Silver Moon Nanny novel · Chapter 1 of 3
Chapter 1: The Nanny They Threw Out
Three weeks before the Hunter's Moon, Elspeth walks back onto the Langtry pack lands to answer the royal claim in the hall, and Cordelia has the gate closed in her face in front of the pack.
The gate to the Langtry pack lands is new since I left.
Iron, black, twice my height, with a silver wolf worked into the crossbar.
Somebody spent real money on it after the night they threw me out.
I stand in the road with my duffel at my feet and look up at it.
Twenty-one days to the Hunter's Moon.
My mother's moonstone sits in my coat pocket, warm as a live coal.
The road behind me runs down through the aspens to the highway.
The road ahead runs up to the hall where I was nanny for five years.
Where I fed Arlo his eggs every morning and braided Clover's hair.
Where I swallowed wolfsbane with my tea so no one would know what I was.
I don't swallow it anymore.
My wolf has been awake for three weeks and she is not going back to sleep.
Two guards come out of the gatehouse.
I know both of them. The tall one played cards with me in the kitchen on slow nights.
He looks at me like he's never seen me before.
"State your business."
"Matters of the pack. I'm here to answer the claim."
"The claim's already answered," he says.
The short one spits in the gravel.
I hear the crowd before I see it.
Forty wolves, maybe more, lined up on the slope behind the gate.
They came down from the hall to watch.
Somebody in the back is holding a phone up.
Word went out that the nanny was walking back.
I pick up my duffel.
"The Hunter's Moon is in twenty-one days," I say. "Royal claims get heard before it rises. That's law, not favor."
"That's old law," the short guard says.
"It's still law."
A woman's voice comes from the other side of the iron.
"Let her look at it, at least."
The crowd parts.
Cordelia Mossgrave walks down the slope in a cream coat, and her hair is pinned up like she's going somewhere better than a gate.
She stops two feet from the bars.
She looks at my duffel. Then at my boots. Then at my face.
Her smile is small and pleasant, the way you'd smile at a dog behind a fence.
"Elspeth. You look thin."
"I'm here to answer the claim."
"You walked."
"I don't have a car."
"I know," she says. "That's the part I like."
The crowd laughs.
I keep my voice flat.
"Open the gate."
"Tell me why I would."
"Because the claim on the Silver Moon seat has to be answered by the heir or the seat goes dark. You sponsored a rival. I'm the heir. I answer it in the hall, in front of the elders, before the moon rises."
Cordelia folds her arms.
"That's a lovely speech. Did Mags write it for you?"
"Mags isn't here."
"No. She isn't." Cordelia glances up the hill. "She's not welcome either, by the way. In case she was planning a visit."
A man near the front of the crowd steps closer to the bars.
"Ma'am, the elders already heard the claim. They ruled."
"Who ruled?"
"The Alpha ruled. And the elders agreed."
"On what grounds?"
He doesn't answer.
Cordelia answers for him.
"On the grounds that the seat belongs to a claimant who lives on the land, keeps its customs, and doesn't run off in the middle of the night leaving two children behind."
The crowd goes quiet in a way that means they agree.
That's the story they tell here.
I ran off.
Not: I pulled Clover out of a lake laced with silver and burned my hands to the bone doing it.
Not: Aldric signed the exile order at his Luna's table while I was still bleeding.
I ran off.
"I didn't run," I say.
"Everyone saw you leave."
"Everyone saw me carried."
"Semantics," Cordelia says.
I take the moonstone out of my pocket.
I don't hold it up. I just let it sit in my palm where the crowd can see it.
The gray stone catches the afternoon light and throws a thin silver line across the iron gate.
The short guard steps back.
Somebody in the crowd says something I don't catch.
Cordelia doesn't look at the stone.
That's the thing about Cordelia. She never looks at the thing that could hurt her.
"Put that away," she says.
"This is my mother's."
"It's a rock."
"It lit for me in front of four witnesses in Butte last Tuesday."
"Then go show it to Butte."
The tall guard puts his hand on the crossbar.
"Ma'am, I'm going to need you to step back from the gate."
I don't step back.
"I want the gate opened. I want the elders called. I want the claim read out loud in the hall."
"You want a lot."
"I want what the law gives me."
Cordelia tilts her head.
"You know what I think?" she says. "I think you came back because you ran out of money."
"I came back because my mother's line is going dark in twenty-one days."
"I think you came back because you miss the children."
The crowd shifts.
That one lands.
Because it's true, and because she said it out loud where everyone could hear it, and now that's the reason I'm standing here, in their minds, forever.
A woman near the front says, "She does look like she's been crying."
"I'm not crying."
"Your eyes are red."
"It's the wind."
Cordelia is still smiling.
"Elspeth, sweetheart. Let me save you the walk."
She steps up to the bars, close enough that I can smell her perfume through the iron.
"You had five years in that house. You had those children in your hands every single day. And you never once told the Alpha what you were."
"I couldn't."
"No. You couldn't. Because the second he found out, he'd have known you were hiding in his kitchen under a false name with a royal stone in your pocket."
"I wasn't hiding under a false name."
"You were hiding the rest."
I don't have an answer for that.
Because she's right, and because everyone at this gate knows she's right, and because the truth of it doesn't matter to them.
"You put that family at risk every day for five years," Cordelia says. "And when it came apart, you walked away and let them think it was their fault."
"I was exiled."
"You were told to go. There's a difference, and you know it. You could have fought it. You could have stood in that hall and said what you were. You didn't. You got in the truck."
The crowd murmurs.
She's taken the one true thing about me and turned it into the hinge of the whole story.
"Open the gate," I say again.
"No."
"I'll wait."
"You'll wait in the road."
"Then I'll wait in the road."
Cordelia turns around and raises her voice to the slope.
"Everybody hear that? She'll wait in the road."
The crowd laughs.
She starts back up the hill.
Then she stops.
She doesn't turn around. She says it to the slope, loud and easy, so the whole pack hears it and so the phone in the back catches every word.
"The nanny has no claim here."
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend