Chapter 1

Chapter 1: The Wedding Pyre

Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation

The night I died, the moon was full and the council hall smelled like winter lilies.

I remember that. Not the hour, not the year — although both were on the carved doors behind me — but the lilies. Damien had ordered them. He told me, three weeks before, that he wanted his wife's coronation to look like a wedding. He had said the word wife twice that night, slow, the way a man says the last name of a horse he owns.

I had loved him for three years.

I had been his Luna in name for one of them, and his Luna in truth for none.

The hall was packed. Every Elder of Crescent Fang Pack, every visiting Alpha of any consequence in the western reaches of Ewavite, every Beta who could fold himself into a council coat. The chandeliers hung low enough that I could feel their heat on the crown of my head when I walked beneath them. Damien had hand-picked the dress. White silk, silver thread, a high collar that pinched at my throat like a hand learning where to settle.

I was twenty-two years old. My hair, honey-blonde, had been pinned by a Crescent Fang attendant who would not meet my eyes. I had thought, foolishly, that she was nervous because the ceremony was sacred.

I know now she was nervous because she knew.

I walked the length of the council hall on my own two feet. Damien's name for me, in private, had always been a lie pretending to be a pet name. Luna, he would murmur, the way a man might call a coin my fortune. I had answered to it as if it belonged to me. I had stood next to him at every public function for three years, smiling for photographs whose backgrounds I now understood — the painted screens that hid the doors he used at night, the carpets that hid blood, the chandeliers he had bought with money my father had lent him before I knew there was a debt.

I walked toward the dais. I walked toward him.

The elders had risen. That was the first thing that should have warned me. Crescent Fang elders did not rise for a Luna's coronation; they sat, sour and ceremonial, and watched you sweat through your vows. Tonight they were standing. Robe sleeves folded over hands. Faces neutral. Lyre, the eldest, had washed his beard.

I should have read it. I had been raised in a council hall. My father's name was Magnus Hartwell, and I was the first daughter of the Silvercrest line, and I had played at my father's feet during clan disputes I did not yet understand. I should have read the room.

But Damien was waiting at the dais. And Damien was the man I had loved.

He was beautiful. He had always been beautiful — dark hair he kept too neat, a jaw he sharpened with discipline, ice-blue eyes a poet might describe and a dishonest man might use. He was wearing the Crescent Fang formal coat, black with silver fang at the lapel. Behind him, on the dais's small step, stood the woman I had spent three years pretending not to see.

Vivienne Marlowe. Auburn hair down to her waist for tonight, because she knew that I knew that he liked it down. A green dress the color of a poisoner's eye. A small, secret smile.

I had told myself, every time I had seen her in the corridors of Crescent Fang Manor, that she was an aide. A friend. A distant cousin of his Beta. I had believed all of it because the alternative had been to admit that the man whose pups I had hoped to carry had been climbing into a different bed.

I stopped at the foot of the dais.

"Damien," I said.

He did not answer.

Behind me, the great doors of the council hall closed with a sound like an iron lid on a coffin.

I felt the air change first. Werewolves know rooms. We can taste the moment before a pack turns. The hairs at the nape of my neck lifted. My wolf — Vesper, who had always been a quiet, anxious thing in those days — shrank in my chest like an animal that had heard a wire snap.

Damien lifted a folder from the carved table beside the dais.

"Lady Selene Cross née Hartwell," he said, and his voice carried, because he had learned long ago how to carry a voice. "It is my duty tonight to present to this council certain documents."

The elders sat down. I noticed that. They had risen because the moment of standing was about Vivienne, who was already in position. They sat now because the moment of sitting was about me.

I did not understand yet. I still believed, then, that a misunderstanding could be undone with a hand and a word and a few breaths.

"Damien," I said again, louder this time. "What are you doing?"

He opened the folder.

"For the past eight months," he said, "the Crescent Fang internal investigation has compiled evidence that Lady Selene has been in private correspondence with rogue factions outside our territory. Specifically with the so-called Crimson Hunt."

I laughed.

I think that was when the room understood. The laugh was wrong. It came out of me cracked, because the words he had spoken were so absurd I could not make my body believe he had said them. The council heard me laugh and decided I was guilty.

"Damien." My voice had gone strange in my own ears. "I have never spoken to a rogue in my life."

He passed the folder down the row of elders. I caught a glimpse of the top page as it traveled — letters in my handwriting that I had never written, signed with my name in a flourish I had never used. I had only ever signed my name plainly. Selene Hartwell. Not S. Hartwell-Cross, the way the forgery had it.

"There are seven letters," Damien said, "and three transfers of pack funds. Total tally exceeds nine hundred thousand."

"I have never," I said, "touched the pack treasury."

"The transfers were signed at the Western Reserve in your hand. We have verifications from two clerks."

"They are lying."

"They are under oath."

I turned to my left, where Marek — Damien's Beta, who had been at our wedding two months ago, who had eaten at my table — was holding the folder. He did not look up. He had not looked up since I walked in. I noticed at last that he was wearing his ceremonial dagger at his belt, the only Crescent Fang second who would dare wear a dagger inside a council hall.

"Marek," I said. "Look at me."

He did not look at me.

"Marek!"

"He cannot hear you," Damien said. "Tonight he hears only the council."

Behind him, Vivienne's smile widened.

I cannot explain to you, even now, the moment of falling that came next. There is a way the floor goes out beneath you when a man you have lain beside in the dark says the words that he has prepared for your death, and you understand for the first time what he has been doing every time he has watched you sleep.

I understood, in that hall, full of lily-smell, that Damien had not loved me.

I understood that he had married me to fold Silvercrest into Crescent Fang. He had courted me to make my father trust him. He had made love to me to learn my body's tells. He had told me he would give me pups so that I would stop noticing when he came home smelling of someone else.

I understood, all in one breath, three years.

And then, the second understanding: the first one had not been the worst part. The worst part was that I had walked into this hall tonight not knowing.

"You are a coward," I said. My voice came out level. I have always been proud, looking back, that the level voice came when it did. "You are a coward, Damien Cross, and a thief, and you are not even original."

Damien's face did not change.

He nodded to the back of the hall.

The doors at the far end of the council chamber opened. Two Crescent Fang guards stepped aside and four more came through, carrying between them a frame of black iron. I knew the frame. Every werewolf knows the frame. It is the kind we use in punishment of rogues, when we use it at all anymore. A pyre stand, with a spike where the offender's wrists are bound, and a lower trough for the kindling, and at the base — folded thin, almost decorative, almost beautiful — the silver netting. Silver-laced kindling. A werewolf cannot heal through silver smoke.

I stopped breathing.

"You cannot," I said. I did not know whom I was telling. The elders. Damien. Myself. "You cannot. There must be a trial."

"There has been a trial," Damien said. "It concluded an hour before you arrived. You are the last to be informed, Lady Selene. The council voted nine to one. The dissenting voice was Elder Ardin, who has stepped down for reasons of conflict."

"My father —"

"Your father will be told tomorrow, and will be furnished with the documents."

"My sister —"

"Lyra will be told tomorrow."

I went for him.

I will tell you, plainly, that I did not get far. Damien had three years of training me to stop noticing what he could see. He had three years of watching me move. He had me by the shoulders before I'd cleared the dais step, and his hands were on my collar, and his thumb was pressing into my pulse with the soft certainty of a man who had measured my throat with his mouth on a hundred nights and had chosen, on this one, to put his hand instead.

"Don't," he said quietly. So quietly only I could hear. "Don't make this loud. The pyre is gentle, if you let it be."

"Gentle," I said. It came out as a laugh again, the wrong kind.

His eyes were very blue and very, very far away.

"Vivienne wanted you to be heard," he said. "I asked her to allow you to be quiet. I am giving you this much, Selene. Please take it."

For one second — and I am ashamed of this, even now, even in another life — for one second I thought: he is sorry. For one second I thought a man who had spent three years robbing me might still be the man I had thought he was.

The second passed. He turned me, pinned my wrists behind me, and walked me to the iron frame.

The guards bound me. Marek tightened the cuffs. The ceremonial dagger, I saw too late, was for cutting away the bottom of my dress — for show, I think. The council craved spectacle. They cut a long wound up the silk of my skirt to my knee and let the silver kindling press against my calves.

A hush had come down on the hall. The elders watched. The minor lords watched. The guards watched. Vivienne stood on the dais with both hands resting on the back of Damien's chair as if she had grown out of him.

Damien turned to face the room.

"By the order of the Elder Council of Crescent Fang Pack," he said, "and in defense of the moonborn order against the rogues that would sicken our blood — Selene Hartwell, treason confessed in the documents you all hold, is sentenced to silver pyre."

I called for my mother. I do not know if you can imagine what it is to call for your mother at twenty-two, knowing she is two days' drive away and will hear what happened only as a story. I called anyway. I called for my father. I called for Lyra. I called for the Moon Goddess.

Damien took the torch from the guard's hand.

The silver kindling hissed when the flame met it, the way ice hisses when it cracks. The first whisper of silver-smoke filled my throat and my throat closed. A werewolf cannot scream through silver smoke. Even our voices burn.

I looked up. The high windows of the council hall were uncurtained — Damien had liked the look of it, the moon coming through the blue glass like water. The moon was full. It always is, when these things are done. We choose our nights for our spectacles.

Vivienne's mouth was moving. From the dais she leaned, with the affection of a girl whispering at a school assembly, and mouthed at me four words I read clearly through the smoke and the pain and the quiet weeping of my own dying voice.

Thank you for keeping him warm.

And then she laughed. I did not hear it. I saw her shoulders shake.

The fire climbed.

I will tell you the truth: at the end I did not curse the Goddess. I cursed Damien. I cursed Vivienne. I cursed Marek. I cursed every elder who had sat down for me. I cursed every minor lord who had not stood. I cursed myself for walking into that hall on my own two feet because a man had told me white silk would suit me.

And to the Goddess — to the Goddess I prayed.

I prayed not to live, because by then I knew I would not. I prayed to remember.

I prayed: If there is anywhere to wake up — anywhere at all, any morning, any year — let me wake up knowing what I know now. Let me carry this. Let me carry every name and every number and every door he ever closed and every glance she ever gave him. Let me carry it. I will use it.

The silver smoke filled my mouth and my eyes. The chandeliers above me burned dimmer than the moon. The moon — I want you to understand this, because it is the only thing in this story that is more than I was — the moon, that night, through the blue council glass, pulsed.

Once. Twice. A third time.

It pulsed like a heart that had decided.

The last thing I saw with my old eyes was not Damien's face and not Vivienne's smile. It was that pulsing moon, blue through the glass, sliding the color of the dress on the woman who had come to watch me die.

I felt my body let go.

And then — and I know how this will sound, I know how impossible it will sound, I know what it will cost you to believe me — and then the moon answered me.