Out of the Shadow at Last novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Cloak
At the Moon Watcher ceremony Linnet watches her mother drape her cloak on Posy, hands over the Seal that will never wake for her sister, and quits; the Alpha of Northgate names her his champion as the first ward lamp goes out.
Four hundred wolves stood in the Moon Tower courtyard and watched my mother put my cloak on my sister.
I stood at the back by the well, in my work apron, with chalk still on my fingers.
Nobody had asked me to stand anywhere else.
The cloak was dark blue wool lined with silver thread, and the weavers had worked on it for a year.
Last spring I had watched them stitch my name inside the collar.
Three days ago Mother had unpicked it and sewn Posy's name over the top.
A line of my silver thread still showed at the edge, where the new stitches did not quite cover it.
Mother saw me looking.
She smoothed the collar flat with her thumb and did not look away.
"Posy Rooke," Father said from the dais, "Moon Watcher of the Rooke Pack."
The applause was thin and polite.
Posy turned toward the crowd, smiling, with her hands shaking where she thought nobody could see.
For seven years I had kept the Moon Tower wards up every night.
No vampire had crossed our border since I was seventeen.
Every wolf in that courtyard slept soundly because of me, and not one of them knew my name was on the work.
Mother had told me the night before that nothing would change.
"You'll keep doing the wards, darling," she had said, and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. "Posy only wears the cloak. It's an honour for the whole family."
She had sounded so kind that I had almost thanked her.
She was always kind on one night of the year.
Every year on the night before Hollow Night, she brought me a cup of chamomile and sent me to bed early.
I always slept through the whole of Hollow Night and woke with a sore fingertip.
I always blamed my rune pen.
My brother Anders stepped down from the dais and came across the stones toward me.
He stopped an arm's length away and held out his hand.
"The Moon Seal, Linnet."
I did not move.
The Seal hung on a cord under my apron, where it had hung for seven years.
It was a silver disc the size of my palm, and it woke for one person only, the barrier mage who wrote the rune in her own blood.
"The Seal answers to the barrier mage," I said. "Posy can't read the simplest rune on the border wall."
Anders glanced back at the dais.
"Father says the pack voted," he said, very low. "Give it over and we'll talk after."
"You voted three days ago," I said. "Nobody asked who does the work."
Father's voice carried across the whole courtyard. "Linnet. Bring the Seal to your sister."
"Linnet," Posy whispered from the dais, and I heard the crack in it. "Please. Just this once. You can do the rest from the shadows, the way you always do."
That was the sentence that did it.
Not Mother's thumb on the collar, or Father's hand, or the thin applause.
My sister, who could not tell one rune from another, asked me to stay in the shadows because it was easier for her.
I walked up the steps to the dais with all four hundred of them watching.
I lifted the cord over my head and put the Seal in Posy's open palm.
"Wake it," I said.
She stared at it.
She pressed her thumb to the silver and whispered the words Mother had made her learn.
The Seal stayed grey and cold.
A murmur ran through the courtyard, and then a hush, and then a murmur again.
"Try again," Father said.
Posy tried again.
Her face went white, and then red, and the Seal did nothing at all.
"It's stuck," Mother said brightly to the crowd. "The cold weather. Linnet, dear, give it a little push."
I looked at her for a long moment.
"No," I said.
I took off the silver pack ring that marked me as a Rooke and set it on the dais at Father's feet.
"I'm done," I said.
"You are an omega," Father said, not loudly, and everyone heard it. "Work is what you are for. Pick that ring up."
"No."
"Then walk through that gate and you are no daughter of mine."
I turned and went down the steps.
The crowd opened to let me through.
At the courtyard gate stood a man in a long grey northern coat, with snow still melting on his shoulders and a pale scar through one eyebrow.
I had never met him, but every wolf in the valley knew the grey coat.
It belonged to Ivar Halvorsen, Alpha of Northgate.
He had been watching all of it.
"Linnet Rooke," he said, and nobody had told him my name. "The Moon Fair opens at Northgate in four days. Each Alpha names one champion, and I need a barrier mage who can actually read a rune."
I stopped in front of him.
"I'm an omega," I said. "Omegas don't stand at the Fair."
"Then they'll have to learn to," Ivar said. "Come north. I'll name you."
Behind me, up on the Moon Tower, the first ward lamp flickered and went dark.
I walked through the gate without looking back.
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