Chapter 6: The Second Set of Footprints in the Snow

Cassia's POV

I've always believed that if you're beautiful enough, most things don't require an explanation.

Take this morning, for instance. I sat down in that chair with twenty pairs of eyes on me, and not one person said a word. Rune said, "Sit wherever you like." Four words, and just like that, the matter was settled. That's exactly what I mean — no explanation necessary.

It's the fourth day since I returned, and I can't sleep. Not because I'm unhappy. I'm perfectly content. The bed in the east courtyard is softer than anything I've slept on in five years, and the window faces south, so the morning sun reaches all the way to the foot of the mattress. I simply cannot sleep.

I draped a robe over my shoulders and settled into the chair beside the brazier. The coals were burning just right — red at the core, blanketed in a layer of white ash. I reached under my pillow and turned the thing over in my hands.

A glove. Left hand. Lambskin, off-white, the style that was fashionable five years ago. The palm had gone completely black. Five years is what it takes for dried blood to reach that color — I didn't know that before. I used to think it would turn reddish-brown, like rust. It doesn't. It turns black, and it hardens, until it's stiff as a shell.

I dropped it into the brazier.

Lambskin curls when it burns, and shrinks, and makes a sound that sets your teeth on edge. I watched it the whole time.

I have no regrets. I want to be clear about that before anything else — I have no regrets.

When I reached the snow that night, Rune was already breathing. That detail matters. It matters a great deal. I am not someone who lets a person die; by the time I arrived, his chest was already rising and falling — shallow, barely there, but moving without question. Silverbane is the kind of poison that kills a person within the span of a single incense stick, and he had been lying there far longer than that. And yet he was still breathing.

What does that tell you?

It tells you he was lucky. It tells you the Moon Goddess was watching over him.

My mind was blank that night. What I remember is kneeling down, pressing my hand to his wound, and feeling the blood surge up against my palm all at once — hot, soaking through my glove until there was nothing dry left. And then I stayed there, kneeling in the snow, until someone came with torches. Until someone shouted, "Cassia! You saved the Alpha!"

I opened my mouth. The words were right there — It wasn't me. I swear they were already on my tongue.

But I looked up, and I saw them: two dozen faces, two dozen torches, and every single pair of eyes holding the same expression. Reverence. Pure, unguarded reverence.

I was nineteen years old. No one had ever looked at me that way. Beautiful — I had been beautiful my whole life, complimented for so long the word had lost all meaning. But no one had ever looked at me like that.

So the words didn't come out. I wept instead. I wept badly, the way you do when something has broken loose inside you, and I kept saying through the tears, he'll be fine, he's going to be fine. What I was thinking, in the part of my mind that stayed quiet, was this: I hadn't denied anything. I hadn't lied. I had simply not denied it.

I repeated that to myself for five years, until I believed it.

There was one thing I could never quite reason away, though. The second set of footprints.

I remember them clearly. When I knelt down, I saw them — not far from where Rune's head lay, coming from the direction of the treeline, shallow and uneven, the stride of someone who had been running. They were older than mine. My own prints had clean edges, sharp in the fresh snow; that other set had already caught a thin dusting over them, the edges blurred and soft.

I told myself it was a wolf. Later I considered that it might have been a patrol guard who had arrived first, taken one look, and run. It was a night of chaos — Ironfang had slipped through the border and put half the western slope to flame. No one was accounting for a set of footprints.

So I turned that page. Turned it, and kept it turned, for five years.

Until this morning.

She said one word. Nyx.

I was peeling an egg at the time. My thumbnail had already broken through the shell and pressed into the white beneath. Nyx. A wolfless wolf, gone five years, and she said it as though the name cost her nothing — no hesitation, no careful weight.

And then Rune pressed his hand to his chest.

I saw it clearly. He had been reading a document; in the space of a single breath, his hand trembled and came to rest against his chest, and the line of his brow pulled tight. I recognized what I was seeing, because he had told me himself.

Three nights ago, down by the river, he talked about what he had carried alone through these five years. Near the end, almost as an afterthought, he said: Cassia, every full moon I hear a voice. A woman humming. No words, just a melody, faint, like it's coming from the other side of a wall. He had consulted a healer. The healer had no answer. He said he had always believed it was an impression left over from that night.

Then he looked at me, and his expression finished the sentence for him. He was waiting for me to claim it.

So I claimed it. I said it was probably me. My face was warm when I said it, and my pulse was unsteady, and I genuinely believed, in that moment, that it was something between us — fated, a mark the Moon Goddess had pressed into the both of us.

Now I was sitting beside the brazier. The glove had burned down to a small black shape, still threading smoke into the air.

I stared at it, and a cold sweat moved across my skin.

That humming voice — what if it wasn't me?

What if the hands that had pressed against his chest that night weren't mine?

I was on my feet before the thought finished forming. The robe slipped from my shoulders and I left it where it fell. I crossed the room twice, then pulled the door open and called the night guard inside.

"This morning," I said, keeping my voice low. "When she left for the Elder Council — did you search her room?"

"Yes. Everything was put back exactly as you instructed."

"What did you find?"

"Nothing of value." He reached into his jacket and held something out to me. "Only this, under everything else in the bottom drawer of the vanity."

A letter. The wax seal was Silverhollow's.

I broke it open and read it through once without reaction. On the second reading, I laughed — a short, involuntary sound.

Silverhollow was offering her a position as an Apprentice Scribe. They wanted her there before the next full moon.

I held the letter above the brazier.

Burn it, and she can't leave. Burn it, and she stays in this house indefinitely, in the smallest chair at the table, a Luna that no one looks at twice. My hand stayed where it was for a long moment.

Then I lowered the letter and folded it closed.

What was I thinking? She wants to leave. She is choosing to leave on her own. This was a gift — she goes, and the Luna's place stands empty. She goes, and Rune has no reason to send anything to her room at the end of each month. She goes, and every uncomfortable question about who else was standing in that snow five years ago walks out the door with her. The farther she goes, the better. I would prefer she never come back.

I folded the letter back along its original creases until every line matched, then handed it to the guard. "Return it," I said. "Put it back in the same position. Leave the drawer open a crack."

He looked uncertain. "A crack?"

"Two fingers wide," I said. "No more."

After he left, I returned to the brazier and sat down. The coals were fading. I stayed there a while longer, and still I couldn't settle, because there was a thought moving in slow circles through my mind, the kind that makes the chest feel tight.

If she left, would the humming go with her? Would Rune notice?

I reached down and stirred the coals. There was still a thread of red underneath.

No, I told myself. It wouldn't happen. A wolfless woman leaving Greystone Pack — the most she could do was copy manuscripts for someone else's archive. What could she possibly uncover from there?

I pressed that thought down firmly, and I held it there.

Then I blew out the lamp.

Lying in the dark, I found myself thinking again about that second set of footprints. Coming from the treeline. The stride of someone running.

Who, on that particular night, would have been running out of the forest?