Chapter 4: Her Seat

Nessa's POV

After he left, I sat in that chair for a long time — long enough for the sky outside to go fully pale, long enough for the sounds of pots and pans to start rising from the kitchen below. Then I did three things.

The first: I folded the letter I had written into a small, tight square and slipped it into the spine of the Old Lunar manuscript. Maeve had "forgotten" that book in my room five years ago. No one else in Greystone Pack could read the script inside it. The safest hiding place, I had learned, was one that meant nothing to anyone who found it.

The second: I took out a sheet of paper and wrote a list. I make lists for everything. Someone once told me it was a sign of insecurity. I didn't argue. They weren't wrong. The list read: Money — one hundred and twenty silver, enough; divide into three caches, never keep it together. Route — the merchant caravan leaves from the north gate on the twelfth of every month, four and a half days to Silverhollow; the twelfth falls six days before the next full moon, which is exactly right. Identity — don't book passage under the Luna's name; use Maeve's name, Holt, her family has old accounts along that road. The last item gave me pause. When to tell him? I stared at those words for a long while, then crossed them out and wrote two words in their place: Don't.

That was right. Don't. The most useful thing I had learned in five years was this: the moment you say a thing out loud, it stops belonging to you. It becomes everyone's, and everyone will tell you what to do with it.

The third: I burned the list. I watched the flame take the edge of the paper and curl it slowly inward, and somewhere in the middle of that I almost laughed — I was actually doing this. Three days ago I had still been trying to figure out how to ask permission to walk up the hillside.

Three days. People change faster than they think.

Cassia moved in on the third day. Not into a guest room. Into the east courtyard — the best suite in the main house, with its own small gate and windows that caught the sun from morning until dusk. The stated reason was that she had just returned and it wasn't safe outside. One of the elders' representatives delivered this news to me with his eyes fixed on the floor. When he finished, he wouldn't look up. I told him that was fine. I genuinely said the words: that's fine. Because I had already discovered something — when you've decided to leave, a great many things that would once have ruined your entire day become weightless. They feel like news from a house that is no longer yours.

On the fourth morning I came down for breakfast.

The long table in Greystone Pack's main hall seated twenty. The custom was fixed: the Alpha at the head, the Luna in the first chair to his right — the one with a slightly taller back and a band of moon-carved relief running along both armrests. I had sat in that chair for five years. Every time I settled into it there was a half-second pause across the table, a small collective hesitation, before everyone resumed eating. I had long since stopped noticing it.

That morning I walked to the entrance of the dining hall and saw Cassia in that chair.

She was wearing white, her hair loose, peeling a soft-boiled egg with careful attention, as though nothing else in the room required any of hers.

My first thought was that she had simply made a mistake. My second thought arrived almost immediately after: everyone in Greystone Pack knew which chair that was. My third thought — the one that sent something cold dropping through my stomach — was the one that followed from the second: so she hadn't made a mistake at all.

Rune was at the head of the table reading documents. He hadn't looked up. A dozen pack members sat along the length of the table, and when they saw me standing in the doorway the silverware went quiet.

Cassia looked up then, saw me, and let out a small, bright sound of realization. "Oh — Luna." She smiled, warmth in every line of it. "Did I take the wrong seat? Nobody told me —" She began to rise, moving with the slow, deliberate care of someone who wanted every person at the table to see exactly what she was doing.

Rune spoke without raising his eyes from the page. "Sit wherever you like."

Four words. Not: you have the wrong seat. Not: Cassia, that belongs to Nessa.

Sit wherever you like.

I stood in the doorway, and whatever had been dropping through my stomach reached the bottom.

The interesting thing was that I wasn't in pain. I want to be precise about that — I genuinely was not in pain. What I felt was a kind of cold clarity, and beneath it something that came close, in spite of everything, to relief. Because there are things you suspect for five years and never let yourself confirm, because confirming them would mean they were real. Now this one had made itself real in front of twenty witnesses. At least I was done guessing.

I crossed to the wall, lifted a spare chair, and carried it to the far end of the table — the seat nearest the door, the one reserved for guests of the lowest seniority. I set it down and sat.

The table went quiet again. One of the younger women started to say something; the person beside her touched her arm.

Rune lifted his head at last. He looked at Cassia, then at me. I looked back and waited, though I couldn't have named what I was waiting for. Perhaps just one sentence. Nessa, come sit up here. Even just that.

He held my gaze for roughly two seconds. Then he looked back down at his documents.

I picked up my utensils.

I had said I wasn't in pain, and that was true. What I noticed instead was that my fingers were cold, and that I could taste nothing. There was congee, braised meat, pickled vegetables — I worked through all of it methodically and none of it registered. I told myself it was the limited senses that came with being wolfless. Then I told myself a small private joke: Nessa, you can't even tell when something tastes bad. You are the least difficult person in this entire pack to feed. Remarkably, this made me smile.

Cassia noticed.

"You seem cheerful this morning, Luna." She rested her chin in her hand and watched me from the far end of the table, all easy curiosity. "I've been wondering about something — may I ask?"

"Go ahead."

"Your wolf." She tilted her head slightly. "What's its name?"

Every breath at that table paused.

It was a trap. Anyone born into Greystone Pack would recognize it in an instant. A wolf's name is not chosen by its bearer — it comes from the wolf itself, delivered on the first night of awakening. To ask a wolfless person for their wolf's name was to ask someone who had never seen color to name their favorite shade. Answer nothing, and the silence speaks. Answer something, and you've admitted to mourning a loss you were never supposed to acknowledge.

I set down my bowl.

"Nyx," I said.

My throat tightened around the word as I spoke it. Five years. I hadn't said that name aloud in five years. I had barely let myself think it — because whenever I did, the hollow place in my chest would begin to ache in a way that was difficult to stop.

Cassia blinked, and then she smiled — warm, indulgent, the way someone smiles at a child who has said something endearing. "Oh," she said. "So even the Silent give their wolves little names. How sweet."

Someone down the table let out a short laugh and swallowed it quickly.

I turned the phrase over in my mind. Give their wolves names. As though I had invented it. As though it hadn't come to me on a winter night when I was sixteen, face-down in the snow, shaking through my first shift, and a voice in my skull had said, with considerable impatience: you're embarrassingly loud about this. I had asked who it was. It had said: Nyx.

I didn't explain any of that. There was no one at this table worth explaining it to.

Instead I glanced toward the head of the table. Rune wasn't looking at me. He had one elbow on the table, one hand pressed flat against his chest, his brow drawn in tight — the look of someone holding something back, or waiting for something to pass.

I assumed he found me tiresome. I offered a silent apology and turned back to my congee.

I finished every last bite. When I rose and walked out to the corridor, Bram was waiting beneath the covered walkway with his arms folded and his usual unhurried expression. "Luna," he said. "The Elder Council would like a word."