The Last Moonblade: Betrayed, Exiled, Unbroken

Five years ago

They had dressed the hall for it.

Stella saw that before she saw anything else. The long tables had been carried out. The pack stood in ranks along both walls, two hundred wolves in dark wool with the cords of rank knotted on every sleeve, and between them someone had left a clear aisle of bare boards for her to walk. It ran straight to the tree.

Her wrists were tied in front of her. The rope had rubbed them raw two days ago, and she had stopped noticing.

The great hall of Thornhold was built around a yew older than the kingdom. Kings were crowned under it. Oaths were sworn under it. In four days Rowan Thorne would kneel there for his crown, and today he was standing there, straight-backed in his good coat, waiting to be rid of her.

Don’t look at him yet.

She had been a long way off from everything for three days. She had not cried. She had not slept. Words came toward her and stopped a little short, like voices over water, and she was grateful, because she knew what was waiting on the other side of the numbness and she did not think she could carry it and walk at the same time.

She was going to die today.

She had worked that out on the first night and spent the next two getting used to it. The law asked a life for a life, and she knew how many lives it would be asking for. High Blade Oriel used to say that a moonblade went to her death the way she went to her vigil: on her own feet, without noise. Stella had never taken the oath. She was going to manage it anyway. It was the last thing left that she could do well, and Oriel, wherever she was, was going to have nothing to complain of.

So she counted. It was an initiate’s habit, and the only part of her still working. Four archways. Eleven guards. Thirty-eight paces from the threshold to the place where they stopped her, six short of the tree.

Nobody shouted. She had thought they might. Two hundred wolves looked at her in silence, the way people look at something that has been pulled up out of a well.

The junior initiates stood by the west archway in their grey, a dozen of them, with no house to go back to. The youngest was crying without any sound. Stella had taught her to braid her hair for drill. In the front rank a woman held a folded white cloak against her chest, a sworn sister’s cloak, and Stella knew whose mother she was and could not make the name come. There were too many names. There were thirty-one of them.

Thirty-one women had gone into the temple court three nights ago to keep the dark-moon vigil. In the morning they had been carried out. Stella had known every one of them since she was a child. They had taught her to hold a blade and to hold her tongue, and nobody had let her see them buried.

She had not meant to look for other faces. She looked anyway.

Maren was in the third rank. Maren, the fletcher’s daughter, who had run beside her under every full moon since their first shift. Her arms were folded. She looked back at Stella as if at a stranger who had turned out to be wearing a friend’s face. The old cook who used to pass honey cakes over the temple wall had turned his head away completely.

They had known her most of her life. It had taken them three days.

It hurt less than it should have. It went into the same far place as everything else. They had only believed what they were told.

The papers in Rowan’s hands said she had done it. He had been told first. He was the one holding them.

She looked at him.

He was reading. Of course he was. High collar, coat the colour of pine shadow, the heir’s cord on his sleeve with its seven knots, and the top page getting the whole of his attention. She knew that look. She had once watched him give it to a miller’s petition about a weir for a solid hour while his supper went cold at his elbow, and she had sat in his window seat eating his bread and loving him so much it had felt like a joke somebody was playing on her. Rowan read a thing as though it could be made to behave if he only read it carefully enough.

There was a curl behind his ear that never lay flat. It wasn’t lying flat now.

His uncle stood at his right shoulder. Corwin Thorne had ruled the Thornwood for twelve years on Rowan’s behalf and in four days would hand it back, and he looked, as always, like a man with nowhere he would rather be. He met her eyes and inclined his head, grave and courteous. There was earth under his nails. He had come straight from his garden.

The inquiry had been his. The hall today was not. There was a thing to be done here that only Rowan could do, aloud, in front of the pack, and for that there was no regent.

By the east archway stood Jace, Rowan’s Beta, who had never once got through a solemn occasion without muttering something to make her laugh. He was studying the floor. He would not look at her.

A guard laid a dagger on the table by Rowan’s hand. Plain steel, an initiate’s blade. Hers. They had taken it off her three days ago.

“The findings of the inquiry will be read,” Rowan said, to the page.

He read well. That was the terrible part. He had a quiet voice that carried, and he used it without hurry and without colour, every word weighed the same as the last. The vial beneath her bed. The cup. Found beyond the wall at first light.

Then the line she had been bracing for.

That the accused had been, for two years, the fated mate of the heir. That the bond had been concealed.

He read it exactly like the others.

She had known it was coming. A bond could not be put aside in secret, and he had not put on his good coat to do a thing by halves. Knowing did not help. The hall took it in all at once, two hundred wolves drawing the same breath. Until that moment nobody in the Thornwood had known except the two of them and, she supposed, Jace. Two years of back stairs and borrowed hours and a shepherd’s hut on the hill. Now Maren knew. The cook knew. Rowan had stood up before his whole pack and read his own secret into the record as evidence against her, because it belonged there, and he had never in his life left out a thing that belonged.

Then the names. All thirty-one, in the order of their swearing. Somewhere in the ranks a man made a sound like something tearing, and was hushed.

It was an orderly account. It had a beginning and an end, and she was in it like a figure in a tapestry, doing what the thread said she did. And what the thread said she did was the worst thing done in the Thornwood in living memory. She could tell. She could hear it the way you hear weather through a wall.

I told you it wasn’t true.

That was the part she kept going back to, like a tongue to a broken tooth.

He had come down to the cells on the first night. Alone, with a lamp. She had been so glad to see him that her knees had gone, and she had thought, now, now it stops, and she had got as far as Rowan, I didn’t, I was—

“Don’t,” he had said.

Gently. He had the first of the findings in his hand even then. He told her the inquiry would establish what had happened, and that he could not hear her and the evidence both and still call himself just. Then he looked down at the page, and she watched his face ease.

She had tried the other way then, the one that didn’t need words. She had reached for him down the bond, the way she had every day for two years, the way you reach for a hand in the dark, and it was like calling into a shut room. Nothing came back. He didn’t flinch. Everything in her was open for him to feel, and he stood there with his lamp and felt none of it.

She couldn’t stop seeing that. A page was written down. It could be read. It held still. She was only a person saying no, and he had not wanted to hear her. He had wanted the page.

Two years. She knew the sound he made falling asleep. She had not known he could do that.

The law would have backed him. Findings were read before witnesses. They were not argued. The accused was not heard in her own defence; the law wanted exactly one thing out of her mouth, and that was agreement. Rowan had explained it to her once with his head in her lap and her fingers in his hair, as something he found beautiful: that the law should be the same for everyone, and that nobody, not even a king, should be able to talk their way around it.

She had kissed him for it. She remembered that very clearly.

Maren could think what she liked. All two hundred of them could. There was one person in this hall who should have known without being told, and she had tried to tell him anyway, and it had made no difference at all.

The bond was two years old and had never had any manners. From six paces it handed her what his face wouldn’t: his heart, going fast and hard, like something run to ground. It only seemed to run the one way now. She had stopped reaching.

He finished. He squared the pages against his palm. Then, at last, he looked at her.

Grey eyes. Perfectly steady.

Nothing in them that knew her.

She had thought the cell was the worst of it. It wasn’t. This got through, when nothing else had in three days; it slid in under the numbness like a blade under a rib, and she held very still around it so that it wouldn’t show.

“Stella Black. You have heard the findings. Do you confess them?”

She didn’t have much left. They had taken her order and her name with it, and before the lamps were lit they would have the rest. She had this: she had not done it. Nobody in this hall was going to hear her say that she had. Not for an easier death. Not for him.

She said nothing.

“Kneel,” said Rowan.

He had never used the voice on her. In two years she had never heard him use it on anyone. He hated it. She had asked him why once, and he had changed the subject, which wasn’t like him.

It didn’t feel like force. It felt like her own body agreeing with him. Her knees hit the boards with a crack that carried to the back of the hall, and a breath went through the pack, soft and satisfied.

One night. She had been one night from the oath that would have put her beyond any Alpha’s voice for the rest of her life.

She lifted her head. If she had to be on her knees, she was at least going to watch him do it.

“Confess it, child,” Corwin said. He said it gently, the way you’d talk to a horse that had stopped at a gate. “Let them rest. It will go easier with you once it’s said.”

It was kind advice, kindly given. She found she couldn’t look at him.

Rowan came down the six paces himself. He didn’t send a guard. He stopped so close that she had to tip her head back, close enough to smell him, woodsmoke and ink and the cedar he kept his coats in, and her whole stupid body leaned toward it before she could stop it.

He stood there, immaculate, papers in hand, looking down at what he had made of her.

Then he bent, as if to take the cord from her sleeve, and spoke low, for her alone.

“Say it.”

“Make me,” said Stella.

Her voice cracked. They were the first words she had spoken since the cell.

Something moved behind his eyes. They both knew what the voice could do and where it stopped. It could put her on her knees. It could keep her there until she starved. It had never yet dragged a single word out of anyone’s mouth.

His fingers brushed her wrist, just above the rope. They were cold. The initiate’s cord had three knots in it, and he didn’t bother to untie them. He pulled, and they gave.

He straightened with the grey cord shut in his fist.

“The accused does not confess,” he told the hall, and the sound the hall made was low and ugly.

He waited for it to end.

“Before this pack and under this tree.” It was an old formula. Everyone in the hall knew it. Nobody living had heard it spoken. “I, Rowan Thorne, reject you, Stella Black, as my mate.”

The bond pulled tight. She felt it like a rope taking her whole weight: the jolt, the strands going one after another, the long sick wait for the last of them.

It held.

She watched him understand it.

A rejection asked nothing of the one rejected. Not her consent, not her answer, not even her attention. An Alpha said the words before his pack and it was done; every wolf in the hall had been told as a child what it looked like. They should both have been on the floor.

He said it again. Same words, same voice, with the care of a man repeating himself to someone hard of hearing.

The bond took the weight, and held.

A third time. The law allowed three. By then the hall was so quiet she could hear the lamps, and over by the east archway Jace had discovered something of enormous interest in the roof beams.

It held.

And it came to her, from the long way off where she was keeping herself, that this was very nearly funny. Two hundred wolves had found out a quarter of an hour ago that their next king had a mate. They had settled in to watch him put her aside. And he had now failed to do it three times running, in public, in his good coat.

Three days ago she would have had thirty-one sisters to tell. They would have howled.

It wasn’t her doing. She would have liked to claim it. She had no more say in it than in the colour of her eyes. Whatever was being asked to let go had been asked three times, and had declined.

Rowan’s face was a king’s face, composed and remote. The fist with the cord in it was shaking. She was the only one close enough to see.

Good, she thought, and hated how much she wanted to put her hand over it.

It was Corwin who spoke. “The goddess keeps her own counsel,” he told the hall, with every appearance of calm. “She has not released them. Then we may not do what the law would ask of us.”

“The law asks a life for thirty-one,” Rowan said.

“And the bond forbids it. No wolf kills his mate and stays whole, and the Thornwood will need its king whole.” Corwin spread his hands, a reasonable man with a hard thing to say. “Let her own goddess have the judging of her.”

“So the law will be satisfied another way.” Rowan had found his reading voice again. “You are cast out of this pack and out of this kingdom. You will be taken east to the Ashlands, and left.”

It took her a moment to understand that she was not going to die today.

She had spent three nights getting ready for a blade, and they were giving her a road.

Nobody came back from the Ashlands. That was what they were for. It was the same sentence, written out longer.

The guards took her under the arms. She got her feet under her before they could lift her, because she was going to walk out of this hall if it was the last thing she ever chose. As they turned her she saw the table once more. Rowan had gone back to it. His hand lay flat over her dagger, covering it, the way a man covers something he doesn’t mean to have taken from him.

You don’t get to keep that.

Then the archway, and the light.

Outside, the cold came down off the hills and the great thorn wall stood black against the sky. There was a moon up, though it was barely past noon: a sliver three days old, pale as a nail paring.

She counted the steps from the hall to the thorn gate. Two hundred and six.

Somewhere around the hundredth she made two promises, since promises were the one thing they had left her. She would not die in the Ashlands to make this tidy for them. And in whatever years she got, whatever became of her, she would never kneel to Rowan Thorne again.

The gate closed.

At the far end of a bond that should have broken, she could still feel his heart.