THE CROWN OF ASH AND MOONLIGHT

Ysolde Varrane had always known her pack's end would smell like smoke. She had not known it would smell like her mother's perfume burning.

She stood at the top of the great hall's stairs, where the lanterns had been smashed and the banners of Hollowmere lay trampled in ash. Below her, the survivors knelt in rows. Children had been dragged from the cellars, warriors disarmed, and elders forced onto knees that no longer bent easily. Blackthorn soldiers moved among them with torches, counting heads like merchants counting grain.

Ysolde counted too. She had done it eleven times since the walls fell. Two hundred and six of her people were alive. Her father was not one of them.

"Lady Ysolde." A young guard appeared at her elbow with blood on his sleeve and terror in his eyes. Tomas was seventeen and had followed her around the keep like a pup since he was twelve. "They say all of the Alpha's blood must go down."

"I know."

"If you kneel quickly, they might..."

"Might what?" She turned, and he fell silent. Her eyes were dark hazel, and a ring of silver had risen around the irises, the mark of her wolf close to the surface. "Look around you, Tomas."

He looked. Then he lowered his eyes.

She smoothed her mother's silver gown, pinned hastily to fit because her own dress was soaked in her father's blood. She had held his head as he died. His last words had not been a blessing or a command. He had gripped her wrist with a strength she hadn't known he had left and whispered, "They were never after the land."

Then he was gone, and there had been no time to ask what he meant.

She went down the stairs one step at a time, back straight, chin high. An Alpha's daughter never runs, her mother used to say, and she never crawls. Her mother was somewhere in the cellars with the other women, or she was dead. Ysolde refused to decide which.

The hall fell quiet as she reached the bottom.

The Blackthorn soldiers parted without being told, and a man walked through the gap who changed the shape of the room.

Rhydian Voss, Alpha King of the Blackthorn, was taller than the stories made him. They said he'd taken seven packs in nine years, that he'd never lost a duel, that he had burned his own father's banner to take the northern throne. None of them mentioned how still he could be. He crossed the wreckage of her home with no hurry and no anger, the way a man walks a field he already owns.

He wore black leather and a heavy fur-collared cloak, clasped at the shoulder with a gold wolf's head. His dark hair was disordered by the wind, his jaw shadowed with stubble, and a thin white scar ran from his temple to his jaw. His eyes were amber, and they moved over the hall, the kneeling people, the dead, and finally her.

They stopped.

Behind him came a wolf. It was enormous and black as smoke, with shoulders level with a man's waist and eyes the same burning amber as the king's. It padded at his heel, silent, and the soldiers shrank back from it.

"You are the Alpha's daughter," Rhydian said. His voice was lower than she expected, quiet enough that everyone had to listen.

"I am Ysolde Varrane, daughter of Alpha Aldric of Hollowmere, whom you killed."

A ripple went through the soldiers. No one spoke to the king without leave.

His expression did not change. "Your father died in battle. He chose to fight."

"He chose to protect his people from men who came in the night."

"We came at dusk."

"You came after the gates were opened," Ysolde said. "On a night when you had sworn peace. Correct me if I'm wrong, Your Majesty. I would hate to misremember the honor of the Blackthorn."

The silence that followed was the kind that comes before a blade. A captain stepped forward with his hand on his sword.

Rhydian lifted two fingers, and the man stopped.

"She is grieving," the king said mildly. "Grief makes the tongue brave." He did not look away from her. "But you're right about one thing. The gates were opened. The question is by whom."

A cold thread ran down her spine. She had assumed the gates were broken, that the Blackthorn had simply overwhelmed them. She hadn't known they were opened.

They were never after the land.

Something flickered in her face, and she had the uncomfortable sense that he had been waiting for it. A silver-haired man at the king's shoulder murmured something. His voice was soft, almost fatherly. Chancellor Maren Cael, she would learn later, though now she saw only a tired old advisor with kind eyes. Rhydian nodded without turning.

"By the law of the packs," the king said, and his voice carried now, "a defeated Alpha's line is forfeit. The victor may claim the territory, the armory, and one spoil from the vanquished." He paused. "I have claimed Hollowmere's lands. I have claimed its armory. As for the spoil..."

The hall held its breath. Ysolde felt every eye swing toward her. She knew what the old law meant. Every girl of the packs did, the way you know about drowning without having done it. Her wolf, Wynne, rose in her chest, snarling.

She kept her hands still.

"I take the Alpha's daughter," Rhydian said.

Someone in the crowd made a stifled, animal sound of grief. It was Tomas. He started to rise, and a spear came down across his shoulders.

"Don't," Ysolde said sharply.

Tomas froze.

She stepped forward, closer to the king than anyone had dared, and tilted her head to meet his eyes. She could smell him now: pine smoke, cold iron, and beneath it something warm and wild that her body recognized before her mind would admit it.

"You'll have my body in your tower," she said quietly, for him alone. "You'll have my name on your slave rolls. You'll have the right to order me, and I will obey the orders that keep my people alive."

His eyes narrowed fractionally.

"But you will never have me," she said. "Not the part that matters. Not tonight. Not in a hundred years."

For a long heartbeat, nothing moved. The great black wolf at his heel lifted its head and stared at her.

Then the corner of Rhydian's mouth tilted, not quite a smile, only its ghost. It was gone before she was sure she had seen it.

"We'll see," said the Alpha King.

He turned and walked toward the doors. Two guards took her by the arms, not roughly. She noticed that, and it angered her more than roughness would have.

As they led her out into the burning night, past the kneeling and the dead, Ysolde looked back at the hall where she'd learned to walk. One banner still hung from the rafters, the silver moon of Hollowmere, scorched at the edges but whole.

She memorized it.

I will come back, she promised it silently. And when I do, I'll know who opened the gates.

Behind her, unseen, Rhydian paused at the threshold and looked up at the same banner. He stood there for three breaths with his jaw tight and a shadow in his eyes that was not triumph. At his side, the black wolf whined softly, once, and pressed against his leg.

Then the king followed his spoils into the dark.