Lunara Silvercoat's Arc

Chapter 2 of 4

Lunara left Aldric's hut with the tablet wrapped against her chest. She reached the grove by dusk and knew at once she was too early. The moon hung as a thin sliver above the trees. The verses on the tablet were plain, but she read them twice and understood the trap. These words only bound under a full moon. That was days off. And each night she waited, the half-hallowed ground crept wider, its cold reaching for the healthy roots at the grove's edge. She could not camp here. The taint would seep into her while she slept. She needed shelter, and she needed it close. But snow stretched empty in every direction. She had passed no farm, no cave, no fire. Then she remembered the walls she had glimpsed on her way in. Old stones, broken arches, a cracked moon carved above a doorway. A shrine, long dead. She turned back and found it before full dark. The ruin sat under snow like a fallen crown. Half its columns lay in pieces. But one corner held a roof of stone, dry and out of the wind. Lunara stepped inside and stopped. A fire already burned there. A short, gray-furred wolfkin crouched over it, feeding it sticks. He wore an old soldier's belt heavy with buckles. He did not rise. He did not reach for a weapon. He only looked up with yellow eyes and snorted, the way a man snorts at bad weather. "Priest work," he said. He nodded at the tablet against her chest. "I can smell it. Consecration." He spat into the flames. "Waste of good ground. The gods don't answer. I know. I served them." "You keep this place?" Lunara asked. "I run an inn, at the End of Nordfrost. This is just where I hunt." Fennric Greymantle turned a strip of meat over the fire. "You can sit. Cold's the same for both of us." She sat. The warmth reached her first, then the shelter of the stone. She saw it now. She would not wait alone in the poisoned grove. She would wait here, in the shrine, where the taint could not follow. The full moon would come, and she would be whole to meet it. "Days," she said. "I need days." Fennric shrugged. "Stone doesn't charge rent." He watched her a moment longer. "But when your moon rises, you'll want more than words. Blessings take blood. That's the part nobody carves into a pretty tablet." Lunara went still. Aldric had said the same. A living offering, given freely. She had walked into shelter and found the very question waiting by the fire. She kept her voice level. "What blood?" Fennric only smiled and turned the meat. "That's yours to answer, priest." She had her shelter now. She had her days. But the harder cost had a name, and no one would speak it for her.