Chapter 2

Chapter 2: Three Years Back

Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation

I woke up screaming.

The scream was so old it scraped my throat raw before I knew I was making it. I had been screaming, somewhere, for a very long time. Then there was no smoke and no silver and the sound came out clean and wrong, ordinary as a girl's terror in an ordinary room.

I sat up with a hand at my throat. My throat was whole. My throat was unburned. My fingers, when I touched my collarbone, were not raw. They were soft. They were seventeen years old.

I knew that hand.

I sat in a bed that was not my Crescent Fang bed. The sheets were lavender — Mother had bought them for my fifteenth birthday because she had been told I had outgrown the pink. The canopy above me had a small water stain in one corner that looked, if you tilted your head, like a star. I had stared at that star a thousand times as a girl. The morning sun came in through the round window over my reading desk, white-gold, the way it came in only at Silvercrest Manor, only on this side of the mountain.

I did not move for a long time.

Vesper, my wolf, was a small, frightened presence in my chest, low and worried, the way she had been when I was a pup and a thunderstorm crossed the valley. She was alive. I could feel her there. She was alive and she had not been alive eight breaths ago.

"Selene?" The voice from the hall was a girl's voice. Not deep. Not lined with a woman's grief. "Selene, are you up? Mother says we're leaving in two hours."

Lyra.

I shut my eyes. I bit the inside of my cheek so hard I tasted iron. The taste was the same as the metal of the cuffs around my wrists in the council hall, and I gagged.

"Sel?"

"I'm up." My voice came out three years younger than it had any right to be. I cleared it. "Give me a minute."

"Don't fall back asleep. Mother is going to kill you if you make us late."

I waited until I heard her footsteps move away from my door. Then I rolled out of the bed.

The basin in the corner had a little tin pitcher beside it. I filled the basin with shaking hands and looked at myself in the mirror over it.

The face that looked back at me was a face I had not seen in three years.

It was rounder than I remembered. The cheekbones I would later sharpen to ice were still soft. The mouth was untouched by the small lines that had grown at its corners during my marriage — the lines I had earned by smiling for photographs. My hair was loose to my waist, lighter at the ends from a summer I had spent climbing apple trees with my sister. There was a freckle on the bridge of my nose that I had stopped seeing in mirrors years ago because I had stopped looking long enough to notice.

It was my face. My old face. My first face.

I leaned over the basin, and I gagged, and I did not throw up, because there was nothing in my stomach but the memory of silver smoke.

I held to the rim of the basin until my hands stopped trembling.

"Vesper," I whispered.

She did not answer. She would not answer for many weeks. But I felt her there, smaller than she had ever been, the way she had been before her first transformation. She was a pup curled against my ribs and I could feel her dreaming.

The Goddess had heard me.

The Goddess had heard me.

I sat down on the floor of my old bedroom in Silvercrest Manor, with my back against the cool wood of my dressing table, and I did the only thing I could think to do.

I counted.

I counted backward from a hundred.

I counted forward to twenty.

I counted, in my head, the names of every elder who had sat down for me. Lyre. Whitlock. Pendarvis. Ashby. Olwen. Maeve. Treven. Fairlight. Marek's grandfather. The dissenting voice — Ardin — who had been forced out for "conflict" two months earlier. Eight names plus Marek's family, against me. Nine to one. I had memorized them in the moment I had heard them, the way a wolf memorizes wind.

I counted them again.

By the time I reached the ninth name a second time, I could breathe.

I rose. I went to my desk and I opened the small leather-bound diary that, in this life, I had not yet started to write in. The first page was blank. I picked up the pen — the silver-tipped one Mother had given me at my last birthday, which I had used as a nineteen-year-old to sign my marriage agreement to a man who would burn me — and I held the pen for a long time without writing.

I thought: nothing is real until I put it in a list.

I wrote the date at the top of the first page in plain script. The First Day.

Below it, in even, deliberate letters, I wrote:

1. I will not marry Damien Cross.

I stared at the line. My hand wanted to shake. I made it not shake. I wrote on.

2. I will save Lyra. Mother. Father.

3. I will save Ezra. (October. North patrol. Four rogues. Don't let him go.)

4. I will not let Vivienne in this house.

5. I will end them. Every elder. Every Beta. Every coward who sat down. I will end them all.

I read it through twice. The list felt like a thing I could hold. I tore the page out, folded it into a small tight square, and tucked it inside the silk lining of my mother's old jewelry box on the dresser, where no maid ever cleaned. I closed the box. I closed the diary. I put the pen back in its little tray as if it had never moved.

I went to the wardrobe. The Welcoming was today. The Annual Pack Welcoming Day, three years before my wedding, the day my father invited every neighboring Alpha to a garden party in our hills.

The day I had met Damien for the first time.

I stood in front of my wardrobe with my hand on the door, and a sound left my mouth that was neither a sob nor a laugh. A bark, almost. A small, animal, awful sound. Vesper, in my chest, whimpered with me.

"All right," I whispered. To her. To myself. To whatever piece of the Moon Goddess had stayed with me through the silver smoke. "All right. We are here. We will use it."

I opened the wardrobe.

The dress hanging at the front was a green linen — modest, sweet, very seventeen-year-old — that Mother had picked out for the Welcoming weeks ago. In my old life I had worn this dress. I had worn it, and Damien had told me, with that small, careful smile of his, that the green made my eyes look like new leaves. I had blushed for him. I had been shaking with it for the whole evening.

I would not wear the green dress.

I went past it. Behind it, deep at the back, my mother had hung a moon-grey silk Eleanor had sent home from a Bluemoon trade trip the previous summer. It was too old for me, technically. Mother had said I could grow into it. I had laughed and said I was already as grown as I would ever be. We had folded the dress and put it at the back of the wardrobe and I had not thought of it since.

I lifted it out. Cool against my fingers. A slim silver belt at the waist. Long sleeves cuffed in pearl. It was a dress for a woman, not a girl.

I held it up against my body in the mirror. The grey caught the morning light. My eyes — which had been the color of new leaves once — looked, in the silk, the color of cut jade.

"Yes," I said softly, to the mirror.

To my reflection, I said: "From now on, you are the woman who walked through fire. They are not the men who burned you. They are the men you will burn first."

The girl in the mirror nodded back at me. I thought, suddenly, that she was the bravest person I had ever met. Then I thought that I would be careful with her, because she was the only one of us left.

I called for Helen, my old maid, who came in pink-cheeked and laughing because she had been gossiping with the kitchen girls. I let her dress me. I let her pin my hair the way Mother liked it pinned. I let her lay out the modest gold earrings my grandmother had left to me. When she lifted the green linen out of the wardrobe and laid it on the bed, I told her quietly that I had decided to wear the grey.

"The grey, Lady Selene? It's awfully fine for a garden party." She lifted the dress with a frown that was half real. "Your mother said —"

"I know what she said." I smiled at her, the gentle smile I had worn for three years like a second skin. "Indulge me, Helen. I felt grown-up this morning."

She flushed, charmed. "Yes, Lady Selene. Of course."

While she fussed at my hair, I made my eyes meet hers in the mirror.

"Helen. If anyone — anyone, even a man you've known since I was small — comes to the gate today and asks to be admitted privately, before the guests are formally received, will you tell my father immediately?"

Her hand paused at my hair. "Lady?"

"Promise me."

"I — yes. Of course. Lady Selene, are you well?"

"I am very well." I let my eyes go bright the way young girls' eyes go bright. "I had a dream last night. I do not want it to come true. Promise."

"I promise," she said, and her voice was a little hushed.

By the time I went down to breakfast, my hair was up in a soft braided crown, and the grey silk caught the high windows of the gallery and made me, for one passing reflection, look like a woman someone might be afraid of.

Mother was at the long table when I came in, pouring tea with the careful, ritual grace I had loved her for since I was small. She was wearing her quiet morning dress — the soft blue one, the one she had been wearing the day the news from Crescent Fang reached her, in the world I had left behind. Three years from this morning, in another life, she would have her hair shorn and her hands clenched in a hospital lobby because Damien's pyre would make her ill enough to put her there.

I stood in the doorway and looked at her. A small, hot, terrible thing pressed up under my breastbone.

I crossed the room before she had seen me. I bent. I kissed her temple.

"Good morning, Mother," I said.

She froze for a heartbeat. I never kissed her at breakfast. The Hartwells, by long pack tradition, were a family whose tenderness happened in private. Mother set down the teapot. She turned her face up. Her mouth softened into a smile.

"What is this, my heart?" She lifted a hand to touch my cheek. "Did you sleep poorly?"

"I had a dream," I said, exactly as I had to Helen.

"Was it bad?"

"It was instructive."

"Oh, you and your fancy words." She squeezed my chin. "Sit. Eat. Your sister has eaten the entire plate of strawberries, and she will eat your share too if you give her three more minutes."

"I heard that," Lyra said, walking in.

I turned, because at the sound of my sister's voice my heart had simply stopped working for a moment.

Lyra at sixteen had freckles. I had forgotten her freckles. By the time she was twenty-one — by the time my pyre was lit — she had grown out of them, or grown around them. She had been kneeling at the foot of Damien's dais, in another life, two days after my death, with her wrists bruised from the guards and her eyes streaming, asking him to give her my body.

Here she had freckles. Here her hair was untied and her shirt collar crooked. Here she was alive and warm and rolling her eyes at me as she came in to fold herself into a chair.

I crossed the room to her and put my arms around her and held her too long.

"Sis." She laughed into my shoulder, half-protesting. "Are you sick?"

"No."

"Are you crying?"

"No."

"You are. Mother, she's crying. Sis, what is wrong with you this morning?"

I drew back. I made my mouth smile. I let one tear go because it would have been worse to fight it.

"I had a bad dream," I said, again. "About you."

Her face softened. Lyra was a sharp child but she had always been soft about me. "Oh." She squeezed my hand. "What kind of dream?"

"You were sad."

"That doesn't sound dramatic enough to make you weep at the breakfast table."

"I was sad, in the dream, because of you."

"Sis." She laughed, a little. She squeezed my hand harder. "I am not going to do anything that makes you sad."

I looked into her eyes — jade, like mine, only with that gold ring around the iris that ran in our mother's people — and I said, very quietly, so that Mother across the table heard only the warmth in my voice and not the words:

"Promise me one thing, Lyra."

"Anything."

"Promise me we never trust the Cross family. No matter what they say. No matter how charming. No matter who comes to ask. We never trust them."

Lyra's smile faltered, the way her smile always did when I asked her something serious. She had always trusted me past reason. Past sense. Past what was, in another life, fair to her.

"All right," she said. "I promise."

"Say the words back."

"We never trust the Cross family. Goddess witness."

I let my hand close around hers, and I held it for too long, and I did not cry again.

"Good," I said.

Father came in then. Magnus Hartwell at fifty was a tall man with grey at his temples and a long face that had been called severe by friends and frightening by enemies. He kissed Mother's cheek and he ruffled Lyra's hair and he stopped, when he saw me in the grey silk, for a heartbeat.

"Selene." His brow drew together. "You look —"

"Older, I know." I gave him my softest smile. "Mother said I could grow into the dress."

He studied me a moment longer. Then he kissed the top of my head, the way he had stopped kissing me when I was thirteen.

"You are a credit to the house, my heart," he said. "Eat your breakfast. Crescent Fang's heir is coming this afternoon."

"I know," I said.

And under the table, where no one could see, I unfolded the small tight square of paper from the lining of my mother's jewelry box, and pressed my thumb hard against the line that read:

I will not marry Damien Cross.