Ysolde Varrane had always known her pack's end would smell like smoke. She had not known it would smell like her mother's perfume burning. She stood at the top of the great hall's stairs, where the lanterns had been smashed and the banners of Hollowmere lay trampled in ash. Below her, the survivors knelt in rows. Children had been dragged from the cellars, warriors disarmed, and elders forced onto knees that no longer bent easily. Blackthorn soldiers moved among them with torches, counting heads like merchants counting grain. Ysolde counted too. She had done it eleven times since the walls fell. Two hundred and six of her people were alive. Her father was not one of them. "Lady Ysolde." A young guard appeared at her elbow with blood on his sleeve and terror in his eyes. Tomas was seventeen and had followed her around the keep like a pup since he was twelve. "They say all of the Alpha's blood must go down." "I know." "If you kneel quickly, they might..." "Might what?" She turned, and he fell silent. Her eyes were dark hazel, and a ring of silver had risen around the irises, the mark of her wolf close to the surface. "Look around you, Tomas." He looked. Then he lowered his eyes. She smoothed her mother's silver gown, pinned hastily to fit because her own dress was soaked in her father's blood. She had held his head as he died. His last words had not been a blessing or a command. He had gripped her wrist with a strength she hadn't known he had left and whispered, "They were never after the land." Then he was gone, and there had been no time to ask what he meant. She went down the stairs one step at a time, back straight, chin high. An Alpha's daughter never runs, her mother used to say, and she never crawls. Her mother was somewhere in the cellars with the other women, or she was dead. Ysolde refused to decide which. The hall fell quiet as she reached the bottom. The Blackthorn soldiers parted without being told, and a man walked through the gap who changed the shape of the room. Rhydian Voss, Alpha King of the Blackthorn, was taller than the stories made him. They said he'd taken seven packs in nine years, that he'd never lost a duel, that he had burned his own father's banner to take the northern throne. None of them mentioned how still he could be. He crossed the wreckage of her home with no hurry and no anger, the way a man walks a field he already owns. He wore black leather and a heavy fur-collared cloak, clasped at the shoulder with a gold wolf's head. His dark hair was disordered by the wind, his jaw shadowed with stubble, and a thin white scar ran from his temple to his jaw. His eyes were amber, and they moved over the hall, the kneeling people, the dead, and finally her. They stopped. Behind him came a wolf. It was enormous and black as smoke, with shoulders level with a man's waist and eyes the same burning amber as the king's. It padded at his heel, silent, and the soldiers shrank back from it. "You are the Alpha's daughter," Rhydian said. His voice was lower than she expected, quiet enough that everyone had to listen. "I am Ysolde Varrane, daughter of Alpha Aldric of Hollowmere, whom you killed." A ripple went through the soldiers. No one spoke to the king without leave. His expression did not change. "Your father died in battle. He chose to fight." "He chose to protect his people from men who came in the night." "We came at dusk." "You came after the gates were opened," Ysolde said. "On a night when you had sworn peace. Correct me if I'm wrong, Your Majesty. I would hate to misremember the honor of the Blackthorn." The silence that followed was the kind that comes before a blade. A captain stepped forward with his hand on his sword. Rhydian lifted two fingers, and the man stopped. "She is grieving," the king said mildly. "Grief makes the tongue brave." He did not look away from her. "But you're right about one thing. The gates were opened. The question is by whom." A cold thread ran down her spine. She had assumed the gates were broken, that the Blackthorn had simply overwhelmed them. She hadn't known they were opened. They were never after the land. Something flickered in her face, and she had the uncomfortable sense that he had been waiting for it. A silver-haired man at the king's shoulder murmured something. His voice was soft, almost fatherly. Chancellor Maren Cael, she would learn later, though now she saw only a tired old advisor with kind eyes. Rhydian nodded without turning. "By the law of the packs," the king said, and his voice carried now, "a defeated Alpha's line is forfeit. The victor may claim the territory, the armory, and one spoil from the vanquished." He paused. "I have claimed Hollowmere's lands. I have claimed its armory. As for the spoil..." The hall held its breath. Ysolde felt every eye swing toward her. She knew what the old law meant. Every girl of the packs did, the way you know about drowning without having done it. Her wolf, Wynne, rose in her chest, snarling. She kept her hands still. "I take the Alpha's daughter," Rhydian said. Someone in the crowd made a stifled, animal sound of grief. It was Tomas. He started to rise, and a spear came down across his shoulders. "Don't," Ysolde said sharply. Tomas froze. She stepped forward, closer to the king than anyone had dared, and tilted her head to meet his eyes. She could smell him now: pine smoke, cold iron, and beneath it something warm and wild that her body recognized before her mind would admit it. "You'll have my body in your tower," she said quietly, for him alone. "You'll have my name on your slave rolls. You'll have the right to order me, and I will obey the orders that keep my people alive." His eyes narrowed fractionally. "But you will never have me," she said. "Not the part that matters. Not tonight. Not in a hundred years." For a long heartbeat, nothing moved. The great black wolf at his heel lifted its head and stared at her. Then the corner of Rhydian's mouth tilted, not quite a smile, only its ghost. It was gone before she was sure she had seen it. "We'll see," said the Alpha King. He turned and walked toward the doors. Two guards took her by the arms, not roughly. She noticed that, and it angered her more than roughness would have. As they led her out into the burning night, past the kneeling and the dead, Ysolde looked back at the hall where she'd learned to walk. One banner still hung from the rafters, the silver moon of Hollowmere, scorched at the edges but whole. She memorized it. I will come back, she promised it silently. And when I do, I'll know who opened the gates. Behind her, unseen, Rhydian paused at the threshold and looked up at the same banner. He stood there for three breaths with his jaw tight and a shadow in his eyes that was not triumph. At his side, the black wolf whined softly, once, and pressed against his leg. Then the king followed his spoils into the dark.

Ysolde woke to the sound of water and, for one merciful breath, believed she was home. Hollowmere had stood above a river, and every morning of her life had begun with its distant rush. Then she opened her eyes on a ceiling of black stone, and the night came down on her like a blade. She sat up slowly. The tower room was round and bare, with a narrow bed, a washstand, and a small hearth where someone had lit a fire while she slept. Her mother's silver gown was gone. A plain gray dress lay folded on the chair. The window was a tall slit with no glass, and beyond it the world dropped away into a gorge, a waterfall, and a river the color of pewter. She tried the door. Locked from the outside. She pressed her forehead against the cold wood and let herself shake for exactly ten breaths. Her father's face. The smell of her mother's perfume burning. Tomas's spear-bruised shoulders. Ten breaths, and then she stood straight and washed her face, because grief was a luxury and she was spending it carefully. Two hundred and six, she told herself. Keep them breathing. The knock came at dawn. The woman who entered was thin as a reed, with a ring of keys at her belt and eyes that missed nothing. "I'm Hesper, the housekeeper. You'll come with me." "Where?" "The king's table. Don't speak unless spoken to. It's easier on everyone." "Easier for whom?" Hesper's mouth thinned. "For you," she said, a shade less sharply than before. The dining hall was empty of courtiers. Rhydian Voss sat alone at the head of a long table with a map spread beside his plate and a cup of coffee going cold in his hand. In the pale morning his scar looked like a thread of frost along his jaw. He didn't look up. Ysolde stood where Hesper left her and counted forty heartbeats. "Sit," he said at last, still reading. "There." The chair he meant was at the table's far end, six seats from his. She sat, because her legs ached, and because she would not give him the satisfaction of watching her fall. "You have two hundred and six people in the lower courtyard," Rhydian said. "They're sleeping on straw and eating soldier's rations, and they're wondering whether they'll be sold, executed, or sent to the mines. I haven't decided." Her hands went still in her lap. "I could be generous. Homes, trades, their children kept. Or I could be cruel. I'm told I'm good at it." He said it flatly, without pride. "Which future they get depends on you. You obey, and they live well. You defy me, and they pay for it." She understood then. He hadn't chained her. He'd done something cleverer, tied the chain to everyone she loved and handed her the end. "That's a coward's leash," she said. "It's an effective one." "It's what a man uses on a woman he's afraid of." Something moved behind his eyes, too quick to name. He smiled, slow and cool. "Afraid of a girl in a borrowed dress?" "You wouldn't need the leash otherwise." Every instinct she had told her to look down. She held his gaze instead. A deep sound rolled through the hall, a vibration she felt in her breastbone before she heard it. At the table's head, Rhydian went rigid. The door at the end of the hall swung open, and the enormous black wolf from last night padded in, amber eyes fixed on her. Servants flattened themselves against the walls. Cinder, she thought. She didn't know how she knew his name. Her own wolf, Wynne, rose in her chest, but not to fight. She was curious. Cinder stopped at her chair. He lowered his massive head and breathed in the scent of her wrist, and something in her chest cracked open, because it was the first gentle thing anyone had done since the walls fell. His warm breath stirred her hair. Slowly, deliberately, he lay down across her feet. Silence. Hesper, in the doorway, looked as if she'd seen a ghost. "He doesn't do that," Rhydian said, in an odd, careful voice. "Cinder doesn't lie down for anyone." "Perhaps he's tired." "Perhaps." His jaw worked. For a second he looked less like a king than a man who had found a crack in a wall he'd thought was solid. Then the mask came back. "Eat. You have a long day." It was long. She stood behind his chair through two hours of council, silent as furniture, and she watched. She'd been raised to read a room, and the Blackthorn court was a poor one at hiding things. The captains feared him. The Elders watched him like crows watching a field. And Chancellor Maren Cael, silver-haired and gentle-eyed, finished the king's sentences so smoothly that the room settled each time he spoke. When a scribe spilled ink and a captain raised a hand to strike him, Ysolde said quietly, "He's a boy." Every head turned. Rhydian's eyes met hers for a long, unreadable moment. "Let it go," he said. No one thanked her. She hadn't wanted them to. The summons came after dark. Two guards walked her down a stairwell she hadn't seen, through a cold corridor that smelled of smoke, and out into the ruined gatehouse of Blackthorn's western wall. Rhydian stood alone beside a workbench lit by one lantern, with Cinder at his heel. "Where are we?" "Where your pack's gate was brought," he said. "After the siege, I had the lock taken out." He lifted a cloth. On the bench lay a heavy iron mechanism, scored with fire. "Hollowmere's gates were sealed with a three-key lock. Alpha, heir, and war-chief. I was told that no force on earth could break it." He looked at her. "Nothing broke it, Lady Ysolde. It was opened. With a key." Cold ran through her, because only three keys had ever existed. Her father's was buried with him. The war-chief's belonged to her uncle Corvin. The third... "Mine is around my neck," she said, and her hand flew to her collar. The chain was gone. She remembered the guards stripping her, last night, and the cold place on her throat. Rhydian's expression did not change. He set a small iron key on the bench and turned it so the lantern caught the seal. A silver moon, worn smooth by a girl's thumb. "This was in the lock," he said quietly. "Someone used your key to open your own gate." The room tilted. "I didn't." "I know." He said it so fast it startled her. "If you'd done it, you wouldn't have stood in that hall and asked me who. But the Elders will not know that. When they hear a key bearing the Alpha heir's seal opened the gate, they will say you betrayed your own people, and the law gives them the right to execute you for it." His amber eyes held hers. "Unless I find who stole it first." "You." She laughed, short and shaky. "You want my help." "I want the truth. You want your people alive." He stepped closer, and the lantern threw his shadow across her. "Someone inside Blackthorn handed that key to a man who used it. Someone who wants Hollowmere gone and wants you blamed. We both want that person found, and we both have a great deal to lose if I'm wrong." Cinder pressed against her hip, warm and steady. Ysolde looked down at the small silver moon, and then she looked up at the king who had burned her home. "If I do this," she said, "my people eat at your table. Not straw. Not rations." "Done." "And the women from the cellars. I want my mother found." Something flickered across his face, too quick to read. "Ysolde..." "Found," she repeated. "Or I don't lift a finger." A long breath. "Your mother was not among the women we took." His voice was careful. "I'm sorry. I don't know where she is." The words hit like a fist. Her mother, last seen in the cellars with the other women, hadn't been among them, and the room went very quiet while Ysolde stood perfectly still and refused, refused, to let it show. "Then find that too," she whispered. He studied her for a long moment. When he spoke, it was almost gentle. "I will." He reached down and took the key from the bench. For a heartbeat she thought he would give it back. Instead he slipped it into his coat. "Keep this between us," Rhydian said. "Trust no one in this keep. Not the captains. Not the Elders. Not even the people who seem kindest." Ysolde thought of silver hair and a fatherly voice, and a room that settled every time it spoke. "Especially them," she said slowly. His eyes sharpened. She had just told the king she suspected his closest advisor, and for the first time since the walls fell, Rhydian Voss looked at her not as spoils, but as an equal.

By morning, the king's tower had a second bed in it. It wasn't really a bed. It was a narrow couch pulled up beside the hearth in Rhydian's own chambers, with a wool blanket folded at one end. Ysolde stared at it from the doorway while Hesper pretended to be very busy with a water jug. "No," Ysolde said. "The Elders will be watching the tower by nightfall," Rhydian said without looking up from the letter he was reading. "A slave sleeping alone in a locked room can be reached by anyone with a key. A slave in the king's chambers cannot." He turned a page. "You wanted your people at my table. This is the price of keeping you alive long enough to enjoy it." "You want me close." "I want you alive." His eyes lifted, amber and unreadable. "If you would rather be found with a knife in your back, say so now, and I'll move you back to the tower." She looked at the couch. At Cinder, already curled in front of the fire as though the arrangement had been settled hours ago. At the lock on the outer door, now bolted from the inside. "I'll sleep by the window," she said. "As you like." It was not a victory, but it didn't feel like a defeat either, and that unsettled her more than anything else. They spent the day hunting a ghost. Rhydian had her sit at his long table with a plain ledger and a cup of tea she didn't touch, while he asked questions in a low, steady voice. Who had handled her key? When had she last seen it? She answered each one carefully, and she watched his face for lies the way he was clearly watching hers. "It was on my neck the night of the treaty dinner," she said. "Four days before the siege. My uncle embraced me, and I felt it against my collar. After that..." She stopped. "After that?" "I changed for the evening. I left the chain on my dressing table." Her stomach turned. "A gift arrived while I was out. A box of lavender soap, from the Blackthorn envoy. A courtesy. I assumed one of the maids had brought it in." Rhydian's pen stopped. "Which envoy?" "I never learned his name. He was gone before I..." She pressed her fingers to her temples. "I can't see his face. Maybe I never did." For a moment he said nothing. Then he closed the ledger very gently, as though he were afraid of what it might say. "Blackthorn sent four envoys to Hollowmere that week," he said. "Only three came home." A chill went through her. "The fourth?" "Is buried under a collapsed mine shaft. The report said it was an accident." His jaw tightened. "I signed it myself." He rose and went to the window. She watched his back, broad and still, with the afternoon light cutting across his shoulders, and understood something that made her throat ache without her permission. He wasn't angry at her, or at the Elders, or even at the traitor. He was angry at himself, the way a man is angry when he's been made a tool in his own house. "You couldn't have known," she said quietly. He glanced over his shoulder, startled, as if she'd said something in another language. "Don't comfort me, Lady Ysolde. I'm not your friend." "No." She met his eyes. "You're my jailer. But I know what it looks like when someone blames himself for something that was done to him, and I won't pretend I don't." The silence stretched. Cinder lifted his head from the hearth and looked between them. "Go to bed," Rhydian said at last, rough and low. "You've done enough for one day." She woke in the dark to the sound of someone breathing. Not Cinder. She knew Cinder's breathing already, slow and heavy as a bellows. This was lighter, and closer, and it came from above her. She didn't move. She kept her eyes nearly closed and her breath even, and through her lashes she saw the shape: a man crouched on the window ledge, dressed in Blackthorn black, with a thin blade in his hand. He'd come over the roof. Four stories of sheer stone, and no sound at all. Wynne, she thought, and her wolf rose so fast it hurt. The assassin dropped silently to the floor. He took one step toward her, then another. In the firelight his eyes were flat and empty, a man doing a job. Ysolde rolled. The blade slammed into the couch where her ribs had been. She kicked the blanket across his face, grabbed the iron poker from the hearth, and swung it as hard as she could. He caught it on his forearm with a crack of bone and drove his shoulder into her chest. She hit the wall hard enough to black out the edges of her vision. "Quiet," he said, almost kindly. "It will be quick." He raised the knife. Then something black exploded across the room. Cinder hit the man like a landslide, a hundred and fifty pounds of fury and teeth, and they went down together in a tangle of snarls and torn leather. The knife skittered across the floor. The assassin screamed, a high, wet sound, and the door to the inner room slammed open. Rhydian was across the chamber before she could draw breath. He was in shirtsleeves, hair wild, eyes glowing a fierce molten gold, and when he reached the struggle he didn't even use a weapon. He took the assassin by the throat with one hand and slammed him against the stone wall. "Who sent you?" The man gurgled. Cinder stood panting at the king's heel, blood on his muzzle. "Who?" Ysolde pushed herself up on shaking arms. She'd bitten through her lip without noticing, and the taste of copper filled her mouth. Rhydian's head turned toward the sound, and in the half-second his attention left the assassin, the man's gaze slid past the king and found her. He smiled. It was an awful, bloody smile. "The Moon is waking in her," he rasped. "He said you'd know. You'd feel it." Rhydian's grip tightened. "Who said?" But the man's eyes had already gone glassy. His body spasmed once. A thin line of black foam slid from the corner of his mouth, and he went limp in the king's hands. Poison. He'd swallowed it before the guards could come. Rhydian let him drop. The room fell silent except for the crackle of the fire and Cinder's heavy breathing. Then the king turned, and in two strides he was kneeling in front of her. His hands were everywhere at once. He tilted her chin to the light, pushed her hair aside, and swept his thumb along the bruise rising on her ribs, quick and careful, as though he were afraid she might break. "Are you hurt? Tell me where." "I'm fine," she said, and was horrified to hear her voice shake. "You're not." His own voice was low and ragged. His hands were trembling, she realized, the great, scarred, terrible hands of the Alpha King. "I heard the window and thought... for a moment I thought..." He stopped. He was very close, close enough that she could see the gold fading from his eyes and the raw, unguarded fear underneath. She should have pulled away. She was his captive, and he was the man who had burned her home. Instead she raised one hand and laid it against his jaw, over the scar, and felt him go perfectly, completely still. "You came," she whispered. "I will always..." He caught himself, too late, and his gaze fell to her mouth. For one long heartbeat the world narrowed to the heat between them and the pulse hammering at her throat. Then footsteps pounded in the corridor, and the door burst open. Guards flooded in with drawn swords, and Maren Cael was among them, silver hair disordered, eyes wide with concern. "Majesty!" he cried. "Thank the moon you are unharmed. And the girl?" Rhydian stood, the mask sliding back over his face so quickly it was almost frightening. His eyes found hers over the Chancellor's shoulder, and what passed between them was a command as clear as a spoken word. Say nothing about the key. The Moon is waking in her. Ysolde looked at the dead man on the floor. Then she looked at Maren Cael's kind, worried face. Slowly, deliberately, she lowered her eyes in the soft, submissive way of a frightened slave. And behind her bowed head, her wolf began to smile.