Iron Oracle

by Merry Ravenell

  “No,” Gabel snapped. “No, it won’t. I won’t give you up. She can’t make me, Gianna. If She wants you, She’ll have to do it Herself. I won’t do it. She can’t make me say the words!”

  “She showed me so that I could tell you, so you know what we have to do.”

  “No!”

  I clawed my way out of the shower, dripping frigid water on the floor, and shivering. The Moon had created this future and promised it would come to pass. Gabel would repudiate me as his mate and Luna when the time came.

  He curled in the shower stall like a rabid Hound that no mortal dare defy. “I made those vows before Her, sworn in Her name, in Her light, and I do not break my promises. The future is never set in stone, and I refuse to play along with Her designs.”

  Her Servant

  I knocked on Flint’s door.

  “Luna,” he greeted me.

  “I need to talk to you. Now.” Not that I expected Flint to put me off, but on the off chance he did, no confusion.

  He stepped aside and gestured for me to enter. On his coffee table was a battered-looking novel featuring a woman in a skimpy, torn dress and a rather rugged-looking bare-chested man bent over her as she swooned. Flint picked it up, dog-eared a page and set it aside. He sat down on his couch, and it was only then I noticed he wore only a plaid robe that fell just to the tops of his knees, and unlikely anything else under it, and my mind remembered the tattoos that extended to the top of his thigh. Normally they were hidden under the hem of his kilts, so intricate, glossy-blue and unreal, and I frowned, trying to remember and inadvertently staring at his lower body in the process.

  “I can disrobe if there’s something you want to see.” Flint’s voice intruded into my thoughts.

  That yanked my eyes to his. The tattoos, I wanted to see those, they had lifted off his skin and wrapped through my awareness, but beyond my understanding. But that’s not what I had come for. “You were in Gabel’s office. That wasn’t a vision. You were there.”

  He didn’t blink. “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I was summoned, as you were.”

  “Do you know what’s coming?” I had never heard of a male Oracle, but given the crazy state of my life, I was willing to believe anything. Gabel was the Comet, I was Balance, I had been to weird places thanks to a tourmaline spike I had only encountered perhaps-not-by-chance.

  “No. I am not an Oracle. I am only a servant.”

  “A servant.” That meant nothing to me.

  “A servant,” Flint repeated. “But you know that. You’ve seen my tattoos. You know I am pledged to Her service.”

  “I didn’t realize you were in so tight with Her.” I finally sat down on the other end of his couch.

  “Jealous?” Flint asked wryly.

  “No. This is all.” I gestured to my head, “This has all become more than just an ambitious male wanting to be a King and having a violent streak.”

  Flint half-smiled. “Did you want to know if I had been there, or if I had been part of the vision?”

  “I need your help. With what I saw. Where I went. Well, I am not the one who will need your help. Gabel will. I will be on my own.”

  Flint titled his head to the side. “In what way?”

  In my vision, I had seen Flint counsel and stand by Gabel, so it seemed reasonable to involve Flint in what I had been shown. “The Moon has created a future that will come to pass. The SableFur, through the Oracles, are going to come for me. It will happen soon. Gabel will be forced to repudiate me. When Gabel abandons me, the Moon will constrict our Bond, but won’t sever it. She will keep the Bond just barely alive. Everyone except for you, I, and Gabel will believe it is dead. She told me that even Gabel and I will have to doubt, because everyone has to believe.”

  Flint’s face carved itself into deep frown lines. “To what end?”

  “I don’t know. She said to cause change within and without. We have to know before it happens so we can play our parts. In the future She showed me, you were at Gabel’s side. I’ve already told Gabel all this, and he’s sworn he won’t give me up, but the Moon has promised me She will force him to.”

  “And by extension, I am supposed to encourage him to give you up.” Flint’s frown deepened.

  I nodded.

  Flint sighed.

  He didn’t say anything, and the line of his strong shoulders tightened. Dumbfounded, I asked, “You won’t?”

  “Why would the SableFur come for you? They are insular. You’re too powerful and visible a Luna for Magnes to permit his Oracles to meddle with you,” Flint said.

  I took a deep breath. “Magnes has a reason to destroy Gabel. A couple of reasons, but one of them is very personal.”

  “That being?”

  “Gabel is Magnes’ get.”

  Flint’s green eyes registered shock. His whole body arched with his breath, which he held, then let out very slowly. “Are you sure?”

  “I’m certain. Gabel had no idea. I know because the Moon showed me the first time I went beyond the Tides. She is very angry, furious, don’t ask me to explain all of it, because I can’t. Gabel is the Comet. Anita, and I think Magnes by extension, believes Gabel is the Destroyer.”

  “If he is truly Magnes’ get, and Magnes’ knows it,” Flint said slowly, “it gives Gabel a claim to the SableFur throne, and it destroys Magnes’ honor. He is a mated wolf and has several other offspring. The stain will affect all of them. It can do great damage to the SableFur. The dishonor and shame of an Alpha bleeds onto the whole pack.”

  “Do you know anything about Gabel’s mother?”

  “Only that she herself had the Moon’s Gift but never became an Oracle. Gabel has never told me her name. It’s possible that she only gave him her wolf-name, not her human one.” Flint shook his head.

  In wolf-form we obviously couldn’t pronounce human speech, or our common names. We had approximate translations of our names, with it understood what the name was. It was complicated, more instinctual than anything else, and I had never considered the possibility that Gabel might only know his mother’s wolf-name, and might not know her common name. It might be impossible to deduce who she was by that name alone. What if he had never thought to ask her her name? Like many young children it had not originally occurred to me that my parents had names. I had been about five or six before I had curiously asked my father if he had a name.

  Would a lupine even have thought to ask? Did Gabel even know her name? Or had she simply been Mother?

  Like the pup-ring...

  I was getting ahead of myself. Back on task. I asked, “Littermates?”

  “Gabel never offered, and I never asked. He doesn’t offer anything about his past, if you haven’t noticed.” Flint rocked back and wrapped his fingers around one knee. “It also isn’t by chance I crossed paths with him.”

  IronMoon wasn’t really the sort of pack where you asked too many questions about the hows and whys. The Doctor was an excellent example of things you’d rather not know.

  “Did you know he was the Comet?” I prodded.

  Flint shook his head, and for the first time, I sensed him being both pensive and evasive. I had given him new information, things he didn’t know, but he still had his own cards close to his chest. “What part do you play in this?”

  “Anita told me that I am Balance,” I said. “I—again, it’s a long story.”

  But Flint nodded wisely, as if this bit of info made sense of other things he knew. “Balance. The one who keeps Gabel from becoming that lump of iron, and keeps the sword sharp and pointed at the proper targets. But you being taken away from him will make him very angry, and tip Balance. The future is not set in stone, Gianna. You say that yourself. The Moon cannot make him give you up, and if Gabel intends to fight, he will.”

  “Somehow She will force him.”

  “The Moon does not normally force us. Compel, yes, but force? No.”

  “This time She will.”

  Flint absorbed thi
s, skeptical. “So Anita knows all this. She told you this.”

  “Not exactly. Anita believes Gabel is the Comet, and will destroy everything. But I suspect Magnes is involved too. When I went to see her before Solstice, she lectured me about Gabel being the Comet, but she was revealing pieces from someone else’s vision. She doesn’t know that I know Gabel is Magnes’ son.”

  Flint nodded slowly. “And she believes Gabel is a mindless monster?”

  “I think she knows deep inside he’s not, but it’s easier for everyone to keep thinking it. The idea of a clever Gabel is something nobody wants to consider.”

  Flint shifted his shoulders, causing a crackling sound as the joints cricked into place. The right half of his robe slouched a bit, exposing some of his tattoos to the light. Their gloss had intensified, as if the Moon shone on them constantly.

  He was quiet too long. I said, “You don’t believe me.”

  “No, I find it all difficult to believe. Tell me everything.”

  So I told him: the deal Shadowless struck with SableFur, Anita’s summons, the piecemeal vision belonging to some other wolf (probably Magnes) she’d tried to pass off as her own, the rabid she-bitch in MarchMoon that claimed to be an EmeraldPelt, and how everyone tried to prey on my unwillingness to be with Gabel, except no one wanted to actually save me.

  Flint didn’t fill in any blanks, and it was hard to say if it was for lack of anything to contribute, or nothing he wanted to share. His expression and scent just grew more troubled, like some old wound slowly peeling open.

  When I was done talking, Flint said, “The Moon has laid it all out, and now She tightens the noose.”

  “Will you help?” His unwillingness seemed greater than ever.

  He shifted again. “I am a servant. If you tell me that you saw me bowing to the Moon’s will, then I must do this thing. But the pain of losing your mate.” He shook his head to and fro, slowly, as if dazed.

  “It happens,” I offered tentatively. “Bonds wither, they die. Mates part ways.”

  “Severing a dying limb so life can go on is one thing. It’s being forced to give up your mate when every instinct tells you both to stay together. I don’t know what it will do to Gabel, I don’t know what it will do to you, and I don’t know if it’s something I can watch.”

  Bewildered, I said, “It doesn’t matter what it does to me. You have to make Gabel do it, and keep a hold of him after it’s done.”

  “You believe it will come to pass. Gabel doesn’t, he thinks he can fight it, and I believe that too.”

  “You were there the other night. You’re the one who forced me to go to Her.”

  He rubbed his unshaven evening scruff, his attention somewhere else. He looked very old, and very tired, as if something had drawn all the life out of him and for a moment, I sensed some flicker of old, draining agony within him. Something familiar, something I had felt recently.

  I said, softly, “Your mate is dead. You’re living with a broken Bond.”

  Flint looked sideways at me, his eyes sparkling with a sharp warning to mind myself on delicate ground. His voice raked my skin like claws. “The Moon is asking you to live with a pain beyond imagining. You have no idea, little girl. None. It is an unspeakable pain and it never eases.”

  I licked my lips. “Never?”

  “Never.”

  “Then why are you still alive?”

  “Who said I was?” Flint asked me with a feral wryness that showed a shade of his torment. “I am where the Moon needs me to be. I am Her Servant. One day I have been promised I will be with her again. Just as you’ve been promised. But it is a cruel promise.

  “It’s not the daylight, it’s not when your mind is occupied with work, it’s not when your muscles burn from effort. The cruelty is in the quiet, still moments, when even silence sleeps, and in life it would have been just the two of you, suspended in that silence. In those moments I can still hear her, feel her, just whispers. The Bond doesn’t sever. She is still here, reaching for me across the umbra, but all she can do is,” he extended his hand and grazed his rough fingertips just along my cheek, “and in those moments you know everything you’ve lost.”

  “But death severs the Bond,” I whispered.

  He barked a laugh. “Yes, that’s what they say. It’s a lie. The mates are only split between the worlds. The Bond is like a spiderweb. You can walk through it, rip it, tear it, but a few tendrils stretch, stick, and linger. When it’s quiet, I feel those tendrils stretched across worlds. I hear her calling me, howling my name, because where she is she is as tormented as I. She endures knowing it is the only way we will ever be together. It’s a lie, Gianna, that the dead mate goes to their reward to wait in happiness for their other half to live out their life. That is why the survivors so often die. Their mate is suffering as they are.”

  He picked up the abused book. “I have not slept well in a very long time, and I have not slept alone for even longer.” He flung it down and his jaw hardened. “I will kill, maim, and watch horrors committed in Her Name, but now She asks me to send two souls into an agony that will drive them into madness. And for what? What is so important that She must ask you to do that She dare not do Herself?”

  Lacking anything to say, and stunned by what he was saying, I sank back on my haunches, hands on my knees, and tried to understand.

  The Moon had promised agony. She had promised I would doubt, question, even we would have to partially believe, it all had to be this way. Sand seemed to parch my throat. I swallowed, but it didn’t help.

  Flint said, “I am Her Servant, and if I do not obey Her will, I will not be with my love again. But if I do Her will, I know what I’ll send both of you to. You two will live as I live, as all who survive do: a Bond just barely alive, a few scant tendrils tethering you together. You think that the Moon is sparing you something because She will tie your Bond with a tourniquet and that is somehow more merciful?”

  I licked my lips again. “Well, I—”

  “No.” Flint spoke over me, “No. She’ll simulate death’s touch. That is what the Bond across the worlds is like. Only mine is stretched so thin a few stubborn silk threads tether us, yours will be bound so tight that it will be compressed into a few stubborn silk threads.”

  It didn’t matter. “We have to do this.”

  Flint’s lips stretched over his teeth in a ghoulish grin. “It is better you don’t know what you’re going to. If you did, I don’t think you’d be so persistent. I think you’d have Gabel fight Her.”

  “It has to be this way,” I said. “She needs each of us in our place, and that place isn’t together.”

  “And you saw me go with Gabel, not you.”

  “Yes.”

  Flint drew in a long, slow breath through his nose, then let it out, equally slow. “SableFur in its time and place, and if the Moon wants you in SableFur to affect changes within, we will need to give you time to do that. I will use that logic to keep Gabel focused, and the promise that one day he will be in a position to come for you, and he has to be ready when that moment comes.”

  “Thank you.”

  “If that moment comes,” Flint amended with great meaning.

  There was no guarantee Gabel and I would get things right. If things were that easy She would have shown us what to do. She was going to force this moment to come, but after that, the future unfurled like the future always did. The rest was on the mortals, and there was no guarantee that Gabel and I would be together again in life, or even in death, if we failed. I picked at my leggings. “Don’t let him obsess over the SaltPaw.”

  Flint nodded. “Have you told Gabel about the Comet? Balance?”

  “No. Tell him if you think he needs to know.”

  “It is not for me to tell him these things. You are Balance, an Oracle, and his mate. If you don’t have the courage to tell him the truth of things, then you do not have the courage to face what you’re going to.”

  The Bell

  Gabel was already
in bed reading. “Where have you been, buttercup?”

  “Talking with Flint.” I closed the door behind me.

  Gabel turned the page. “Did he growl at you for bothering him after-hours?”

  “I am the Luna. I can cajole a little indulgence from him.”

  Gabel chuckled. “How bad of a mood was he in?”

  With Hix in the south, Eroth not a suitable First Beta, and Donovan as predictable as a cat, Flint had become the de facto First Beta in many ways. It wasn’t official, nor was it permanent, but it didn’t please the Master of Arms at all.

  “Grouchy.”

  Gabel watched as I pulled off my top and shook out my hair. Warmth pooled between us, and he set his book on the nightstand table.

  “Gabel, we need to talk about something,” I said, hoping to chill the moment. Or at least talk to him before he got too distracted.

  “Still this? The Moon will not take you from me. She cannot make me give you up.”

  “She will find a way.”

  Gabel slid out of bed. He came over to me, gripped my face in his hands. “No.”

  He made it sound so simple! He pulled me back towards the blankets. “Gabel, please. It’s not about that anyway—”

  “It can wait. Tell me afterwards.”

  “After what?”

  “After I remind the Moon Herself who you belong to.”

  I laughed. “The Moon knows!”

  “Then I need to remind myself. Right now.”

  I was not in the mood, but telling Gabel no in that moment would have been unwise. He was so rattled, so feral. Even if he didn’t know as I did, he knew things were spiraling out of his control.

  He kissed a chain down my neck, along my throat. His hands gripped my ass, and his body swelled, trapped between us, and his scent turned feral and savage and rushed.

  I pushed against him. “Slow down, Gabel. Just in case you’re wrong, I want memories no one will ever exceed.”