Chapter 5

Selene's POV

I thought she'd pulled a few stems. Maybe trampled something. I was not prepared for what I found.

The herb garden was gone. All of it — every raised bed, every carefully staked vine, every plant I had spent years sourcing and cultivating and coaxing through Ironwood's brutal winters. The Nightshade Roses were black sticks. The moonveil grass had burned down to the roots. The frostweave vines and darkscent ferns were ash. The air was thick with the smell of scorched magic, that particular bitterness that comes when a living compound burns before it's ready, all that stored potential going up for nothing.

Vira was crouching at the edge of the ruin, crying, her small shoulders shaking. She said she'd only wanted to smoke out the nightcrawlers from the soil to see if they glowed. She hadn't meant for it to spread. The maid standing nearby said the southwest wind had come up fast, too fast to contain.

I stood there and looked at it.

Then I walked to where the Nightshade Rose bed had been and crouched down. I had brought that plant in from the far eastern territories two years ago — paid more than I should have, called in a favor I'd been holding onto, transported it wrapped in moon-dampened cloth because it couldn't survive dry air. It only bloomed on full-moon nights. It was the core ingredient for my Grand Prix entry, irreplaceable at this stage, with one month left before the competition. I touched one of the remaining stems. It crumbled. Black ash fell across my palm.

I closed my hand around it and stood up. "Where is Elora?"

The maid said she had left the fortress about an hour ago.

An hour ago. Right around when Vira would have been in the garden. That timing is not an accident, and I am done pretending things are accidents.

I told the maid to go find Loken and let him know about the fire. Then I stayed where I was, standing in front of what used to be three years of work, and I kept my face very still.

Loken came in fast. His first question, before he had even fully looked at the damage, was where Vira was. The maid pointed to the garden. He found her kneeling in the ash, still crying, and he picked her up and held her against his chest, and she said she was going to keep kneeling until I forgave her. He carried her back inside.

I was coming down the stairs when he looked up at me and said, loudly: "It's the middle of the night and you've got a child kneeling in the ash out there. What exactly is your point?"

I stopped on the stairs. That thin, precise pain again — the kind that doesn't announce itself, just arrives and stays. I had just lost two years of work and my only path into the Grand Prix, and the first thing my mate said when he walked through the door was an accusation on behalf of someone else's child.

I asked Vira, calmly, to tell him what had actually happened. She shook her head and said I hadn't told her to kneel. Loken had the decency to look briefly uncomfortable. He said he'd misread the situation. Sorry.

Then he put his arm around my shoulders and said, in the easy tone he used for things he'd already decided didn't matter: "She's just a kid. She didn't know what she was doing. I'll have someone bring in a new batch of herbs from the outer territories, it's not a big deal."

I waited.

"Honestly, Selene — what are you doing with all those herbs and compounds anyway. You're the Luna of this pack. Stay in the fortress, take care of your mate, manage the household, be present for the pack. That's not a small thing. That's the most important thing you could do with your life."

He used to say he'd protect me. I remember exactly when he said it — we were standing at the edge of Howling Canyon after the bonding ceremony, and the sacred fire was still burning, and I believed every word. I was so sure that was a promise. It wasn't. It was a fence.

I laughed. It was a short sound, and there was nothing warm in it.

I told him, quietly, that Elora had been standing in the shadow of the entrance hall the entire time. I could see her outline from where I was on the stairs. I asked her to come forward and, as Vira's guardian, account for what had happened.

Elora stepped out. Loken nodded at her to speak. She looked at Vira for a moment, and then she raised her hand and slapped her daughter across the face — clean and hard, the sound sharp in the stone hall. Then she turned to me and said, without any change in her expression: "I didn't raise her well enough. I apologize to the Luna on her behalf."

Vira's hand went to her cheek. She said it didn't hurt, her voice steady, but her whole body was shaking and the tears were already running. She stood there and shook and said it didn't hurt.

Loken went very still. Then he turned to me. "Selene." His voice had dropped to something low and controlled and furious. "Are you satisfied now? Over a few plants? I don't know what I was thinking when I chose you. I genuinely don't."

So that was the move. I had to give them credit. It was well-executed.

I stood there and let the words settle. I don't know what I was thinking when I chose you. I turned them over. Tried to find the part that still had the power to hurt. Found it. Noted it. Set it aside.

"If you've gone that blind," I said, "do you want to dissolve the bond? I'm available."

He stared at me.

I told the nearest maid to bring me the bonding robe from my room — the white moon-silk I had worn at Howling Canyon, the one the priestess had passed through the sacred fire before she bound our wrists, so that the blessing settled into the weave instead of the skin. It had come back from the ceremony smelling of smoke and cold stone, and I had kept it folded in the carved cedar chest at the foot of my bed ever since, wrapped in linen, and never once let another hand touch it. Every servant in the fortress knew better than to reach for it, because they had all watched me treat it like something that could still be broken.

She carried it out the way people carry things they've been told are precious — both arms out, chin tucked, careful with the hem — and I took it from her without a word and walked the length of the corridor and out into the garden, where the burn pile from the herb clearing was still going, embers glowing dull orange under a skin of grey ash.

I dropped it in. The moon-silk went up faster than I expected, the way thin fabric does when it has been dried by years of sitting in a chest, and the sacred fire's blessing turned out to be no protection at all against ordinary flame. The white went brown, then black, then the hem curled in on itself and the thread-of-moon embroidery along the collar — every rune the priestess had stitched by hand, one for endurance, one for children, one for the long life of the bond — began to pop and vanish, one small bright spark at a time.

Loken came out behind me. I heard the door, then his boots on the flagstones, then nothing, because he stopped.

"Selene. What are you — are you out of your mind?"

I didn't turn around. There was a fold of the robe that hadn't caught yet, a sleeve or a shoulder, and I watched it until the fire took it too. The smell was worse than I thought it would be. Not woodsmoke. Something sweeter and more chemical, like scorched flowers.

Then I turned around.

"You said you went blind," I said. "I don't see the point in keeping it."

His mouth was open. He looked, for a second, like a man who had walked into a room and forgotten why — the great Loken Ironwood, Alpha of the Ironwood Pack, standing in his own garden with his hands half-raised and no argument in them.

I walked back inside and I didn't look at his face.