Chapter 1

Moira's POV

Pain dragged me back out of the dark.

My throat felt it first, a vise-tight agony. I opened my eyes and met a pair of crimson pupils.

"You killed two of my men on your first night under my roof." The owner of those red eyes spoke low and rough. "Did you think a marriage contract with three silver seals would make me spare you?"

I knew this man. His name was Soren. He was my target, the Alpha of this wolf pack, and exactly as shameless as the rumors had promised. He said it as though he had no part in it.

Those two had kicked my door in before midnight wearing his house colors, carrying blades from his armory. Whether they died at my hands or I died at their orders came down to who struck first. He knew that, and still he stood over me asking as though I owed him two lives.

I laughed, short and without warmth. He wanted only an occasion to call me an assassin and be done with the trouble. On his own ground, who would dare ask a second question.

I caught his wrist and shoved. He did not move. I slid my left hand into my sash, fingers brushing a folded paper packet. It held the poison powder I had brewed on the road. Most of it had gone into the two intruders, and what remained would barely cover my palm.

Not enough. But it was all I had, so I split the paper open with my fingernail and flung the powder into his face.

He turned his head aside, turned his face downwind, and the draft from the corridor carried off most of it. The last pinch caught him between the brows and drew one muffled cough. His grip faltered for an instant, then clamped down harder.

My fingers twitched a few times without my permission. The residue burned into the creases of my hand, and the strength was going out of me. My vision blurred at the edges.

I was going to die. I knew it, and I was not ready. Seraphina was still in their hands, and I was about to die on the stone floor of a keep I had entered six hours ago, before I could get her out.

I did not want to die. My heart was going too hard and too fast. I could count it. I hated that I could count it.

Think, I told myself, and nothing came. No angle left, no name worth saying, so I did the one thing I had never done. Inside my own head, where nobody could hear it, I prayed.

I did not pray to the Light. The Light had put me in this dress and carted me north to be married, and called it a blessing. I did not pray to the moon either, because the moon belonged to the thing standing over me with my blood on its hands. So I prayed to everything under it.

Gods, demons, the old names nobody said out loud anymore, anything that was listening and might be willing to trade. I beg you. I give you all of me. My hands. My name. My body, moving or still. All of it is yours, and with it I ask for nothing but the chance to live.

And hers. Seraphina. No. Not her. I hated myself the moment I said that. Even if it may already be too late, I still begged him. Take more of me. Take all of me twice over, three times, and leave her where she is.

Nothing. Nothing. I said it and the room did not change. He kept breathing, I kept bleeding, the cold kept coming up through the stone, and nobody anywhere in the world changed his mind about me.

I am going to die on this floor tonight. By morning he will tell the pack that the bride from the capital was killed by an assassin who came out of nowhere, and that will be the sum of my life.

I imagine my face must have been hideous just then. I had begun to hate all of it. By what right was this pain mine. By what.

Something came over me then, vast and ancient, from somewhere I had no name for. A voice followed it, low and final. "Do you consent?"

Yes. I answered without hesitating. I did not know what I had agreed to. I only knew it was the only thing that had answered me, and that I had to hold on to the chance.

Heat rose from my chest and went through me fast. The hand at my throat convulsed and released.

My legs gave way. I dropped onto the stone and gulped down air in ragged pulls, every breath tasting of blood and dust. But I was alive. I pressed my palms into the cold floor just to feel something solid. I could not hold back a laugh, just the one, very short, and then I stopped.

I looked up at him. He was pressing at his own neck, and when he raised his eyes they were hard, the disbelief already turned into something sharper. "What did you do to me?"

So he did not know either. I sat up straight, tucked the loose hair behind my ear, and raised my eyes to him. My shoulder ached and my throat was raw, but I kept my breathing even.

He had not let go out of pity. A wolf-kin did not carry human feelings like that. He had let go because something had threatened him. I did not understand where the threat came from, but that did not stop me from using it.

I was about to speak when a dagger came flying at me. It reached me in the space of a blink, and I could not move fast enough. The steel entered flesh below my shoulder blade and the pain arrived all at once, white and total. I bit down hard on my lip and pressed my free hand flat against the floor. I was not going to fall in front of him.

Then I heard him make a sharp, involuntary sound. Below his left shoulder blade the flesh tore open beneath unbroken armor, and the blood came through the underlinen, found the seams, and ran out along the lower edge of the plate. He staggered one step and looked at his hand. Then at me.

"Witch," he said. "What have you done to me?"

There it was. I turned the word over once. He thought I was a witch, and he thought the threat had come from me. With almost no strength left to fight, I could only follow where his mind had already gone, because this wolf was plainly wary of me, and men who were wary did stupid things, or they did careful things.

Either way, he did not immediately kill what he was afraid of. That was enough. That was all I needed right now. I put on the look of a woman with nothing left to fear.

"Yes," I said. "I'm a witch. So what? Are you going to keep going?"

Soren looked at me for a long moment. Then he bared his teeth, stained crimson. "Of course."

The cold came up my arms fast. The room was very quiet. Had he figured it out? I kept my face still and watched him come.

I had heard that wolf-kin could smell fear, could pull apart a lie from the sweat and the pulse, read whatever a person tried to hide right off their skin. I did not know if that was true. I did know that my back had gone slick with sweat.

He drew the knife from his belt. I did not wait for him to move first. I grabbed the nearest thing within reach, wrenched my elbow back hard, broke free of his grip, and put the last scrap of strength I had into getting clear of that blade.

He caught me by the wrist without any visible effort and held me still.

"Interesting," he said. "A witch who panics."

He said it flatly, almost bored, as though my struggling had been mildly worth noting and nothing more. He turned my forearm over in his grip and studied it.

"I thought witches were supposed to be calm under pressure." He glanced up at me. "Or was that only when the trick was actually working?"

I said nothing. Anything I said right now would only give him more to work with, and he already had enough. I held still and waited.

He drew the knife across my forearm, one long line from wrist to elbow, unhurried and deliberate. The sting was immediate, sharp enough that my breath caught before I controlled it. A breath later, the same cut opened across his own forearm, red and distinct, while mine had already begun to close.

He looked at it. Then he pressed the flat of the blade against his own forearm and drew a shallow line across the skin, slow and deliberate, watching my face the whole time. His blood welled up clean and dark. Mine did nothing. He had wanted to be sure the transfer ran only one way, and now he was.

He looked at me and did not speak.

The door burst open before either of us could move. His wolf-kin poured in with blades drawn, and behind them stumbled the two handmaidens who had followed me all the way from the capital.

The younger one threw herself in front of me, shaking so hard she could barely stand. The other stopped at the door, took in the wreckage, let her gaze rest for an instant on the marriage contract soaking in blood, and then came over and took my arm.

I let her help me up. My legs were unsteady and my shoulder had started hurting again, but I was alive, and I had a power I had not had an hour ago. I fixed my eyes on Soren.

He wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth and gave his order one word at a time. "Pass this down. Whoever lets the lady lose a single hair, I'll hang him from the wall."

I finally could not help laughing, because I understood that I had bought myself a little room to breathe. Perhaps I really was a witch, and the one who had answered me was the Mother of legend, and no other name would account for a power that kept such orderly books.