking along my spine. I held his gaze and spoke each word distinctly. "I am reminding my king that the Moon Goddess marriage bond describes an alliance, not a sacrifice. My children are not gifts you may use to comfort the Wolf Queen."

He stared at me for a long time, then swept out of the room.

Mira rushed in, white-faced. "My lady, why anger him now?"

I opened my palm. While bowing to him, I had plucked a trace of black powder from Kael Blackthorn's cloak.

Black-obsidian powder.

It had come from Moonlight Hall, yet clung to the king's clothes. Seraphine Voss had brought a forbidden substance into his daily life. Black obsidian magnified possessiveness and rage in wolf blood. It could also make cubs dependent on a particular sound.

"I was not trying to anger him." I sealed the powder inside a moon-crystal vial. "I was testing the medicine's effect."

Kael Blackthorn had lost control more quickly than I had ever seen before. The dose was rising.

I refused to trust my instincts alone. The next day, I summoned the court physician, Lucian, under the pretense of a postnatal examination. He came from the fox clan and could distinguish the faintest scents. Years ago, he had owed Father his life.

I divided the powder from the cloak into two portions and gave him one without explaining where I had found it.

He scattered it into clean water. Black ice-flowers formed across the surface at once.

"Black Obsidian Heart-Dust." Lucian's expression changed. "In small amounts, it makes an adult wolf restless and irritable and creates a diseased attachment to the scent of someone close. With continued use, judgment becomes increasingly obsessive. A cub cannot survive it in pure form, but it can be mixed with scent-severing herb to make the child dependent on a chosen sound."

"Can you determine how long it has been used?"

"Blood and fur would both show it. But without an order from the council, I cannot examine members of the royal family."

I resealed the second portion. "You need not examine anyone. And today, I asked you nothing."

Lucian studied me for a long moment. Before leaving, he said that three years ago Rowan had been brought to the infirmary because he cried through the night. Seraphine Voss had refused to let anyone touch the back of his neck. Lucian had assumed the Wolf Queen was simply overprotective. Now he suspected she had been hiding needle marks from a severing spell.

His words could not yet serve as testimony, but they gave me a new path.

I had Mira send Willow a blank silver leaf. It was an old Silvercrest clan distress signal: the next time Rowan was bathed, she must find a way to examine the back of his neck. If she found scars, she should carve their number into the leaf and return it.

Three days later, the silver leaf came back.

Seven marks were cut into it.

Seraphine Voss intended to control my children forever with Black Moon magic. Perhaps she meant to control the Wolf King as well.

What I needed was a chain of evidence strong enough to drag her from the Wolf Queen's seat.

Evidence, however, was not the same as victory. Seraphine Voss ruled the inner Wolf Keep. Kael Blackthorn commanded the royal guards. The Silvercrest clan possessed influence only among the priesthood and a handful of weaker tribes. If I exposed her now, the bell could be destroyed, the nurses silenced, and I would be accused of framing the Wolf Queen to steal another woman's mate.

On a sheet of paper, I drew three circles: source of the forbidden substance, testimony of the victims, and royal protection. Only when all three closed together would the council be unable to bury the matter as a private quarrel between women.

Mira looked at the page. "My lady, do you truly mean to place the king inside your evidence?"

"Without his permission, Seraphine Voss could not have taken my first child. Without his silence, she would never have dared take the second."

I drew the final line.

"He is not an innocent man deceived from the outside. He is one of the beams holding up this cage."