Lunara Silvercoat knelt in the hidden grove and knew she was about to ruin it. She was Aweined, a wolfkin healer, and she had walked three days through the Nordfrost snow to find this place. Moss covered the stones. A cold spring bubbled at the center. She wanted to consecrate it, so any wounded soul, beast or kin, could heal here under the moon. But she only knew half the rite. The other half had died with the priests who raised her. She pressed her palms to the largest stone and spoke the words she remembered. Her voice faltered at the gap. The moon rose. The grove stayed cold and silent. No warmth answered her. She had not blessed it. She had marked it wrong, and a botched rite could leave the ground unhallowed for good. Lunara sat back on her heels. Her ears flattened. If she guessed at the missing words, she might poison the grove forever. She could not guess. So she went to find the one person who might still know. Aldric Vane had kept the rites before Lunara was born. He lived alone now in a hut of black timber, far from their kin. He opened the door before she knocked. He leaned on the frame, gray beard tangled, eyes half-lidded, and looked at the frost on her coat. "You started a rite you can't finish," he said. Not a question. "I can smell it on you. Old work, only half done." He snorted derisively. “Go home.” "I need the moon-consecration verses," Lunara said. "The full ones." He snorted. "I buried those with better days. Go home, girl." "A grove is hanging half-blessed right now. If I leave it, it rots." She stepped closer. "You taught the ones who taught me. Finish what you started too." That landed. His jaw worked. He turned inside and returned with a pale moonstone tablet, etched with patterns that caught the firelight. He held it against his chest like a wound. "The lost verses are cut here," he said. "I never gave it to anyone. They'd botch it, same as you nearly did." He studied her face for a long moment. "But a half-hallowed grove is worse than none. So." He set the tablet in her hands. "Read it exact. One wrong word and you undo it all." Lunara traced the shimmering marks. The missing words were there, plain and complete. Her chest loosened. "Come with me," she said. "Read it over my shoulder." Aldric shook his head. "My knees won't cross that snow. And the rite needs more than words." He tapped the tablet. "You bring an offering to the ground. Something living, cut fresh, given freely. The tablet won't tell you what. That part you learn yourself." Lunara closed her fingers around the tablet. She had the verses now. But the grove waited a hard day's walk behind her, and she had no offering worthy of it, and the moon would not wait forever.

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.

The full moon came four nights later. Lunara left the shrine at dusk and walked into the grove. The half-hallowed rot had spread while she waited. Black veins crossed the snow now, reaching from the poisoned center toward the last healthy trees. By morning they would touch the roots. She had run out of days. The moon rose full and white above her. She had to finish the rite tonight, or the grove would die. She knelt at the pale stone altar near the grove's heart. Its curved rim caught the moonlight. The silver bowl at its center sat empty, waiting. Beside it lay the moonstone tablet and a single white blossom she had carried from the shrine. She set the flower in the bowl. Then she drew the dagger from her belt. Its blade gleamed cold. Red streaks ran along the steel, and a small moon shone in the pommel. Fennric's words came back to her. Blessings take blood. That was the cost no tablet named. Lunara pressed the edge to her palm and cut. Blood welled dark and dripped into the bowl. She lifted the tablet and began to read the verses aloud. The words were old and hard in her mouth. She spoke them slow and clear. The pain came before she finished. It crawled up from the cut, not from the wound but from the blade itself. Something old lived in that steel. It drank her strength as she spoke. Her arm went cold. Her vision blurred. She understood too late. The dagger held its own corruption, and it fed on her while she gave her blood freely. She forced the last verse out. Her voice shook. The bowl of blood flared silver, then white. Light rolled off the altar in a slow wave. Where it passed, the black veins in the snow shrank back. The poisoned ground pulled tight toward the center and stilled. The spreading stopped. Lunara fell against the altar. The dagger dropped from her hand. She could not feel her fingers. The grove around her held its breath, no longer dying, not yet whole. She had bought its life with her own strength, and the blade had taken more than the rite required. She lay in the cold and looked at the wound in her palm. The cut had closed. But the coldness stayed, spread up her arm, and sat in her chest like ice. The corruption from the blade was in her now. She had stopped the rot in the grove and carried it into her own body. She gripped the altar and pulled herself up. The grove was saved for tonight. The full moon would not come again for a month. And whatever the dagger had put inside her was already moving, slow and cold, toward her heart.

The cold in Lunara's chest woke her before dawn. She sat up in the shrine and pressed her hand to a healing wound on her arm. The moment her gift warmed the skin, the cold surged, sharp and quick, up toward her heart. She jerked her hand away. Fennric stood in the doorway, watching. "That thing feeds on your healing," he said. "Every blessing you give, it moves closer. You cannot tend the grove like this. You cannot even tend yourself." She had come to save the grove. Now she could not touch it without killing herself. She knew one place left to try. When the wolfkin still lived in the old caves, they spoke of her aunt, a blind oracle who saw what eyes could not. Lunara had not spoken to Lyra Moonseer in years. They had parted badly. But the caves held healing older than any tablet, and only Lyra knew it. She wrapped a woven sash around her cold arm and walked into the frost until stone swallowed the sky. Lyra waited at the mouth of a deep chamber, as if she had known the hour. Her white eyes fixed on nothing and saw everything. "You bring rot into my house," the old wolfkin said. "And you bring it because you gave your blood to save dirt and trees." Lunara's throat tightened. "I need help, Aunt." Lyra tilted her head. "You needed help when you left. You did not ask then." Lunara knelt on the cold stone. "The corruption grows when I heal. My gift is turned against me. Fennric says it will reach my heart by the next full moon." Lyra was silent a long moment. Then she stepped aside. Behind her, water glowed with soft lunar light. A round stone basin held a still, shining pool. "The old way does not use your gift," Lyra said. "It uses the moon's. Water remembers a cleaner light than the one you were taught." Lyra pressed a pale crystal into Lunara's palm. It was cool and bright, and the cold in her arm did not stir against it. "Hold this. Enter the water. Do not heal. Do not pull. Only let go." Lunara lowered herself into the spring. The chill of the corruption fought the glow. She wanted to force it out with her gift, but Lyra's voice stopped her. "Let go." She stopped pushing. The pale light in the crystal spread through the water and into her. The cold in her chest loosened, thinned, and drew back down her arm. Lunara rose from the basin, breathing hard. The cold no longer sat against her heart. It had retreated to a thin line below her elbow. "It is not gone," Lyra said. "The moon can only push it back so far. To draw it out fully, you must return the corruption to where it was born." Lunara looked at her arm. She had bought time. But now she knew the blade was not finished with her.