Chapter 9: The Second Fire

Cordelia walked out of the hall with her father.

I stood in the middle of the floor with her word on my skin like frost.

Fairholt.

Nobody had said that name out loud in eighteen years.

Not even Mags.

Mags said "kid" and "Your Highness" and "little moon."

The name itself, she'd kept locked in her mouth, the way I'd kept my wolf locked in wolfsbane.

And Cordelia Mossgrave had just used it.

"What did she say to you?" Aldric asked.

He was beside me.

I hadn't heard him come down.

"Goodbye," I said.

He didn't believe me.

But he let it go, and I took the children's hands and walked them up to bed, because they were mine and nobody stopped me.

That night, back at the burned hall, I told Mags.

She sat on the hearthstone and stared into the fire a long time.

"She knows," Mags said. "Then her father knows. Then the second claim isn't a mistake."

"What does that mean?"

"It means they're not looking for you, kid. They found you. Now they need you dead before the Hunter's Moon."

The blacksmith and the twins had cut timber all day.

There was a new roof over the old kitchen, raw yellow pine on the black stone walls.

The first roof on Silver Moon ground in eighteen years.

The cook had cried when they set the last beam.

The next night, it burned.

I woke at two in the morning to smoke and the old woman with the bad hip screaming.

The new pine was going up.

Shapes moved at the edge of the meadow.

Wolves, gray, a dozen at least.

Men behind them with torches.

"Out!" Mags roared. "Everybody out!"

I shifted before my feet hit the ground.

The blacksmith had his iron bar and was standing in the doorway, swinging it at anything that came near.

The twins had the old woman between them, carrying her by the arms.

A gray wolf went for them.

I hit it from the side and we rolled in the ash.

It was bigger than me.

It was trained.

I wasn't.

It got its teeth in my shoulder and shook me, and the world went white.

Keep reading free with an account. Start His Pups Called Me Mama. He Called Me Nobody. from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.