Chapter 5 Chapter 5: The Ninth Daughter

My father had been dead for five years, yet his handwriting still knew how to command me. "Keep reading."

The words seemed to whisper from the page even though neither Asterion nor Faolan spoke.

I lowered myself into the chair beside the table because my legs no longer trusted me. The diary lay open beneath my hands, its leather cracked where Father's fingers had bent it night after night.

His scent had vanished from it.

I wished his voice had vanished just as completely.

The first entry beneath my deity name had been written twenty-seven years ago.

'Lunaria came to me beneath a silver eclipse. She named our daughter Pandora so the child might walk among mortals. Before dawn, she whispered another name over her cradle. It was Polycaste, the Ninth Daughter, born with dominion over war.'

I frowned. "He already told me this."

Not everything. Father had revealed that Lunaria was the name of the Moon Goddess, and my mother, and that he was one of the Moon Goddess's mates. He had told me I was neither wholly wolf nor wholly divine.

Half-breed.

But he had never called me the ninth.

He had spoken of Lunaria as though She had descended from the moon for him alone, blessed him with one perfect daughter, and disappeared.

"Did you know you had eight older sisters?" Faolan asked.

"No."

The answer tasted like another lie Father had forced me to swallow.

Asterion remained across the table. "Continue."

I looked up sharply. Once, he would never have dared use that tone with me. Now the order sat between us with the quiet weight of an Alpha's command.

His gaze did not waver.

I turned the page.

'The Scarlet Raven may know Pandora carries the blood of the Moon Goddess. They may call her the Goddess of War because I have permitted it. They will never know the name Lunaria whispered over her cradle. Polycaste belongs to the celestial realm. Pandora belongs to me.'

Disgust tightened my stomach. "That is why the Raven never connected the arena fighter to me," I said.

"They were searching for Pandora Seitz," Faolan replied. "A dead Alpha. Not a nameless fighter calling herself Polycaste."

"But you knew."

Asterion touched the edge of the diary. "A rumor reached Crescent Ice about an undefeated woman using a name written only in Raiden's private records. We knew before the messenger finished speaking."

That name had been my safest hiding place. Now, Father had turned it into a trail leading directly to me.

The next pages recorded my childhood like a military campaign. My first shift. The morning I summoned moonfire. The winter I broke a training master's arm because he refused to strike me with his full strength.

Father had described that moment with pride. 

Then, I found a passage copied in ink darker than the rest. The letters curved differently, graceful and ancient. They were not Father's words.

'When Lunaria's ninth daughter walks beneath a crimson moon, war shall take a mortal name.

The wolf who sired her shall place two crownless sons at her feet—one born of winter, the other born of flame.'

My eyes rose to Asterion. Winter lived in his blue gaze.

Faolan had gone utterly still beside him.

I forced myself to continue.

'She shall bind them in blood, yet deny their claim.

Pandora shall perish beneath a burning sky, and from her ashes Polycaste shall rise.

Alone, the Ninth Daughter shall become the blade that empties nine thrones.

Between the wolves she once enslaved, she shall become the shield that ends the Raven's war.'

Silence swallowed the room. My marks throbbed beneath the bandages at my neck.

Two futures had been placed before me before I learned to walk. In one, I stood alone upon the ruins of four kingdoms. In the other, Asterion and Faolan stood beside me.

Father had spent my entire life teaching me which future deserved to survive. His notes crowded the margin around the final lines.

'A blade conquers. A shield merely receives the blows meant for weaker creatures. Lunaria would soften our daughter by tying her fate to two ruined wolves, but I will not allow Polycaste to waste her divinity protecting what she was born to rule.'

Faolan leaned over my shoulder to read it. Heat flared through his bond, but his voice remained level. "He was afraid of that line."

"Father feared nothing."

Asterion's expression turned bitter. "He feared anything he could not own. Including you."

I wanted to reject the words. Loyalty to Father rose from somewhere old and diseased inside me, demanding that I defend the man who had made me strong.

Then, I looked at the sentence again.

'Our daughter.'

'My divinity.'

'What she was born to rule.'

Not once had he written what I might choose.

"He knew," I whispered.

"Before he brought us to Crescent Ice," Asterion said.

My fingers tightened around the page. "He found two orphaned wolves because the prophecy described you."

Faolan's expression hardened. "No, little tyrant. Read the next entry."

I did not want to. But the bond carried none of his usual warmth. Beneath his anger waited an old grief so deep I could barely breathe around it.

I turned the page.

'The northern pack has fallen. Asterion survived exactly as ordered. The boy possesses the discipline winter demands.'

My gaze blurred. Below it, another entry waited.

'The western wolves resisted longer than expected. Their Alpha and Luna are dead. Faolan was recovered from the ruins before the flames reached him. He has the insolence of fire. Pandora will either tame it or learn to burn beside it.'

The diary slipped from my fingers. "He destroyed your packs."

Neither man answered.

They did not need to.

I remembered two thin boys standing inside Father's throne room. Asterion had stared at the floor while dried blood darkened his borrowed clothing. Faolan had looked directly at me with hatred too large for his small face.

Father had rested his hand upon my shoulder. "A gift for my princess."

I had been too spoiled to ask where gifts like them came from.

The memory refused to stop there. Faolan had bitten the first guard who tried to force him to kneel. Asterion had dropped beside him without being ordered, placing his own body between Faolan and the guard's raised whip.

I had laughed. Not because their suffering amused me, I told myself now, but because Father had been watching and I had already learned that his approval came most easily when I showed no mercy.

The excuse withered before it finished forming.

I had still laughed.

Across the table, Faolan's eyes narrowed. The completed bond had carried enough of the memory for him to recognize it. "You remember," he said.

"Every moment."

"Good." His voice was quiet rather than cruel. "So do we."

"I didn't know," I said.

Faolan's laugh broke without humor. "Neither did we. Not until we opened that book."

"He murdered your families and handed you to me."

"And you made certain we understood what we had become," Asterion said.

The words struck cleanly because they were true. "He taught me—"

"He taught you cruelty," Asterion interrupted. "You still chose to use it."

I looked at him.

His face remained controlled, but the bond exposed everything beneath it: the collar around his throat, my fingers gripping his chin, the mark I had forced into his flesh because I wanted proof that he belonged to me.

"Then, why spend five years searching for me?"

Asterion's coldness fractured. "Because he taught us devotion," he said. "We chose you."

My wolf pressed against my ribs. Faolan looked away first.

I reached for the diary again. The next entry described the mating ritual with enough detail to make my skin crawl.

'Pandora has marked them both. She refused their answering claims, as I taught her. Affection has made her possessive, but possession can still be sharpened into power. She must never regard them as her equals.'

I heard Father's voice from years ago. "A ruler may brand what she owns, but she must never allow what kneels beneath her to claim her in return."

All this time, I had believed the cruelty belonged to me alone. Discovering its source did not make my hands feel cleaner.

"The order," I said. "Show me where he wrote about the order."

Asterion turned several pages until another brown stain appeared along the binding.

'The Raven collects blood from every commander who swears its military oath. The boys offered theirs willingly, believing the ritual proved their loyalty to Pandora.'

My stomach twisted as I remembered the silver bowls.

'Their preserved blood responds to her marks, but it cannot form a living seal without divinity. Mine will provide what is missing.'

"His blood," I murmured.

"Carried the same divine trace as yours through his mate bond with the Moon Goddess," Asterion said. "Enough to awaken ours when you touched the order."

I read the following line.

'Once I am dead, the sealed command will be placed among the Raven's reports. Pandora will believe her mates intend to murder her and seize Crescent Ice. Pride will never allow her to confront them. Love will prevent her from killing them. She will choose the only path remaining.'

My fingernails cut into my palms. "My death."

"Your performance of it," Faolan corrected. "Raiden knew you would never surrender the pack to Scarlet Raven. He knew you would place Crescent Ice in our hands before disappearing."

I had believed faking my death was the first decision I had ever made without Father standing over me. Even that choice had belonged to him.

"He wanted me alone," I said.

Asterion nodded. "He believed the blade in the prophecy would conquer enough kingdoms to make his name immortal."

"And the shield?"

"He called it Lunaria's weakness."

Of course he had.

Father had never understood any power that did not require someone else to kneel.

I closed the diary. "You found this three months after the war."

"After your funeral," Faolan said. "After Asterion tore apart half the old study because he refused to believe you were gone."

"Why didn't you tell me in the arena?"

His amber eyes flashed. "You broke a guard's hand and ran before the hammer finished echoing. When exactly would you have preferred the conversation?"

"Before you poisoned me."

"You would have vanished."

"You still had no right."

"We know," Asterion said.

The admission did not repair anything, but it stopped my anger from finding an easy target. A loose sheet shifted beneath the diary's back cover.

I pulled it free. Another portion of the prophecy had been copied there.

'When the two crownless wolves return the Ninth Daughter's bond, the Firstborn shall hear its awakening and seek the sister lost to war.'

My hands turned cold. I touched the two marks burning on opposite sides of my neck. "Return the bond," I said. "It means when both of you mark me."

Asterion's attention dropped to my throat. For the first time since I awakened, uncertainty crossed his face.

Faolan took the loose page from me and read the verse again. "Raiden underlined it."

"He kept you two from marking me because he didn't want the Firstborn to find me."

"Or interfere with the conqueror he intended to create," Asterion added.

A pressure moved through the bonds. It was not from either man, but from somewhere far beyond the inn. It was faint, almost lost beneath the pain, yet it carried the unmistakable pull of moonlight.

Someone had felt us.

Someone was answering.

"Who is the Firstborn?" I asked.

Asterion and Faolan exchanged a look.

"Raiden never recorded her mortal identity," Asterion said.

"But he wrote the name the Moon Goddess gave her," Faolan added. He turned the loose page over.

One word had been written on the other side.

Ragriel.