Chapter 5 Alive

I woke up screaming.

Sunlight. Warm sheets. Woodsmoke and cedar oil. I clawed at my throat and found it whole, my heart pounding hard and steady, stronger than it had been in months. Above me, a crack ran across the ceiling in the shape of a crescent moon. I had stared at that crack every night since I was a little girl. I was not at Thornwatch. I was in my own bed, in my father’s house in Silverwolf.

The door burst open.

“Fiona!” My father filled the doorway in his nightshirt, grey-streaked hair on end, a fire poker raised like a sword. His bad leg made him lurch as he swung the poker at the empty corners. “Who’s here? I heard you scream.”

I could only stare at him. The last time I had seen him, he had stood on the scaffold in the square with a rope around his neck, searching the crowd until he found me by the bakehouse wall, and smiling so that I would not be afraid.

I don’t remember getting out of bed. I only remember crashing into him so hard that he dropped the poker, and sobbing into his shoulder. His heart beat under my cheek, slow and steady and real.

“Hush, little moon. It was a nightmare, that’s all.”

“You were dead,” I choked. “Papa, they killed you. I watched them do it.”

“Well, they made a poor job of it, because here I am.” His brown eyes crinkled with worry and amusement both. “You’ve been working yourself to the bone over those ledgers. It’s the last day of winter, Fi. Even the Steward of Stores is allowed to sleep past dawn on the last day of winter.”

The last day of winter.

The stores ledger lay open on my desk, my pen in its fold, and the date at the top of the page made the floor tilt beneath my feet. It was the very day I had died at Thornwatch, only a full year earlier. The Alpha was alive. My father had not yet been accused, or chained, or buried beneath the old oak. Logan had not yet thrown me away on the moonstone. None of it had happened yet.

Not yet, little one.

“Papa. Is the Alpha well?”

“Cedric?” He snorted. “Strong as an ox and twice as stubborn. He’s been badgering me all week to ride with him on the spring hunt, bad leg or no bad leg. I expect I’ll give in. I always do.”

The room went cold. In my first life, he had given in. He had ridden out with the Alpha’s flask on his saddle, the flask Calista had filled, and when Cedric fell at the river crossing, it was my father they found holding it.

“You’ve gone white as milk,” he said, touching my cheek. “Sit down. I’ll make porridge.”

He limped out, muttering about stubborn daughters, and I went to the window and pushed open the shutters.

Silverwolf was waking below me, smoke curling from the bakehouse chimneys, the smithy clanging across the square, silver wolves on blue snapping from the banners on the hill. And crossing the training yard with his great grey cloak flung back was Alpha Cedric Silverwolf himself, laughing and clapping a young warrior on the back so hard the boy staggered. When I was small, he used to pass me sugared almonds round the tapestry during councils and rumble, “Don’t tell the Luna.” Eighteen days from now, he would collapse at the river crossing with Calista’s poison in his blood.

A few steps behind him walked his son.

My heart did the foolish thing it had always done whenever Logan Silverwolf came into view. It leapt.

I had loved him since I was nine, since the summer he dragged me out of the river, wrapped me in his own shirt and told me I was the bravest girl in Silverwolf. I had never told a soul. Even from so far away, I knew the set of his shoulders and the dark hair falling across his forehead. He wasn’t wearing black. There was nothing yet to mourn.

I hated that my heart still leapt for him. I had died in his arms and heard him say I never stopped loving you, and it had changed nothing. He had loved me, and he had still thrown me away while the pack laughed. Whatever I felt for him, I would bury it so deep this time that not even I could find it.

I pressed a hand to my chest and reached for my wolf.

For a long, terrible moment, nothing. Then, slowly, as if from the bottom of a deep well, she stirred, heavy and groggy as someone drugged, and answered me with a sleepy grumble before sinking down again. But she answered. At Thornwatch, she had not answered at all.

Six months ago, my dresses had fit. Now my nightgown pulled across my stomach and hips, my knees ached, and the fog had begun to creep into my mornings. But six months of poison was not eighteen. There was still time.

Then my eyes fell on the nightstand.

A half-finished bottle of sparkling elderflower stood there in the morning light, beside a box of honey cakes tied with ribbon and a folded note in round, looping handwriting.

For my favourite girl. C.

I had drunk half of that bottle last night. I had drunk from bottles exactly like it for six months, and thanked her for every one.

Downstairs, the front door opened. I heard my father’s warm welcome and a lighter voice answer him, laughing. Then footsteps on the stairs, light and unhurried, as if whoever made them had all the time in the world.

I had heard those footsteps climb the Thornwatch tower on the night I died.

Something that had been soft in me my whole life went cold and hard as river ice. Deep inside, my wolf lifted her head again, and this time she growled.

Calista had poisoned me. Her father had poisoned my mother. Between them, they had murdered the Alpha and let my father hang for it. They had taken everything from me once. This time, I would make every one of them pay.

And Logan Silverwolf would never get the chance to throw me away again.

The door handle began to turn.

“Fi?” called a sweet, familiar voice. “Are you awake? I’ve brought you breakfast.”

Author’s Note:

Fiona’s back, and she remembers everything. Her father is alive, the Alpha has eighteen days, and her murderer is at the door with breakfast. What should Fiona do first? Tell me below. 🐺

Lyra