Chapter 2

They found her at sunrise, and by midday I'd already decided what to feel about it.

I stood over the body in the eastern clearing, arms crossed, jaw tight. The healer knelt beside her, checked for a pulse that wasn't there, and looked up at me waiting for instruction. I gave one.

"She wandered off. Exposure took her." A pause. "She's been unwell for months. Everyone saw it."

The healer's mouth opened, then closed. Nobody in Blackthorn argued with their Alpha over a dead Luna nobody had bothered to look for while she was alive.

By the time the pack gathered that evening, the story had already hardened into truth the way stories do when no one's left to correct them. A withdrawn Luna. A troubled mind. A tragedy, but not a mystery, and certainly not anyone's fault. I told myself that too, more than once, until it started to sound almost true.

There was no funeral rite. No procession through the compound gates. A quiet burial at the tree line, four wolves and a shovel, and I made myself stand there the whole time without looking like I was counting the minutes.

The ground had been hard that week, early frost setting in ahead of season, and it took the diggers longer than expected to break through to proper depth. I remember being irritated by the delay more than anything else, checking the position of the sun, thinking of the treaty negotiations waiting on my desk, and feeling nothing about the woman being lowered into ground I hadn't once thought to visit while she was alive to walk it herself.

Seraphina attended in black, and even in grief she managed to stand close enough to me that the pack noticed.

"You did what you could," she said afterward, hand resting on my forearm like she'd earned the right to touch me. "Nobody could have saved her from herself."

I didn't answer. I looked at my own chest instead, at the place where the bond used to sit, humming low and constant even when I ignored it. It wasn't humming now. It wasn't anything now. I told myself that was grief. I told myself a lot of things that week.

By the end of it, Seraphina's belongings had made their way into the Luna chambers. Nobody announced the move. It simply happened, the way water finds the lowest point in a room, and by the time I thought to question it, it already looked like it had always been that way.

The herb pots on the windowsill, the ones Elara had tended every morning without fail, sat untouched. I didn't think to water them. Nobody did. They didn't die right away. They just stopped growing, the way things do when the person who loved them stops coming back.

I noticed the pots once, weeks later, on my way past the window. I almost stopped. Almost reached for the pitcher.

Seraphina called my name from the hallway, and I kept walking.

I didn't understand yet why my hands still curled into fists at odd hours, why my sleep had gone thin and restless, why some nights I woke reaching for a side of the bed that had never once been mine to reach for while she was in it. I called it stress. I called it the harvest, the treaties, the weight of the title.

I did not call it what it was, because a man who has just buried his mate does not go looking for the shape of what he's lost. Not yet. That would come later, slow and merciless, the way rot always does. • • •

The first thing I noticed was the smell. Cedar smoke and road dust and something green underneath it, herbs drying from a low wooden ceiling somewhere above me. The second thing was my hands, small on the blanket, the nails bitten short, a thin white scar across one knuckle I didn't remember earning.

Sound came slow after that, the creak of a wagon settling on its axles, low voices somewhere outside the canvas discussing whether to break camp before or after the midday heat, a child laughing at something too far away to make out clearly. None of it belonged to any life I could remember living. All of it felt, somehow, less foreign than it should have.

An older she-wolf sat beside my cot, grey at the muzzle even in her human shape, watching with the patient stillness of someone who had done this before. Waited by enough sickbeds to know the particular silence of someone surfacing.

"There you are," the woman said, gentle, like she was greeting a shy animal. "You've been sick a long time, little one. Do you know your name?"

I opened my mouth to answer honestly. I don't know. I don't know anything. But something older than this new, small body moved through me first, and a name came out instead, unbidden, certain.

"Rael."

Her eyebrows lifted, just slightly. "Rael," she repeated, testing it. "Well then, Rael. I'm Mira. You're safe here. You've had a fever that scared the whole camp half to death."

I looked down at my own hands again. Turned them over. The scar on the knuckle. A callus at the base of my thumb that felt earned, though I had no memory of earning it.

"How long," I asked, and my voice came out rough, unused, "was I sick?"

Mira's face did something complicated. Not quite a lie, not quite the whole truth either. "Long enough that we'd started to worry we'd lose you." She reached out, tucked a strand of hair, auburn, not silver, behind my ear. "You kept singing in your sleep. Strange old words. None of us knew them."

Something in my chest went very still. Not painful. Just alert, the way a held breath is alert, waiting to find out if it's safe to let go.

I didn't know the words she meant. And yet, somewhere under my ribs, I felt the shape of a song trying to remember itself, the way a scar remembers a wound long after the skin has closed over it.

"Do you remember anything," Mira asked, quieter now, "from before the fever? Anywhere you might have come from? Anyone waiting on you?"

I opened my mouth again, and for one suspended second I almost saw it. A dark room. A door closing. A voice saying goodnight in a tone that meant nothing at all.

Then it was gone, slipping away like water through fingers, leaving only the ache of almost-knowing.

"No," I said, and it wasn't quite a lie either. "I don't remember anything."

Mira studied me for a long moment, the kind of look that saw more than a person meant to show. Then she nodded, slow, and rose from the stool.

"Rest a while longer. We move the caravan at first light, and you'll want your strength for it." At the tent flap she paused, looking back with an expression I couldn't read. "Strange thing. The healer said your fever broke the same hour the old moonpetal patch bloomed early this year. Whole field of them, out of season, right along our route."

She let the flap fall shut behind her.

I lay very still in the dark, one hand pressed flat over my sternum without meaning to, the way you'd check a wound to see if it still hurt.

It didn't hurt. It didn't do anything at all.

But something under my palm, faint and stubborn, had started, very quietly, to hum.