Chapter 2: The Door Was Locked From the Outside

Nessa's POV

The letter was short. So short that I read it four times before I trusted myself not to have missed something.

Silverhollow had accepted me as an Apprentice Scribe. First cohort, eleven people total. I was to arrive before the next full moon.

At the bottom, in small print: No questions of birth. No questions of Pack. No questions of Wolf Spirit.

No questions of Wolf Spirit.

I stared at those words for a long time, long enough that my eyes began to ache. It wasn't emotion—I don't move that easily. I was calculating. From Greystone to Silverhollow, nine days on foot, four and a half by merchant cart. I had a hundred and twenty silver coins, scraped together over five years by selling, one by one, the things Rune had given me.

It was enough.

Which meant I could leave whenever I chose. I always could have. It turned out I was never trapped here—I simply never thought to go.

I folded the letter and pushed it to the back of the bottom drawer.

Because tonight was the full moon. Tonight I had to go down to the cellar.

By the time Maeve knocked, the sky had gone completely dark. She stood in the doorway with a lantern in hand and said only, "It's time, child." I took my cloak without a word. I had done this sixty times. Eyes closed, the sequence came automatically: cloak, water flask, a book. The cellar was cold and there was nothing else to do down there.

We crossed the courtyard on the way down. The sound of laughter carried from somewhere farther out—young wolves already gathering, someone whistling, others jostling each other's shoulders. Something pulsed in the air, tight and low, like a drumhead stretched to the edge of breaking.

I knew what that was. They were about to run.

I had never once seen the Greystone pack run. Not in five years. I had only ever seen the morning after—claw prints layered over claw prints, trailing from the hillside down to the river. I used to count them. One year I reached three hundred and seventy-nine.

"Maeve," I said.

"Yes?"

"This year, could I—"

I stopped. Because I remembered: there was no point asking now. I had meant to ask Rune in the courtyard, but Rune was at the center of the courtyard with a girl in white standing beside him, someone who had just returned, and the whole Pack had gathered around them both. Was I supposed to push through that crowd and say I want to stand on the hill for a moment?

The image assembled itself in my mind without permission: every head turning, the yard going quiet, and then Rune looking at me with that particular gentleness and saying, Nessa, go rest. And then everyone continuing on.

I pressed the thought flat.

"Nothing," I said. "Let's go."

Maeve didn't ask. She only walked a little slower than usual, keeping the lantern angled so I could see the steps.

There were thirty-three steps in the cellar staircase. I had counted them the first time I came down, and I had counted them every time since—not for any reason, only to give my hands something to do. One, two, three. At the seventeenth step there was a broken corner you had to step wide around. At the twenty-ninth, someone had scratched a lopsided paw print into the wall stone, the lines uneven and slightly too large, the work of a child who had probably never been asked why.

Thirty-three. The bottom.

Maeve hung the lantern on its nail, smoothed out the blanket, and then drew a cloth bundle from inside her coat and pressed it into my hands. "Still warm," she said. "Eat while it is." I thanked her. She stood in the doorway a moment longer, the way a person stands when they are deciding whether to say a thing, and then she decided against it. "Stay put," she said, and went up.

The door closed.

I sat down and opened the bundle. Two flatbreads, both warm. I bit into one.

And then I heard it.

A small sound. Muffled. From the other side of the door, up at the top of the stairs. One sound, and then nothing.

I stopped chewing.

I knew that sound. Five years in this house had given me a precise knowledge of its every door, every hinge, every particular complaint. What I had just heard was the door bar dropping into its bracket. From the outside.

I sat there with bread still in my mouth.

Then I did something I had never done in five years: I got up, climbed all thirty-three steps, and pushed the door.

It didn't move. I pushed again, pressing my palm flat against the wood. There was no give at all—not the stuck resistance of a swollen frame, but the solid, absolute stillness of something fastened shut. There was not even a thread of movement between the door and its frame.

I stood there with my hand still against the wood.

Sixty full moons. Sixty times I had come down without once thinking to try the door. Because he had told me it was to protect me, and I had believed him. Because what right did a person who couldn't even keep her own wolf have to question someone else's intentions?

My palm had gone damp. I walked back down slowly, counting again without meaning to, and sat down on the twenty-ninth step, beside the crooked scratched paw print in the wall.

The strange thing was that I didn't cry. I had expected to. I have always cried easily—over small things, over things that should not have mattered. The year he left a bowl of soup I had made untouched, I cried in the kitchen. The birthday he forgot, I cried into my bedding for half a night. But now, with my hand still carrying the warmth of the door and sixty full moons settling their weight over me all at once, I felt nothing that wanted to be tears.

Only cold. The kind that comes from inside the bones outward.

Near the top of the cellar wall there was a small air vent, set into the stone just below the ceiling—smaller than my head, and positioned to face the back slope. I had never once looked out of it. I rolled Maeve's blanket into a cylinder and set it on top of a barrel, stacked two crates on top of that, and climbed. The whole arrangement shuddered when I reached the top and I nearly went over sideways.

Wonderful. Truly a luminous moment—the Luna of Greystone, on a full moon night, balancing on wine barrels in a cellar.

I gripped the window ledge.

Then I went still.

The back slope was covered in wolves.

I had read descriptions of the Moon Run. Old Lunar devoted an entire volume to it, and I had copied out passages a dozen times. None of those passages were right. None of them had mentioned the silence. I had expected noise—howling, the percussion of hundreds of paws, a sound large enough to feel in the chest. Instead, several hundred wolves moved across the slope in near-complete quiet, flowing downhill like a shadow blown by wind, like something that had borrowed the shape of motion without needing to announce itself.

I held the ledge and could not speak, even to myself.

The wolf at the front was black. Larger than any of the others by a full measure, the muscles across his shoulders rolling with each stride. He ran to the crest of the slope and paused there, lifting his head.

That was Rune. I knew it without question—though I had no wolf, though I had only ever seen his shifted form in drawings, I knew him.

Then another wolf came up from behind and drew even with him, stopping at his shoulder.

White. Blindingly white in the moonlight.

They stood together at the crest—one black, one white, shoulder to shoulder.

My fingers were going numb against the stone.

Below the air vent, not far off, two voices drifted in on the wind. Two men crouched in the dark, smoking, their conversation shaped by the evening's easy expansiveness.

One of the voices was Bram's. I recognized his particular laugh.

"...good that she's back, it's good," the other man was saying. "These years haven't been easy on Rune—on the Alpha, I mean."

"Tell me about it," Bram said, and exhaled. "What was he even getting out of it? Brought back a wolfless girl, kept her around for five years, never even held a Claiming—and how could he? The moment he opens the Mind Link, every wolf in the Pack is in it, and there she is, the one person who can't hear a word. You want to do that in front of everyone?"

"That's not really—"

"You ever catch her scent?" The amusement in Bram's voice had sharpened into something else. "Nothing there. No scent at all. You know what else has no scent?"

Silence from the other man.

"Stone," Bram said. "Dead things. That's why the Alpha has that stuff sent down for her every month—rub enough of it on, at least she smells like something living. Generous, really. He's genuinely kind."

A coal died against the ground. Both men stood and moved away.

I climbed down from the barrel. My legs buckled when my feet hit the floor and I went down on both knees, and I stayed there on the stone for a while, the cold of it working steadily through my skin.

My thoughts were very loud. But the thing that surfaced through the noise was not Bram's word—dead things—though I could feel exactly where it had landed. What rose instead was a night from five years ago.

I remembered the moon, and the snow, and Rune lying in it with his face the color of paper, his lips gone gray-blue. Silverbane moved inward through a wound; once it reached the heart, nothing would stop it. I remembered pressing both hands to his chest. I remembered the passage from Old Lunar that Maeve had once taught me, and I remembered what it felt like at the last syllable—something torn loose from inside my chest by a grip I couldn't resist.

I still remember that pain.

Spirit-Giving. The texts were clear: what you render out, you do not recover.

I remembered looking up at the sky one last time.

After that, nothing. When I woke, it was three days later, and everyone told me the same thing.

It was Cassia who had saved him.

I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came. After Spirit-Giving, the voice goes—sometimes for weeks. By the time I could form words again, half a month had passed, and by then the entire Pack had already shaped that night into a single coherent story, repeated hundreds of times until it had hardened into something more solid than memory.

A wolfless girl, stepping forward to say actually, it was me?

No one would have believed it. I wasn't sure I believed it myself anymore.

So I said nothing. I told myself it was enough that he had lived, that the outcome mattered more than the credit. I told myself that for five years.

When dawn came, the door opened.

A young Pack member came down to unlock it and startled when he found me sitting on the twenty-ninth step. "L—Luna?" His voice pitched upward. "Why are you sitting there?"

"It's nothing," I said, standing and brushing off my skirt. "Thank you for coming."

I climbed the stairs one by one. Thirty-three.

Outside, the morning light was still thin and gray. The grass was trampled flat with claw prints layered over claw prints, trailing from the slope all the way to the riverbank. I did not stop to count them.

I went straight to my room and pulled the entire drawer free from the cabinet. Then, one by one, I carried all sixty tins of Cedar Ash to Rune's study and arranged them on his desk in neat rows—ten across, six deep. The first year on the far left. The fifth year on the far right. Perfectly aligned.

My hand was steady when I set down the last tin. I surprised myself—I had expected it to shake.

When the arrangement was complete, I sat down and took out paper and pen. I had thought about the reply to Silverhollow for a long time, but in the end I wrote only two lines.

The first was my name. My full name: Nessa Vale.

The second was four characters in Old Lunar—something I had learned while copying the Blood Oath volume. The meaning was simple: I am coming.

I set the pen down.

Behind me, the door opened.

"Nessa?"

Rune's voice.