46. Lucy #2
I took it without speaking, the weight of it settling in my hands, and felt something rise in my throat that I wasn’t prepared for.
These people had found me half frozen on a bridge and asked for nothing.
Had fed me and given me purpose and sat with me through all of it, and somewhere in the weeks that had passed I’d stopped noticing how extraordinary that was.
I noticed now. Even when I ached to leave them, I was grateful.
“Thank you,” I managed, and it came out smaller than I intended, carrying more than the words could hold.
“Open it,” he whispered, his eyes bright.
I pulled the ribbon loose and lifted the lid.
A gown the color of the red velvet seats on the train sat within the box.
I ran my fingers across it and felt an immediate, irrational pang of grief that Riot wasn’t here.
I wondered if my heart would always long for him during the days.
But this moment was about Tavian. A dragon that only wanted to heal the city and would never understand the world outside of this one.
“It’s perfect,” I said, and meant it completely, even through the ache.
“Emrys said the color would look good with your hair. I think he might just be right on that one.”
The city had transformed.
Every lantern that had been floating lazily through gray streets for days had found its purpose today, clustering in constellations above the crowds, casting everything in gold and amber.
Dark ribbon had been replaced with something that sparked faintly when the wind moved through it.
The smell of Maren’s honey cakes drifted through everything like a thread pulling the whole city together.
But then perhaps it was. When she cooked with magic, and food was so limited, maybe she was doing everything she could to keep the city more fed than people realized.
People filled every available space, bundled in their finest, breath misting in the cold air, faces tipped upward toward the mountain with anticipation.
“Thirteen,” Emrys said, rubbing his hands together.
“You said eleven last week,” Tavian pointed out.
“I was wrong by two. I’ve recalibrated.”
“That’s not how recalibration works. You need a basis before adjusting.”
Emrys shook his head. “Wrong! It’s thirteen. I feel it in my bones. I can practically hear that river running.”
I had my arm looped through his. The hem of my red gown was damp from snow but I’d pinned my hair back, letting a few curls fall loose. Though I’d covered myself with a coat, Emrys had declared I looked like I could start a war, which he seemed to consider a compliment.
“Lucette.” Baylor appeared through the crowd of people with the cook on his arm, her cheeks flushed pink from the cold or the company or both. The smile on her face was one I hadn’t seen before. It transformed her entirely.
The jeweler looked like a man who had won something.
“You look extraordinary,” he said, kissing my hand with a small bow before producing three small paper parcels from his coat pocket. “A small thing. Just for the occasion.”
Mine held a tiny pin, a cluster of thirteen dragon scales made from dark metal, simple and lovely. Tavian received a carved button for his coat. Emrys unwrapped his and held up a small brass compass that spun lazily in his palm.
“It doesn’t point north,” Baylor said cheerfully. “Points toward whatever you want most. I’ve been trying to sell them for years and nobody believes me.”
“Do they work?” Emrys asked.
“Not even slightly.” Baylor grinned. “But they’re very pretty.”
Emrys clapped Baylor on the back a little too hard. “Thanks for the gift no one else wanted.”
I had to bite back my laugh as the crowd shifted around us, pressing toward the open ground beyond the city’s edge where the mountain rose into darkness.
A drumbeat started somewhere, low and steady, and voices picked it up without deciding to, a hum that moved through the crowd like something alive.
I felt the Ossira tighten.
Just slightly. Just enough.
I kept my arm through Emrys’s and breathed through it.
The drumbeat slowed. The humming swelled. Every face around me tipped upward toward the mountain pass where the fog curled thickest.
The anticipation grew as the crowd fell silent and still. Then someone at the front of the crowd called out. “One.”
A figure emerged from the mountain pass, robed in white, moving beneath the lanterns. The crowd exhaled collectively.
“Two.”
Another figure. Then a third descending behind it.
“Three.”
The Ossira burned. I locked my jaw and kept hold of Emrys’s arm, staring at the figures coming down and felt the fog rolling in at the edges of my thoughts, the familiar erasure, the beast rising to answer something it recognized.
“Four. Five.”
The figures didn’t seem majestic at all. They moved just like regular people, though they were cloaked and slow, there was nothing otherwise special about them.
“Six. Seven.”
My breath came shorter. Tavian’s hand found my elbow, a question in the touch.
“I’m fine,” I said, resisting the urge to approach the Moonborn.
“Eight. Nine.”
I focused on Riot. On the cliff. On his forehead pressed to mine and the silence that came with it, the absolute quiet of the collar when he was close. I held onto that the way I’d held onto him, like letting go meant losing everything.
“Ten. Eleven.”
The crowd’s counting had taken on a desperate quality now, each number landed like a held breath finally released. Around me people gripped each other’s hands. Someone was crying quietly. The farmer somewhere behind me said nothing at all.
“Twelve.”
The mountain pass went still.
The crowd waited.
One figure. One more figure was all it took and the river would run and the farmland would live and thirteen Moonborn would have descended on Noctiria for the first time in living memory.
The pass stayed dark.
And in that darkness, through the burn of the Ossira and the fog crowding my thoughts, something crystallized with a clarity so sudden it nearly took my breath away.
I knew where the thirteenth was.
The lycan. The same one, night after night, slipping away before I could complete the hunt. The one the collar had been pulling me toward with a precision that had never felt random, never felt like chance. Not prey. Never prey.
The Moonborn were lycan. Lycan who could control when they shifted.
And I’d had him. Three times at least. Close enough to touch.
The Ossira burned hotter, answering the recognition, and underneath it something else entirely surfaced.
If I delivered the thirteenth, if I completed the hunt the collar had been building toward since the moment it was placed around my throat, maybe that was it.
Maybe that was the terms of it. Maybe completing this released me.
Furies. It all made sense.
I looked at the dark mountain pass and felt the pull orient itself south and east with the same insistence it always did at night. The sun was setting somewhere beyond the fog.
I unwound my arm from Emrys’s.
There was still time.