The Thirteenth Moon novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Moonrise

Before three hundred wolves Brynn refuses the word and the Council's envoy sets a hearing for the next moon; a man she has not seen in a year steps out of the trees.

By the time the pack arrived, I had washed the flour off my hands and rolled my sleeves down over my bare arm.

They came up the ridge in family groups, carrying folding chairs and covered dishes.

Each of them found a white stone in the grass and stood on it.

Nobody sits at a moonrise, so the chairs were for the old ones.

I stood at the foot of the moonstone dais where a promised Luna waits.

Davin stood beside me, and Sable stood three steps behind him with her hands folded over her stomach.

Nobody had told the pack yet, but they were wolves.

I could feel three hundred noses working out what had changed.

The Council's envoy had come in at dusk, a grey-haired woman in a grey coat, to witness the vow.

She took the seat beside the witness-fire and opened a notebook on her knee.

Davin climbed the dais alone.

"Family," he said. "Thank you for coming."

His voice was warm and a little hoarse, and it made people lean in.

He had been doing that since he was nine.

"Thirteen moons ago, my father and the elders promised me a Luna," he said. "Brynn Buchanan has worked beside you every day since."

A murmur ran through the clearing, friendly, and it hurt more than anything else he could have said.

"But a Luna has to answer the moon," Davin said. "Brynn has not."

He paused to let that sink in.

"In thirteen moons she has not once come to me or let me close. I have been patient, and tonight I can't be patient and honest at the same time."

A woman near the front said, "What does that mean?"

"It means I have unmade the vine," Davin said. "I did it this afternoon, privately, out of respect."

He turned his head and looked down at me, kind and sorry, a man hoping to be thanked.

"All that's left is for Brynn to say the word, and she can keep her place with us."

Every face in the clearing turned my way.

I knew this crowd by name.

I had fed their children and counted their winter flour and carried a sick man's soup up the east trail in the snow.

Not one of them knew what had happened at the table at noon.

Every one of them was waiting for me to be gracious.

Sable had begun to cry quietly, the way she did at funerals, and a few people looked at her and then at me.

I climbed the first step of the dais and faced the pack.

"Thirteen moons," I said. "That part is true."

I let my voice carry to the back stones.

"The rest is a lie, and I'll tell you what he left out."

Davin's face went still.

"He asked me to say 'released' for him. But he took the vine off my arm at lunch, in front of two elders, before I said a word."

I waited one beat.

"Then he told me Sable is carrying his child."

A sound went through the pack that was not a murmur.

"I won't say the word," I said. "If he wants out of his oath, he can stand here and ask the Council."

The envoy turned a page in her notebook.

"Miss Buchanan," she said, in a dry level voice. "Do I understand you to refuse the release?"

"Yes."

"Alpha Rawlings. Did you unmake the vine without her word?"

Davin took a long time to answer.

"I did."

"Then the vow is not spoken and the release is not given." She wrote it down.

"That is a matter for the Council, and I will set it for the fourteenth moon."

She looked at me over her glasses.

"Until then Miss Buchanan is the promised Luna of this pack, and her house, her work and her standing are not to be touched."

"That's a month," Davin said.

"It is exactly a month," said the envoy, and closed her notebook.

The moon came up over the eastern ridge, full and enormous, and a hundred witness-fires lit one after another along the stones.

My wrist went warm.

I held my arm against my side.

The small crescent there warmed through my sleeve and began to glow, faintly, silver, as the moon cleared the trees.

At the foot of the dais, Edda was looking straight at it.

Then someone at the edge of the clearing took a step out of the dark.

I did not need the firelight to know who he was.

He had been gone for thirteen moons.

He walked out of the treeline in a leather jacket with his hands open at his sides.

Every wolf on the ridge turned to look.

Torin Ashe stopped at the edge of the white stones.

He looked at me, and not at Davin or the Council or the pack.

"Brynn," he said. "Show me your wrist."

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