Elara’s tutor requested a private meeting three days after the accord ended, and I knew before he’d finished his first sentence that whatever came next was going to be a problem I couldn’t solve with a smile and a well-placed lie.
“She’s five years old,” Master Corwin said, choosing his words with the particular caution reserved for delivering unwelcome news to a Luna.
“Most children of Alpha bloodlines show early signs of their wolf by this age. A flicker during sleep. A response to moonlight. Something. I’ve observed nothing in her. Not once, in three years of tutoring.”
“Children develop differently.” I kept my voice light, unbothered, the tone I’d perfected over five years of exactly this kind of conversation.
“Darius himself didn’t shift until he was nearly seven.”
“Darius is the son of an Alpha line with an unbroken pattern of early shifting for six generations before him.” Corwin’s eyes held mine, careful but unmistakably pointed.
“Forgive me for saying so directly, my lady, but Elder Marrow has begun asking similar questions. Quietly, for now. I thought you’d want to know before it stopped being quiet.”
I dismissed him with more grace than I felt, and the moment the door closed behind him, I allowed myself exactly thirty seconds of the fear I’d been holding at bay for longer than I wanted to admit before I forced my expression back into something usable.
Elder Marrow.
I should have expected him to be the one circling.
He’d never fully trusted my rise to Luna, had voted against my confirmation five years ago on grounds vague enough that no one had taken them seriously at the time.
He’d apparently spent five years waiting patiently for a reason to be right.
I found Elara in the garden with her nurse, and I watched her from the doorway for a long moment before announcing myself — my daughter, five years old, dark-haired and sharp-eyed in a way that had nothing to do with Darius and everything to do with a man I hadn’t spoken to since the week she was conceived.
She was playing some elaborate game involving imaginary swords, exactly the kind of game any child her age might play, human or wolf-born, and the ordinariness of it was exactly the problem.
She should have shown something by now.
A flicker.
An instinct.
Some sign that the story I’d built her entire identity around had any truth underneath it at all.
She had none of it, because none of it was true, and five years of careful management had bought me exactly as much time as it was ever going to buy before the absence became impossible to explain away. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
“Mama.” Elara looked up and smiled at me, easy and unguarded, and something in my chest twisted at the sight of it, guilt tangled up with a fear too large to fully examine.
She didn’t know.
She’d never known, raised from birth to believe she was a boy, dressed and trained and spoken to in ways designed to keep a lie alive that she hadn’t chosen and couldn’t understand the weight of.
I’d told myself for years that the lie protected her as much as it protected me.
Standing in that garden watching her play, I wasn’t certain anymore that either of those things was still true.
I sent the nurse away and sat with my daughter for a while, watching her invent battles against enemies only she could see, and I let myself think, honestly, about how much longer I actually had.
Not long.
That was the answer I kept arriving at, no matter how I turned the problem over.
A year, maybe two, before the absence of any wolf sign became too glaring for even Darius’s general inattention to miss.
Less than that if Marrow kept asking questions loudly enough that other elders started listening.
And now there was Maeve.
I’d told myself for five years that Maeve’s survival didn’t touch me, that whatever power she’d found at Dreadmoon was someone else’s problem, a rival pack’s good fortune with no bearing on my own position.
I’d almost believed it, until the accord, until word had reached me that she’d sat in that session as an official Dreadmoon representative, composed and powerful in a way that made the old story of her — wolfless, cursed, unworthy — sound increasingly like something people would stop believing the longer she stood in rooms full of witnesses proving otherwise.
If Maeve’s story unraveled in the public eye, people would start asking why.
And people who started asking why Maeve had actually been cast out sometimes arrived, eventually, at uncomfortable questions about who else in Hellfang might have built her entire position on a foundation that wouldn’t survive close examination.
I hadn’t expected the two problems to be connected.
Sitting in that garden, watching my daughter fight invisible enemies with a wooden sword, I understood they’d been connected from the very beginning, and I’d simply been too confident in my own timeline to see it clearly until now.
Darius found me there an hour later, later than I expected, his expression carrying something distant that had become familiar over the last five years — a man performing the motions of a marriage without any of the substance underneath it.
“Corwin says our son hasn’t shown any signs yet,” he said, using the pronoun so easily, so entirely without suspicion, that something in me both relaxed and tightened at once.
“Children develop at different rates.” I gave him the same line I’d given Corwin, watching to see whether it landed any differently coming from a wife instead of a tutor.
“That’s what I told him.” Darius watched Elara for a moment, something unreadable in his expression.
“He’s a good child. Whatever pace he develops at, that’s not going to change.”
I felt something twist uncomfortably at the easy affection in his voice, guilt threading through it in a way I usually managed to suppress more effectively.
Darius had never loved me, not really, not in five years of a marriage built on a lie he didn’t know he was living inside.
But he’d tried, in his own hollow way, to be something resembling a father to the child he believed was his, and watching him do it while I sat on a secret that would eventually destroy whatever fragile peace existed in this family was becoming harder to stomach than it used to be.
I didn’t let the guilt show.
I’d gotten too good at not letting things show, five years of practice sharpening the skill into something close to instinct.
“I should speak with Marrow myself,” I said instead, standing, smoothing my dress the way I always did when I needed a moment to arrange my thoughts.
“Before he takes his questions somewhere less private.”
“Do you need me to intervene?”
“No.” I said it too quickly, and caught myself, softening my tone before he could notice the edge underneath it.
“I can handle Marrow. I always have.”
I left him with Elara and walked the length of the garden alone afterward, turning over the narrowing options in front of me with the same cold calculation I’d used five years ago to engineer Maeve’s downfall in the first place.
I’d been desperate then too, though I hadn’t recognized it as desperation at the time — only as necessity, as the obvious, inevitable thing a woman did when she wanted something badly enough and had the tools to take it.
I still had tools.
Fewer of them than I used to, and less time to use them in, but I wasn’t finished yet.
Whatever it took to keep Elara safe, to keep my position secure, to keep five years of careful construction from collapsing in on itself before I’d found a way to shore up the parts that had always been the weakest — I intended to find it.
Maeve was alive, and powerful, and standing in rooms that made my lies feel increasingly fragile by comparison.
I didn’t know yet exactly what I intended to do about that.
But I understood, walking alone through that garden with my daughter’s laughter fading behind me, that I was running out of time to decide.