5. THE MOONSTONE LOCK
Chapter five
THE MOONSTONE LOCK
LEON
The alarms are still screaming when Portia takes my hand and pulls me into the palace, and I go, half a man and half a wolf and no use to anyone, because for the first time in twenty years I cannot find the wheel.
I have shifted a thousand times. On empty moors under a private moon, in the reinforced room Keith's people built for a boy who woke with claws, once in a stadium tunnel before I learned to cage it.
I know my own wolf the way you know a scar.
This is not that. This is the animal reaching for something I have never let him have, and the reaching has torn the cage off its hinges, and now the noise and the floodlights and the smell of strangers with steel are pouring into the gap where my control used to be.
"Where are we going," I get out. The words come thick, my jaw wrong, the shift crouched behind my teeth.
"Somewhere the walls are thick and the ground is old," she says, not slowing. "If you're going to come apart, you do not do it in front of a terrace full of witnesses on the night they buried the queen."
Guards blur past us the other way, toward the alarm, toward the figures I saw moving on the grounds.
One of Ferb's captains shouts something about the east wall breached, a diversion, hold the heir, and I understand in some far-off way that the intruders were never the point.
They were noise. They were a match struck near a man already soaked in oil, and someone knew exactly what the noise would do to a returned heir on the edge of his first shift under this roof.
Portia knows it too. I feel her read it, feel the cold clarity of her decision come down the pull between us before she says a word.
"They want you to break where people can see," she says. "So we don't give them that. We give them a locked door and an old room and no audience. Move."
She takes me down. Not up, down, past the wine cellars, past a level where the stone stops being cut and starts being only stone, into a hall I did not know the palace had.
It is round and roofless, open to the sky through a wide oculus, and set into the floor at its center is a single enormous disc of pale stone that drinks the moonlight and gives it back the color of milk and silver.
The moment my bare foot touches the edge of it the shift stops fighting me.
It does not recede. It settles. Like an animal that has been straining at a leash suddenly finding the person at the other end has stopped pulling and started walking beside it.
"What is this place," I manage.
"The moonstone hall." Portia's voice has gone careful, and under the care is dread.
"The oldest room in this kingdom. Older than the house that owns it now.
" She steps back off the pale disc, deliberately, putting the stone between us.
"Your family's heirs come here for one thing, Leon.
The first shift that makes them real. It was never going to hold off forever, not after last night.
The garden started it. This is where it finishes, whether either of us is ready or not. "
The floodlights and the alarms are a world away up the stairs.
Down here there is only the moon through the open roof and the pale stone under me and the pull, and the pull is not hazy anymore.
It has gone clean and bright and total, a line drawn straight from the center of my chest to the woman standing just off the edge of the light with her hand pressed to her own throat.
"You should go," I tell her, and it costs me everything to say it. "Whatever this does to me, you shouldn't be close for it."
"I know." She does not move. "I'm not going to be smart about this. I've been smart about it my whole life. I'm out of smart."
The moonstone takes me then.
I have no better word for it. The light off the stone reaches up through the soles of my feet and finds the animal and does not force him, invites him, the way you open a door for someone who has been standing outside in the cold their whole life.
And the wolf, who has spent twenty years being a fist held closed, a thing I clamped down and apologized for and locked in a reinforced room, walks through the open door as if he was always allowed to.
There is pain. Bones have their terrible say, the old argument of a body rewriting itself, and I go down onto the pale stone on all fours as the shift rolls through me.
But under the pain is something I have never once felt in a thousand shifts.
Permission. This is the first time in my life I have changed and not felt, somewhere underneath, that I was getting away with something.
When it finishes I am enormous. I know it the way you know a thing in a dream, from the inside and the outside at once.
The hall that felt close around a man feels close around a wolf the size of a horse, moon-silver where the light hits my coat, and every sense I own has been thrown open like every window in a house at once.
I can smell the queen's grave-flowers three floors up.
I can smell the intruders' steel cooling in the east wing, the fight already over, the diversion spent.
I can smell fear and wine and old stone.
And I can smell her, and there is no smell in the world like her, and the pull that has been a hook behind my ribs becomes the only true direction there is.
I turn toward her.
She has come to the edge of the moonstone, drawn the way I am drawn, her careful mask gone and something raw and enormous rising in her face to meet the thing rising in me.
The bond, unlocked at last by the shift the law was waiting for, snaps taut between us with a force I feel in my spine, in my teeth, in the marrow of the new and ancient shape I am wearing.
Mine, the wolf says, with no language and no permission and no off switch.
Mine. And the woman on the edge of the pale stone bares the side of her throat a fraction of an inch, an answer she cannot help and immediately hates, and I take one step toward her across the moonlit stone with the whole weight of the unlocked bond behind me.
Not to attack. Never that.
To claim.
Dearest Readers,
Twenty years he kept that wolf in a cage and apologized for him. Twenty years of shoving him down, locking him in reinforced rooms, treating the truest part of himself like something he was getting away with.
And then he stands on a stone older than his kingdom and the door simply opens, and nobody is angry, and nobody is frightened, and for the first time in his life the animal walks through as if it was always allowed.
I cried writing that. I am not ashamed to tell you.
But now he is enormous, and unlocked, and he is turning toward her with the whole weight of the bond behind him, and she is standing at the edge of the light with nowhere left to run.
What would you do, loves? Run, or stay?
She stays. Turn the page and see what it costs her.
Your author.