The Luna They Buried Came Back for the Crown · Rhea Wolfe

Chapter 1: The Wolf That Didn't Come

The law of Ashenmoor about hollow wolves is four sentences long. I could say all four of them by the time I was six, the way other children learn the words for weather.

A wolf that does not answer at the Rite has died inside its skin. A hollow wolf carries rot. Rot in a pack is rot in a winter. Put it in the snow field before dark.

Nobody ever said it like a threat. My grandmother used to recite it while she pinned wash on the line, in the same breath as frost by Thursday and the well's gone bitter again. That's how our laws live in Ashenmoor. They aren't shouted. They're household. You hang them on the line next to the sheets.

On the Long Night of my twenty-third year, four hundred wolves stood in the ring of standing stones to watch me answer, and I had been carrying Rook Ashgrave's pup for six weeks, and my wolf had not moved inside me for eleven days.

I thought it was nerves. Understand that. I want it written down somewhere that I thought it was nerves.

* * *

They build the fires low for the Rite so the light comes up from underneath and everyone looks older than they are. Snow had been falling since noon and had stopped at dusk the way it does before real cold. The stones wore white caps. My breath came out of me in slabs.

Rook stood at the north stone with his hands loose at his sides. Thirty years old, Alpha eight of them, and he had a way of standing very still that made the whole ring stand still with him. The mate-mark he'd put on my shoulder in the spring was two years healed and still ran silver in cold weather. I could feel it under three layers of wool, the way you feel a coin in your boot.

I had a whole sentence prepared for after. I'm carrying. Two words. I'd been holding them in my mouth for nine days like a stone under my tongue, waiting for the Rite to be over, because you don't give an Alpha news in a crowd.

Oda Ferren struck the law-stone with the flat of her hand. She's past sixty and keeps the book, and her voice carries without her doing anything to make it carry.

"Wren Halloway. Come and answer."

I came and answered.

You go bare to the waist for the Answering. That's not cruelty, it's practicality — a shift in clothes ruins the clothes, and Ashenmoor has never had wool to spare. The cold went into me like a hand going into a glove. My nipples ached. The hair on my arms stood up and stayed up. I knelt in the churned snow and put both palms flat on the frozen ground the way my mother taught me before she died, and I went down inside myself to fetch my wolf.

She was there. That's the thing nobody in that ring will ever believe. She was there, curled tight, warm, her nose under her tail, and when I reached for her she did not so much refuse me as decline to notice me.

I called again.

The first call is free. The second call costs. I felt my jaw start to ache at the hinges, and the long bones of my forearms went hot the way they do in the second before the break, and my gums ran with that thin salt water that means the teeth are ready to come down. My body was doing its work. My body did everything it was supposed to do that night. It was only the wolf that stayed asleep, and a body without its wolf just heats up and hurts and heats up and hurts.

Somebody in the second row shifted their weight and the snow squeaked.

Third call. You only get three, and the third one takes whatever it wants. I went into it with my forehead on the ground and my fingers hooked in the frozen dirt, and the heat rose up my spine and got to the base of my skull and then simply — stopped. Like a door closing in a house two rooms away. Quiet, and final, and not even slammed.

I threw up into the snow between my hands.

Four hundred wolves watched me do it. There is a particular silence a crowd makes when it is embarrassed for you, and it is worse than laughing. A pup somewhere behind the west stone said, "Mama, is she doing it wrong?" and got hushed so fast the hush was louder than the question.

I got my head up. Snow had gone to slush under my palms and refrozen around my wrists.

"Again," I said. "Let me go again."

"You've had three," Oda Ferren said, and there was nothing in it. Not spite. Not pity. Frost by Thursday. "Healer."

* * *

Cassia Vayle came out of the ring with her sleeves already pushed up.

We grew up eleven houses apart. She'd set my collarbone when I was fourteen and I had held her hair when her mother died, and when Rook marked me she had cried and said she'd never been so glad about anything in her life. I want that on the record too.

She knelt in front of me and put her hands on my ribs. Warm hands. She always had warm hands, it was half of why the pack trusted her.

She listened at my sternum. She moved her palms down along the arch of my ribs, and then lower, and her fingers went flat and still just under my navel — right there, right on the place where the whole rest of my life was six weeks old and no bigger than a bean — and they stayed still for two full breaths.

She felt it. I felt her feel it. Her thumb was actually touching it.

Then she sat back on her heels and turned to face the north stone and said, in the clear carrying voice she uses for pack business:

"There's nothing under her ribs. She's hollow."

The ring made a sound like a herd moving.

"I'm carrying," I said.

I hadn't meant it to come out there. It came out anyway, loud and cracked, out into the cold in front of four hundred people who had known me since I was born.

Cassia didn't even look at me. "A carried pup makes a wolf louder," she said. "Not quieter. Every woman in this ring knows that."

And every woman in that ring nodded, because it's true. It's true of Ashenmoor wolves. In Ashenmoor, a carrying female is so loud with it she can't sleep for the roaring. That's the law of it, the ordinary weather of it, the thing everyone knows.

It would be nine months before anybody told me there are wolves in the world who go silent instead.

* * *

Rook came away from the north stone.

He crouched in front of me, close enough that I could smell him — woodsmoke and hot iron and the sour-sweet of a man who has been awake for three days — and I felt my whole body lean toward him before my mind gave it any permission at all. That's the part I can't forgive myself for. Half-frozen, sicked-up, called hollow in front of the pack, and my flesh still tipped toward him like a plant toward a window.

He said, quietly, but not so quietly that the first three rows missed it:

"Is it mine?"

I have thought about that question every day since. I've thought about it in the dark under six feet of snow. I've thought about it with my daughter's mouth on me.

"Yes," I said.

He looked past me at Cassia. And Cassia — who had her thumb on my child ninety seconds earlier — moved her head about an inch from side to side.

Rook stood up.

"I release Wren Halloway," he said, "from the pack of Ashenmoor, from my table, and from my protection."

The elders' bench made a noise. Oda Ferren put down her pen.

"That's the first part," she said.

"I know what it is."

"Then speak the second part, Alpha. Release is not rejection. A bond doesn't break because a man walks out of a room. It breaks when he stands in front of his pack and says the words, and the words are five, and you know them."

"I've said what I'll say."

"Say the words, Rook."

He looked at me then. Straight down at me, kneeling in my own sick with my arms crossed over my bare chest, and something moved behind his face — something that in any other man I'd have called fear.

"I've said what I'll say," he said again, and turned his back, and walked to the north stone, and stood there with his shoulders set like a man holding a door shut from the inside.

So Oda Ferren looked at the sky, which was the colour of a knife, and did the only thing left in her book to do.

"Two hours of light," she said. "The field before dark. That's the law and I didn't write it."

Then somebody put the shovel in my brother's hands — because in Ashenmoor the family carries the shovel, grief being nobody else's work — and Ollen Halloway, who taught me to swim in the black pool under the falls, who was twenty-six years old and had never once in his life told me no, stood there with the handle across both palms.

And did not put it down.