The Moon had sent me here. The Moon would have to preserve me.
I returned the obsidian to the velvet and went to shower. I had not had a proper bath in... um... a while, and the water ran murky around my toes, and turned my neck into burning, acrid, agony.
...Gianna...
In the quiet of the shower, the steady pulse of water and steam lured my brain back into the recesses of the Bond, deluding me.
He had plunged me into water swearing this wouldn’t happen, and I, so glib, had insisted it would. If I had even stopped a moment to think...
...Gianna....
He was here. He had to be, somewhere, he was close. The tile wall, was he behind the wall? I pushed, pressing, leaning. He was here, I could feel him, I could smell him even through the steam, he was here. I scratched at the grout. One of my fingernails ripped off the nail bed. I stared at the blood.
Flint had warned me. Flint had warned me.
...Gianna...
“Stop it! Stop it!” I shouted. “Stop it! Is this enough pain for you, Gabel?! Is this enough of a risk?!”
Why was I even shouting? I was the one who had told him to let me go and play along with the Moon’s plan! I had no one to blame but myself. I could have fought. I could have refused.
It’s better you don’t know what you’re going to...
Flint had been right. I wept into my hands. Flint had been right.
And even though I knew it was crazy, I somehow knew Gabel was coming. I could feel him pressing against the Bond, sort of like the heat from a fire behind a closed door.
I had to do whatever it was I was supposed to do here, so that when Gabel showed up, SableFur was ready.
Think.
The path to vindication involved four tests. One of those was find something hidden.
Which wasn’t to be confused with a different test: discover a secret.
I had never spent a lot of time thinking about vindication, or learning anything about it besides it was an option, and what the tests were, or what the difference between hidden and secret was. It hadn’t mattered. I had never thought I’d need to know.
The trees outside my window were just like the trees in the place beyond the Tides. Had I gone back in time itself and that place was real? If I could go there, I’d discover something hidden. How finding that hidden place was supposed to help me I had no idea, because what would I tell Kiery? Oh, by the way, I found the place where your Alpha knocked up an acolyte?
Outside the window, the trees swayed, luring me back into my memories of that Other Place. My mind stilled, my blood calmed. I needed to find it. That was what was hidden. That was what the Moon wanted me to find.
But first: the bowl. Chances would have to be taken.
I poked my head out my door. Goon A was absent, Goon B glared. I glared right back. “So. Who’d you annoy to get this job?”
His scowl increased several times over.
“Send word to Oracle Kiery that my obsidian chunk is ready to go to the stonecutter,” I stated.
He harumph’d. I closed the door.
There. Done. The chunk was going to the cutter. First test of how far Magnes was willing to go to obstruct me. Time to find out if Kiery was one of Anita’s little toadies like Thessa, or if Kiery was just an innocent Oracle caught up in this. Or a gutless one.
The trees danced around in the corner of my vision, but it wasn’t time yet. I was still physically unwell, and I didn’t have the faintest clue where to go. I could start prowling in a few days, but I’d need the bowl to help me divine the location of the grove, unless the Moon spoke to me in my dreams.
Try not to destroy the world, Gabel. I need a few days yet...
The First Test
Bog, river, thicket.
I thumbed through the survival guide I had picked off Gabel’s shelf. Bog, river, thicket. I read a few paragraphs of a chapter on creating a search pattern, and orienting oneself to new, unknown surroundings. Not what I was looking for. I needed information on the best ways to get across thickets, rivers, and bogs of sucking mud. Or, more to the point, try to figure out which one was the least dangerous option.
“Donovan makes you nervous. Or are you just reading survival books for dinner conversation?”
I closed the book and walked to the railing. Gabel stood in the center of the lower floor. Outside it was a misty, grey night. Gabel gave me an expectant look, arms akimbo, wanting his answer.
“I had a dream. I’m looking something up.”
I retreated out of his sight and flipped back through the book.
Bog, river, thicket. Three roads, three challenges, only one outcome.
“Buttercup.” His voice came closer as he came up the spiral staircase.
His presence felt huge, and hot, and everything dimmed, like gas lanterns flickering. I squinted at the text. Gah, I had gone too far, and was back at that orientate-yourself-to-your-surroundings chapter again. “Gabel, I’m busy.”
His hand touched my arm, reaching out through the darkness. I twisted away, trying to find my place in the book again. He was such a pest—
“Buttercup. Is that the name he calls you?”
I dropped the book and whirled around.
Magnes looked back at me.
“Buttercup.” He pushed me against the books. The weight of his body pinned me. “How adorable. A little pet name for his little pet Oracle.”
“Don’t call me that! Get away from me,” I rasped, unable to breathe around his body pressing me flat against the shelves. The lights dimmed even further, with just the flickering wall sconce at my right to illuminate the dark space.
“I will never let you go, buttercup.” Magnes curled the words at me around the fangs that extended from his jaws. His eyes tinged green like summer storm clouds.
He bent forward, and I screamed, kicked him, it didn’t matter. His fangs glowed dull in the sconce light.
I screamed and pushed back—
I surged out of my covers mid-scream. I flung the covers off before I realized they were not Magnes.
I clamped my hands over my mouth to hold in the screams.
A dream. It had been a dream. A horrible, horrible, horrible dream. But a dream.
I rubbed my arms. Only Gabel’s fading mark. Not—
It had been a dream. Just a dream.
Just a dream.
I retrieved my blankets and huddled into my bed. The room seemed too big now, just a vast empty box. Almost every other time I had woken from a nightmare someone had been there. Shaking me out of it, waiting, or I had gone to them. Even Gabel had always been there.
The Moon had shown me that dream for a reason. I closed my eyes. I’d lived it, after having the dream about the bog, river, and thicket. I’d argued with Gabel about his public antics with me, and how Donovan would spot we’d consummated our bond, and he’d confessed to doing it all deliberately.
The book. The book was what I was supposed to have remembered! I had read a chapter about scouting unfamiliar territory and orienting myself.
The door opened.
“It’s Kiery,” the figure said. In her hand the light of her phone popped up, casting her in a faint blue glow.
I watched her from my huddle of blankets.
“I heard screaming.” Kiery approached the bed.
“Nightmare,” I answered.
“Are you better now?”
Did she actually care, or did it just worry her that I might have my gifts left? Hard to say. I looked at the drawn curtains across from my bed. “I am going to find something hidden.”
There. I had declared that I was undertaking the first test. I would have a turn of the moon to find the hidden thing.
Unlike the others, the test of finding something hidden had to be declared. It wasn’t like you could just show up with something and claim it had been hidden. You had to put the Oracles on notice that you had been shown the hidden thing, and you were going to find it.
Kiery didn’t object, and
she also didn’t seem to care, but it was the dark of night and I had woken up that wing of the house with screaming. Satisfied I was not dying (nor killing anyone), she just shrugged it off and went back to bed.
The next morning I set out in wolf-form with my grumpy goons in tow.
With a little while to think about it, trying to find the meadow where Gabel had been conceived seemed reasonable. Magnes had always lived in SableFur’s heart, so the meadow couldn’t be too far away. Maybe he could have snuck away overnight, but acolytes were closely supervised, so it would have had to have been within half a day of the heart.
My goons had shown me a basic map of the surrounding area. There were no rivers, and no bogs within the logical distance. Thickets weren’t noted on the map. There were several ponds. With the exception of the trees, and the meadow, there hadn’t been any clues as to direction or location of the place I needed to find. After some thought, I decided to set up a modified grid search: trot out a mile, turn right (or left), then trot back and forth like I was weaving. Then the next day, trot out two miles, track the squares I hadn’t before, over and over, for about five miles out, then rotate around to the next cardinal direction.
It might not have been the way Donovan would do it, but it was the best plan I had.
After four days of searching (and my muscles aching, my paws tender, and my ulcerated neck blistered, raw, infected glory) I caught the scent of something. I sniffed around the rock, unable to describe what I was smelling, but I did smell it, and the trail on the trees led me deep into the forest, wriggling under brush and scrambling over rocks.
“Where are we going?” Goon B growled, annoyed. They were sick of following me around for days on end.
“Wherever this scent takes me,” I retorted.
“I don’t smell anything.” Goon A sniffed.
“You’re not an Oracle,” I flung back. If a male couldn’t smell it, it wasn’t a scent for their noses. I slid down a snowy slope, then wriggled under some more brush. It tore at my fur and neck. Didn’t care. The scent was what mattered. The Goons swore and cursed as their larger bodies left tufts of fur behind on the stickers.
Males could be so vain about their pelts.
The forest was dense here, and very dark, and we picked our way along mostly by feel. Then, after an hour of scrambling, the trees grew thinner, and opened up onto a flat-ish plain of snow. I barked and bolted forward. The meadow from the vision!
Minus the pond, but the pond hadn’t really been a pond, it’d been Her Eye, or a bridge back to my world.
I bounded down the hill with a shout of triumph.
The Goons were not impressed, and sat off to the side while I trotted around the clearing, my snout in the snow.
Surely the Moon had not just brought me here to find the damn place? I needed evidence! I needed the hidden thing, and this meadow was not hidden.
“It’s getting late,” Goon B told me.
I ignored him.
A new scent caught my nose, and out of the corner of one eye, I saw a glimmer. Just a brief gleam. I trotted over, but there was nothing there. I dug at the snow, rooting around in the frozen earth underneath.
The Goons looked on with interest while I dug with my forepaws.
“Come here and help!” I demanded.
They didn’t move.
“The sooner you come help the sooner we can go back,” I growled.
Reluctantly, they came over and helped. They were bigger, heavier, stronger and their large claws ripped at the packed, frozen dirt.
One claw caught a pebble, it flipped over—
“Stop!” I barked. I shifted into human form (damn, it was cold) and picked up the pebble. It was a sliver of quartz. A runestone.
Balance.
“A runestone?” Goon B asked.
“Balance.” I showed it to him, unable to hide how excited I was. “Keep digging. Carefully. There will be more.”
Goon A hesitated. I shifted back to wolf and snapped at him, and, reluctantly, they continued to rake at the dirt.
We unearthed four more runes: love, betrayal, pup and faith.
In this case, the love rune was the one that symbolized passionate love between mates.
The Goons didn’t recognize the runes, or they might have killed me right then. The runes were old, and had been there a long time, the edges softened by years, but their power intact. I could not use them, they were not mine, but someone once had.
Gabel’s mother.
We dug some more, and found a small leather bag, filthy and half-rotted, and then, the claws of Goon B struck something hard. A jagged, broken piece of mirror.
“What is it?” Good B asked.
“A piece of a scrying mirror.” The power of the mirror was firmly intact. Gabel’s mother had used a mirror! I could barely breathe.
She had been far along in her training if she had had a mirror and a set of runes. Could she have been a full fledged Oracle, and had “left abruptly” under the guise of a calling? Was that what she had said? Or was that what Magnes had told everyone?
Or what Anita had told everyone?
Someone had to have known where a late-stage acolyte or an Oracle had gone. They just had to! And an Oracle that used a mirror. Anita had to have known her, and couldn’t possibly have forgotten her.
Anita, I am coming for you.
The remains of the mirror were the size of my palm, and I was able to put it in the leather rune bag. I told the other two wolves, “We’ve found the tools of an Oracle. Or an acolyte in the final stages of training. Some of them, at least. This is not a complete mirror or set of runes.”
I picked the straps of the leather bag up in my teeth very carefully.
I had it. I had found something hidden, and I had (for whatever they were worth!) witnesses. The goons were very uncomfortable, ears slicking and unslicking, pawing at the dirt. They would be much more uncomfortable if they knew what those runes said! But that would be going too far. I had to be careful not to let on that I knew where all this was leading.
“It’s late,” Goon B said uneasily.
“Lead the way back,” I said. “I’m done here.”
We bounded through the snow. Getting back went quickly, but not before night had fallen and we entered the house coated in snow and ice, dirty and grimy, and the Goons had missed their evening meal with the pack.
I shifted into human form, dripping wet in the mudroom, the bag dangling from my fingers. I did need to report my find to Kiery no matter what, and I even had the Goons with me.
Did I dare do it with Magnes present? Would that stir up the hornets?
No good choices. If I delayed, it could be doubted. If I stirred up hornets, I’d get stung. Better to march right into the dining room ass-naked and filthy with my prize.
After all. It was just flesh.
I followed the sounds of dinner. Goon B tried to tell me I should put on some clothes. I snapped at him to get out of my way. “It’s just skin. You have it too.”
“But—” He faltered.
I went right into the dining room, head held high. I had been the IronMoon Luna, and if I had anything to say about it, I would be again. Dinner stopped and silence glossed over the assembled senior members of SableFur. Oh, I was going to have an audience. Even better!
“Apologies, Alpha,” Goon B said uneasily, trying to cover himself as best he could. He looked absurd, and it wasn’t like his body was a squishy lump to be ashamed of. “She insisted on seeing Oracle Kiery.”
I didn’t wait for Kiery or Magnes or anyone else to acknowledge me. I walked right over to her. She sat several seats down from Magnes, who presided at the head of the table, Luna Adrianna on his right and his First Beta on his left. Luna Adrianna watched me.
Do you know?
I focused on not looking at anyone but Kiery. I had to play innocent and ignorant. “I have found something hidden.”
“Excuse us, Alpha—” Kiery started to say.
I dropped
the bag right in front of her plate before she could get up and get me out of the room.
My hair dripped water down my back as it thawed.
Kiery pushed her plate to the side, gave Magnes an apologetic look, and gingerly picked up the rotting leather bag. “Apologies, Alpha. The test does demand she come to me without delay. Gianna, where did you find... this?”
“A clearing about four hours northeast of here, through the forest, across a meadow, and down a slope. My guards can tell you exactly where. Careful, there is glass in there.”
Magnes and Adrianna just watched, but the First Beta showed far more interest. Kiery loosened the ties. With care, she withdrew the mirror shard, and her eyes instantly widened. Its speckled, ruined appearance did not disguise the power still imbued into it. She turned it over once, then carefully set it aside. She fished out the runes next and lined them up side by side on the table.
balance, love, betrayal, pup, faith
Even for an Oracle she went several shades paler.
I stared at her. I could not look at Magnes. Instead, I inquired of Kiery, “Do you know who they might have belonged to?”
“No,” she said in a breathless, horrified tone. “I don’t.”
Oh I wanted to stare straight at Magnes as I spoke, but I restrained myself. “They had to have belonged to an Oracle or a late-stage acolyte. Their power is still intact. Has there ever been a SableFur Oracle who used a mirror?”
Kiery leaned her chin on her hand.
I stared down at her, cold-fire anger and triumph inside me. I had succeeded! The first test. And there was the Moon’s accusation, the crime that had been committed, right there in front of Kiery, Magnes, his family, all of them! They wouldn’t be able to make this go away or hush it up.
Triumph made me giddy and a little shaky. The First Beta gave me a curious look, but what did he care if he smelled my cruel, furious triumph? That’s what I was here for, wasn’t it?
Kiery stared at the mirror shard, but I couldn’t tell if she knew who it belonged to or not. Kiery couldn’t have known Gabel’s mother—she would have been just a baby when all this had happened. But maybe she had heard something or learned something.
Iron Oracle Page 12
