Counterfeit Moon

Wren

Old Hollow rang the thinning hour just as I ruined the Ironmoon heir’s fate for the second time.

The bell’s low, cracked note rolled through the stone above the Registry vault, and my hand jumped. A bead of silver ink slid off the nib and landed right in the middle of the K.

“Moon-broke,” I whispered, which is not a word a lady says. Luckily, nobody in Selene Hall had ever mistaken me for a lady.

I blotted it. The blot made it worse. Of course it did.

The ledger lay open in front of me, as long as my arm and older than every building in the city below. Three centuries of names, two by two, marched down its pages in Registry silver. Sealed under the Heartshard, by right of fate, witnessed and bound. Every pair of names was a marriage, a treaty, and a border, all at once.

Every pair, as far as I could tell, was a lie.

I dipped the pen again and started over on a fresh leaf.

Kael Ansel Draven, of Ironmoon.

Lyra Celestine Vane, of Saltmarrow and the Hall.

The trick was the dust. You couldn’t just write a bond in silver. True bond-ink was supposed to take its glow from the pair themselves, catching light from the Heartshard the moment two fated hands closed over it. That’s what the Registry taught, anyway. That’s what every first-year learned the week they arrived, pressed nose-first to the glass of the Sealing Chamber to watch the Hall’s newest couples turn the ledger silver.

What they didn’t learn was that the ink never turned silver on its own. Not once, in the three years I’d been clerking for my mother.

So afterward, when the chamber was empty and the candles were out, someone came down here with a pot of crushed shard-dust and a steady hand, and made it turn.

I tapped a pinch of dust into the well and stirred. It caught the lamplight and woke, the way shard-dust always does, a soft breathing glow, like something dreaming.

That was the part nobody else could see. To the rest of the world, shard-dust was pretty. To me it was alive. I could see the light inside it, threads of pale silver coiling and uncoiling. I saw the same light in the shard-lamps along the corridors, in the great white bulk of the Heartshard humming under the Hall, and, faintly, in every wolf who walked within its reach.

It pooled in them like warmth under skin. It brightened in their chests when they laughed and flared in their shoulders right before they moved. Wolves carry the light of their shard around with them, and I could see every flicker of it.

What I’d never seen, not once, was it reaching from one wolf to another.

My grandmother’s old book called it bond-light. Two lights becoming one thread, she’d written, in brown faded ink, a hundred years before I was born. It cannot be mistaken, and it cannot be made.

I’d watched four hundred and twelve sealed couples since I was sixteen. Not one of them had ever had a thread between them.

And I’d written every single one of them silver anyway.

I finished the K. I finished Draven with a little flourish my mother hated, then the long, rolling Lyra below it, and then the Registry sigil, a broken circle with a line through it. I held my breath while the dust settled into the strokes.

The names glowed.

There. Fate, done by hand, at two in the morning. The Ironmoon Alpha would arrive in eight days to sign the treaty copy, and he would find his son’s bond shining as bright as the moon used to.

I sat back and flexed my aching fingers. Silver had crept into the creases of my knuckles again. It always did. No matter how hard I scrubbed, it stayed in my skin for a day or two, a faint metallic shimmer and a smell like cold coins and crushed mint.

On the other side of the vault, under a glass dome, the Registry’s own sliver of the Heartshard pulsed slow and steady.

I looked at it for a long moment.

“Don’t look at me like that,” I told it. “You’re the one who broke.”

It didn’t answer. Shards never do.

“You look like a corpse someone forgot to bury,” Tam said at breakfast.

“Thank you, Tamsin.”

“A pretty corpse.” She pushed the honey pot toward me like an offering. “A pretty corpse with ink on her face again. Left cheek. No, your other left.”

I scrubbed at my face with my sleeve. Tamsin Oakes had shared my room for three years. She was the only person in Selene Hall who sat with me on purpose, and she was mostly elbows, freckles, and opinions. Her pack, Brackenfall, held the smallest shard on the continent, a chip the size of a thumbnail. Brackenfall wolves were sent to the Hall with patched boots and orders to marry well. Tam had arrived with patched boots and a firm plan to marry no one and become terrifying instead.

I loved her for it.

The refectory roared around us: five long tables, one for each great house, under shard-lamps that hung like frozen stars from the vaulted ceiling. Ashgrove students were throwing blackbread at each other. Two Saltmarrow girls with sea-green ribbons in their braids were comparing sealmarks, turning their wrists so the silver lines caught the light.

I had inked both of those marks. One of them had cried the whole time.

“You know what day it is,” Tam said.

“Don’t.”

“Hollow’s Due.”

“I said don’t.”

Once a term, by a tradition older than anyone could remember the reason for, every student in the Hall had to step into the Pit, and that included the hollows. Hollows were wolves who’d never shifted. There were three of us that year. Most hollows kept their heads down, stood in the ring for a ceremonial thirty seconds, then lay down when someone pushed them.

I had never lain down. That was a large part of why I was not popular.

“You could just fall over,” Tam suggested. “Very gracefully. Like a swooning princess.”

“I’m not swooning for anyone.”

“Ugh. I know.” She stabbed a sausage. “That’s why I love you. And that’s why I’ll be the one dragging you to the infirmary.”

The Pit was a sunken ring of packed sand in the old east courtyard, ringed by stone benches that held two hundred students. Somebody’s great-great-grandmother had carved STRENGTH IS LIGHT over the archway, and somebody else’s great-grandson had added AND LIGHT IS STRENGTH, YOU IDIOTS underneath in very small letters. The masters had never scrubbed it off.

Master Halloran stood in the middle of the ring, scarred and grizzled and missing two fingers on his left hand. He read the names off a slate without looking up.

“Hollister. Ashby.”

The benches woke up.

Of course it was Dace. It was always going to be Dace. Dace Hollister of Ashgrove was big, fair, and handsome in a slab-of-meat sort of way. He hated hollows the way some people hated spiders: loudly, theatrically, and with an audience. Last spring I’d caught him cheating on a Registry examination, and I’d reported him. He’d spent the whole summer in Ashgrove hauling timber as punishment.

He smiled at me as I stepped down into the sand. It was not a nice smile.

“Ashby,” Master Halloran said, finally looking up. His grey eyes were tired. “You know the rules. Thirty seconds. Yield whenever you want.”

“Yes, Master.”

“I mean it, girl.”

“I know you do.”

He sighed through his nose and stepped back to the edge of the ring.

Dace rolled his neck until it cracked. “I’ve been looking forward to this all summer, ledger girl.”

“I can tell,” I said. “You brushed your hair.”

A few people on the benches laughed. Dace didn’t.

I looked at him the way I looked at everything, all the way through.

Ashgrove’s shard-light was a warm, smoky amber. In Dace it sat heavy and low in his belly, simmering. When he shifted his weight forward, it surged up into his right shoulder half a heartbeat before the rest of him moved.

There.

I stepped left.

His fist went through the air where my head had been. The benches gasped.

Dace stumbled a step, caught himself, and turned on me with his lip curled back off his teeth. “Lucky.”

“Sure,” I said. “Do it again.”

He did.

Amber flared, right shoulder again, and I ducked under it. I came up inside his guard close enough to smell the sausage on his breath, and drove my elbow into the soft place under his ribs.

It was like hitting a door. My whole arm buzzed to the shoulder.

Dace grunted, more surprised than hurt, and swept a backhand at me that I barely twisted away from. His knuckles grazed my ear. It rang.

“Twenty seconds!” Master Halloran barked. “Ashby, you can yield!”

I didn’t.

“Come on, hollow,” Dace said. He started circling me with slow, stalking steps, the way wolves do when they’re bored of playing. “Fall down. You know how. It’s the only thing you lot are good at.”

“Funny,” I said, circling with him. “I thought you’d be the expert on falling down. How was the summer? I heard the timber was very heavy.”

The amber in his chest flared bright and hot.

That was a mistake on my part. Not the joke. I stand by the joke. The mistake was watching his shoulder.

The light went up into his right shoulder, bright and obvious. I slid left to dodge it, the way I had twice already, and realized one heartbeat too late that the rest of him hadn’t followed. The light had been bait. He’d learned that, over the summer, from somebody.

His left fist came out of nowhere and buried itself in my side.

Every bit of air I had left me at once. I folded around his fist and hit the sand on my knees, my mouth open, nothing going in or out. My ribs screamed. The world tilted white at the edges.

“There it is,” Dace said softly above me. “There’s the hollow.”

I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t breathe, and two hundred people were watching me not breathe, and somewhere on the benches Tam was yelling my name.

“Yield, Ashby!” Master Halloran’s voice came from far away.

I dug my fingers into the sand.

Something turned over in the dark of me.

I didn’t have a wolf. I’d never had a wolf. I’d been told so since I was twelve, by healers and masters and, very calmly, by my mother. But in that moment, on my knees in the Pit with the air crushed out of me, something deep down in the dark moved. It was slow and heavy, like a sleeper rolling toward a sound.

Then it was gone again.

But my lungs opened. Air poured in, cold and sharp and wonderful, and I was on my feet before I’d decided to stand.

Dace’s eyebrows went up.

I didn’t wait for him this time. I watched his light, his real light, the way it pooled and shifted, and when it lurched toward his front foot I kicked that foot right out from under him.

He went down hard on one knee. His face came level with mine, and I hit him square in the nose with everything I had.

Cartilage crunched. Blood spurted bright down his chin.

The benches went silent.

I stood there with my fist throbbing and my ribs on fire. A crazy laugh was trying to climb out of my throat.

How the hell did I do that?

“Time!” Master Halloran was striding forward. “Time, that’s time, Hollister, stand down—”

Dace looked up at me with his ruined nose and his split lip, and his eyes went from blue to Ashgrove amber in one breath.

I saw it before anyone else did. The light rushed out of his belly and down his arms, dense and burning, and poured into his hands.

His fingers split. Claws slid out of them, black and hooked and as long as my thumb.

Partial shifting in the Pit was forbidden. It had been forbidden for a hundred years, ever since an Ashgrove boy had opened up a Hollowfen girl’s throat during a spring trial.

Dace didn’t care. Dace had a broken nose and a whole summer of timber behind those claws, and he swung them right at my face.

I had time to think, very clearly, Well, this is going to scar.

Then a hand closed around his wrist.

It stopped him dead. His claws hung in the air an inch from my cheek, close enough that I could see the grit under them, and his arm shook with the effort of pushing against whoever was holding it. The other arm didn’t move at all.

“No,” said a low voice.

That was all. No. Quiet, almost bored.

Dace’s claws slid back into his fingers like they’d been scolded.

I looked up the length of the arm holding him. It was long, roped with muscle, and bare to the elbow where a dark sleeve had been shoved back. My gaze went up the shoulder and the throat, to a jaw cut sharp enough to shave with, and to a pair of eyes the cold, clear grey of a winter river.

Kael Draven.

The Ironmoon heir was standing in the Pit, in the sand, holding Dace Hollister’s arm the way you’d hold a misbehaving puppy by the scruff. Behind him, the benches were losing their minds. I could hear it in a vague, underwater way. Tam’s voice. Somebody screaming Draven! The scrape of two hundred people standing up at once.

I’d seen him a thousand times. Everybody had. He sat at the head of the Ironmoon table like he’d been carved there. He walked through the corridors with the whole Hall parting around him like water around a stone. Eight days ago, he’d stood in the Sealing Chamber with his hand over Lyra Vane’s, his face blank as a wall, while my mother inked the silver line onto the inside of his wrist.

I’d seen him a thousand times. I’d never been this close.

His shard-light was not like other people’s.

Ironmoon light is supposed to be cold, blue-white like frost on iron. His was. But there was so much of it. It filled him all the way to the edges, packed tight and humming like the Heartshard itself, like a storm someone had pressed into the shape of a man. I’d never seen anything like it.

Then he looked down at me, and I forgot to see anything at all.

“You’re bleeding,” he said.

I touched my ear. My fingers came away red. “Oh. So I am.”

“Draven,” Master Halloran said tightly, arriving at last. “I’ve got it from here.”

Kael let go of Dace’s wrist. Dace staggered back, cradling his arm, his face gone a blotchy, furious red under the blood.

“She broke my nose,” he said thickly. “The hollow broke my—”

“I saw.” Kael didn’t look at him. He was still looking at me. “You deserved it.”

“Hollister, infirmary,” said Master Halloran. “And then my office. You will be explaining those claws to the headmaster yourself.”

Dace went, throwing a look at me over his shoulder that promised he was nowhere near finished.

Which left me on my knees in the sand, with my ribs howling and my ear dripping, and the most powerful wolf of his generation standing over me.

He held out his hand.

I stared at it. It was a big hand, scarred across the knuckles. On the inside of his wrist, peeking out from under the shoved-back sleeve, was a thin line of Registry silver.

My silver. My mother’s ink and my dust.

“I’m not going to bite you,” Kael said dryly.

“That’s what wolves always say.”

Something happened at the corner of his mouth. It wasn’t a smile. It was the place where a smile would go, if he were the kind of man who smiled.

I took his hand.

I want to be precise about what happened next, because I’ve thought about it every day since, and I still don’t have the words.

The moment his palm closed over mine, the light moved.

It didn’t flare or brighten. It moved. His cold blue-white storm and something in me that I didn’t know had any light at all both lurched toward the place where our hands met, like two rivers finding the same sea. Where they touched, they caught.

Silver.

Pure silver, brighter than shard-dust, brighter than the Heartshard. It was brighter than anything I’d ever seen. A single thread of it ran up from our joined hands, coiling around both our wrists, so bright I couldn’t believe the whole courtyard wasn’t shielding its eyes.

Two lights becoming one thread.

It cannot be mistaken.

Nobody else was looking. Nobody else could see it.

Kael went very still.

He couldn’t see it either. I knew he couldn’t. But his pupils blew wide, swallowing the grey. His nostrils flared, his grip on my hand tightened almost to pain, and a sound rolled out of his chest so low that I felt it in my teeth more than heard it.

He hauled me to my feet in one smooth pull.

Then he didn’t let go.

We were standing very close. Too close, in front of two hundred people. My head only came up to his collarbone, so I was staring at the hollow of his throat, at the pulse beating hard and fast there, and the silver thread was still burning between our hands.

He bent his head.

For one insane second, I thought he was going to kiss me in the middle of the Pit.

He didn’t. He breathed in, slowly, right at my hair, right at the side of my neck where my pulse was going wild. It was the way a wolf breathes in when he’s found a scent he can’t place and doesn’t intend to forget.

Heat went through me so fast it left me dizzy, and it had nothing to do with my ribs.

“You smell like the Registry,” he murmured. His voice had gone rough. His thumb moved over my knuckles, where the silver had sunk into the creases of my skin, and stopped there. “Ink. Shard-dust.” He lifted his head and looked at me, and his eyes weren’t grey anymore. They were glowing the faintest, coldest blue. “What were you writing last night, little ledger?”

My heart stopped.

I looked down. I couldn’t help it.

On the inside of his wrist, the thin silver sealmark that bound him to Lyra Vane, the one I had written with my own hand, was flickering.

On and off. On and off.

Like a candle in a draft.

Like something dying.