Chapter 3: The Moon Writes My Name

They were gone before I could say anything clever. Which was probably a mercy, because what I'd been about to say was you have got to be joking. The Alpha King. Kaelen Thorne. Twenty-nine years old, crowned at nineteen over his father's corpse, the wolf who'd held six packs together with his teeth for a decade. Dying in an alley behind a tavern, drinking wine off a kitchen girl's finger. I didn't sleep. At dawn, the sky broke open. The whole kingdom saw it. A column of white light punched up out of the Temple of the Moon and split the clouds, and in the tear it left behind, a sigil burned — a wolf's skull crowned by a crescent. The Trials. By noon the square was packed. The King's Fang himself stood on the temple steps in black armor — the giant from the alley. Halvard. He read from a scroll that hurt to look at directly. "The Alpha King has no Luna. The Alpha King is dying. By the law of the Moon, the throne cannot pass to a King alone." Eight hundred wolves, silent. "The Goddess has opened the Trials of the Moon. She will name her own candidates. They will fight. The last standing will be Luna of the Wolf Kingdom, and will hold the crown when the King falls." Cassia was already at the front, chin up, radiant, because everyone knew whose name was coming. Blood Moon was the strongest pack in the kingdom. Ulric had spent ten years and half a treasury making sure of it. "And the rogues," Halvard said, "have answered the summons." The square went cold. "The Goddess did not refuse them." Above us, the tear in the sky filled with totems. A grey wolf. A white one wrapped in frost. A blue one crackling with storm. Then a red one. Bloated, red as a wound, wrong. Somebody screamed. "Their champions will enter the Trials," Halvard said, and even his voice had gone flat, "with one purpose. Kill every candidate. If no Luna stands when the King dies, the throne is empty, and the rogues take it." Ulric pushed to the front, playing the loyal Alpha. "Then let the Goddess name them, and let the Blood Moon carry the kingdom." The light dropped. It hit Cassia first. She glowed like a lit lantern, and Blood Moon roared, and Dorian kissed her hand. It hit a Silverash girl. A Storm Valley girl. Three more. And then it swung across the square, past the noble daughters in their silk, past the warriors, past everyone — and stopped on the girl in the kitchen apron. It went through me like a swallow of hot water. My name burned itself into the sky in letters of white fire. SERAPHINE VALE. I want to tell you the square gasped. It didn't. It laughed. It laughed so hard a man fell off a cart. "The wolfless one?" "The Goddess is drunk—" Cassia's smile did not move a millimeter, but her eyes went to knives. Dorian's face was worth every scar on my back. "That's — no. That's my cousin. That's the dishwasher—" And my uncle. My uncle didn't laugh. Ulric Vale looked up at my name burning in the sky and went the color of old ash. Because there was a thing my uncle had known for thirteen years that nobody else in that square knew, and I watched it crawl across his face in front of everyone. He was in the crowd beside me in six strides. His hand closed on my arm like a manacle. "Withdraw," he said, very quietly, mouth by my ear. "Candidates can't withdraw. Halvard just said—" "Then die in the first round." His grip ground bone. "Girl. Listen to me. If you take one step onto that sand, I will put your mother in the cellars, and I will leave her there." I felt my own heartbeat in my teeth. "You've had thirteen years to break me, Uncle," I said. "You should have finished." He let go like I'd burned him. He walked away with Dorian at his shoulder — and Dorian turned back once to sneer at me, and the movement swung his cloak open, and I saw what he wore at his hip. A dagger. Black crystal, hilt wrapped in old leather, a red rune half-worn on the pommel. Behind me, my mother made a sound like she was drowning. "Sera." Her hands were shaking. "Sera, look away. Don't look at it—" "Mother. What is that dagger." She was crying. "It's your wolf."