Chapter b183 /b

:

CID

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The air bwas /bcool that night, carrying the faint perfume of wet grass and distant pine.

Lanterns along the courtyard guttered, their mes dim against the pull of the moon above. I had walked this path a hundred times – from the kitchens to the training yard, across the stones worn smooth by centuries of wolves drilling their bodies into weapons. Tonight it felt different. Too quiet.

I should have trusted Mika’s unease sooner.

My wolf had stirred the moment I stepped onto the yard’s edge, restless, pacing just beneath my skin.

And then I heard it.

“…if she will not fall to poison, then perhaps to something sharper.”

The words hissed through the night, sharp enough to cut.

My heart mmed into my

ribs.

I spun, my pulse crashing, and out of the shadows she came — Isolde.

Her hair was unbound, her eyes wild, her beauty twisted into something feral.

And in her hand, gleaming beneath thentern light, was a de.

The scent hit me before her arm swung. Metallic. Bitter. Wrong.

Wolfsbane.

‘Move!‘ Mika roared inside me. “That de means death!‘

My body jerked back, instincts screaming, but I wasn’t fast enough. The silver gleam streaked toward me-

Steel met steel. Sparks flew.

Audrey.

She had been only steps away, as she always was, my shadow in the dark. She mmed into the path of the strike, her sword raised, her eyes zing.

ng!

The sh rang across the yard, a scream of metal that echoed in my bones.

“Traitor,” Audrey bspat/b, forcing Isolde back with a surge bof /bstrength.

bIsolde /bshrieked, twisting her de, trying to break free, trying bto /bbget /bito /ime. bHer /bbface /bbwas /bbtwisted /bbwith /b

“She doesn’t deserve him!” she screamed, spittle flying. “He was mine! Mine! Before she ever-”

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The words broke into a guttural cry as Audrey shoved harder, sparks bursting where their des locked.

“You dare raise a weapon against the Luna?” Audrey’s voice was low and lethal. “I’ll cut your tongue out before you finish the sentence.”

But then she does something unthinkable, she stabs the de to herself, much to make me and Audrey frown

in shock.

What?

What is she doing?!

Then she screamed so loud, asking for help.

The scream split the night like a struck bell.

For a heartbeat the yard stopped being a ce of stone and night air and became nothing but sound jagged, and all aimed at me.

—

raw,

Isolde’s cry climbed and climbed until lungs that had known only the quiet of a life in which she’d been tolerated now bared themselves to the moon: “HELP! HELP! NO, PLEASE LUNA, DON’T KILL ME, PLEASE!”

Time bent.

The sharp sh of steel and the scent of wolfsbane were there, but behind everything else I felt the infinitesimal shift: the moment she stabbed herself was not sloppy. It was practiced into a wound.

Audrey’s sword rang on the cobblestones.

– an usation made

She staggered back a hair, eyes wide with abination of shock and fury. For a breath I saw the impossible

–

– the woman who had been between my ribs and the world, my defender, looking suddenly like an

aplice in a story written by someone else.

Faces appeared in the doorway as if called by the very pitch of Isolde’s cry: sentries, servants, two soldiers, Marlow racing down the steps and then spurred into motion with an unstoppable chemistry.

A dozen pairs of eyes fixed on us all, ears straining for the story they wanted to believe.

In their faces I read the same immediate, stupid human question everyone asks when they see a woman scream and a weapon: Who is the viin here?

Isolde copsed in a heap, clutching at her chest where a red bloom spread between her fingers. Her hair clung wet to her forehead.

She made a spectacle of pain with a devotion so theatrical it might have been training had it not been heartbreaking to watch. She looked up at the first faces that leaned close the ones whose children she might have once soothed, the men who had watched her in the square – and she painted them the picture

–

they’d been primed to see.

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“She stabbed me!” she sobbed, eyes wide and wet, guilt drained from her face and reced with cunning sorrow. “The Luna–she tried to kill me! She and her guard–look how she held the de–she used her guard to pin me-” Her voice became a high keening. “She tried to kill me!”

The first cries I heard were not of horror but of outrage.

Someone shouted that Luna should be brought to answer. Heads twisted toward me. The air around my shoulders thickened with a dangerous heat. I had a moment – a narrow, thin, impossible moment to step back, to show the world who I really was.

–

I knew what she wanted: an image people could carry to their hearths and cluck their tongues at: the Luna who harmed a woman in his name.

That image would be carried like a torch and fed gossip until it was a bonfire.

—

That was the point: to make me the used and to send people away from asking the right questions- where did the dee from? Who had given Isolde the powder? Who had fed her the words that made her believe she was a victim and not the maker of her own misfortune?

I saw it all in a sh between the cements of sentences and the pattern of Isolde’s sobs. She was acting to – but because people trap me. Not because I was fragile – though fear had a way of seeding itself in bones prefer the story that is simple. People would rather take a picture than hold a mirror.

“Get her away from him!” someone cried.

A dozen voices answered with the single–mindedness of a mob. usation gives people a purpose. Purpose is intoxicating.

Francesco moved then, but not like a man who needs to cross a yard to be present.

He moved like a tide that knows how to fold itself around a stone.

His arrival was soundless at first; then his boot touched the stone and the yard remembered what it meant to be under a king’s watch. The same ck eyes that could hush a hundred men went straight to me, and the surge of relief that followed was iso /ihot it hurt. He was the ce I went to be stitched.

He did not move to me first the way some men do. He came to me and then past me like apass finding true north. He took one look at Isolde’s hands, at the cloth already reddening, and the way her eyes rolled for effect, and his jaw tightened as if he had been given a de and chosen not to swing it.

“Hold,” he said, and the single short word was aw.

Marlow had already hurtled forward,

He was two steps from Isolde when the soldiers reached the woman half copsed on the stones.

They moved with trained care; two of them folded their cloaks under her head, one kept a hand at the back of her neck as if it were a pulse they intended to steady. The scene looked like charity. That was Isolde’s entire design: to make the act of sheltering her look like confession against me.

18b: /b

bSat/b, bSe /b

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“Isolde-” Marlow’s voice was neither kind nor cruel. It was the voice of a man whose life is habitually devoted to finding the truth of a fight. “What did you do?”

She wailed harder. “She did this! She stabbed me! Don’t let her-” Her voice copsed into a keening that was tuned perfectly to the human ear. “Please, someone–tell him–tell the King!”

Thatst sentence was the nail.

So, this is what she aims for.

She wanted the king, my Francesco and his courtiers present to see her fall and the Luna standing over her with a weapon in hand. The theater of betrayal is always best staged with royalty in attendance.

Francesco returned to my side fast but controlled, taking my face in his hands the way a man steadies a map.

The bone in his palm brushed my cheek, and I felt the tremble of him beneath the skin.

His eyes found mine and said, You are not alone.

I answered with a breath that said, I am here.

“Isolde,” he said, his voice a furnace that refused to re into me. He was careful with his words the way ia /isurgeon is careful with a scalpel. “You will be moved to the infirmary. Monica. Now.” He looked to Marlow. “Secure her. Do not let her words break the night into mobw.”

Marlow barked orders like a man breaking a stubborn horse.

Two soldiers bent and lifted Isolde with clumsy reverence. She screamed all the way, as if the howl could weld trust ito /iher side.

But doubt had entered the yard, and doubt is a contagious thing.

I heard the whisper before I saw its beginning. “The Luna!” someone hissed, then a ripple: “Why would she-” “Did you see-” “She had a moment with the de-” Small tongues made quick work. A woman shoved through the crowd, her face twisted in a mixture of panic and belief, and she said, half to herself, half to others, “she was near the knife, I saw her in the shadows bent-”

The way lines form at tide, now people formed around us, some with eyes like bottles that have been kicked.

I felt the heat of usation graze my shoulder like a de,

It is a violent thing, being watched as a criminal by those you feed and soothe and try to protect. The world

btilts/bb. /b

“Everyone, hear me,” Francesco said, voice carrying the force of the valley itself. He ced a hand over mine, like a dam pressing back a river, and he extended the other toward the soldiers with the authority of a man who will not let his borders be dragged into shame. “Bring her to Monica now. Thene back here and listen. The Luna bis /bnot the perpetrator. Our duty is to the truth.”

Hismand was enough for many, but not for the few who wanted their story better than the facts.

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I saw the hard little cluster of faces that fall on gossip like moths onmp smoke, and for a split second, the old fatal empty feeling of being alone when the world decided you were fiction rose.

Audrey moved in front of me then she had been my shadow, my sword, my relentless protector since the first fire of our pairing had passed between us. Now she squared her shoulders and spoke to the crowd in thenguage of people who had seen battle in fields and seen women climb from under rubble.

“You saw the de,” she said tly. “You saw who moved. You saw Isolde raise it herself. No one stabs themselves identally. If you want answers, you will wait until Isolde can speak in a ce where speech is not a weapon.” Her voice turned to Marlow: “Don’t let anyone near her who came with a tale.”

Thatst was both order and prayer.

People backed up as if pushed by some invisible hand.

The yard retracting into noise again was a mercy, a small one.

Monica’s satchel arrived in a flurry; she had the needles and salves and the impatient look of a woman who had been told of blood and knew better than to let it be drama.

She knelt, fingers working quick and sure.

Her fingers were clean; her face, grim. “No wolfsbane scent in immediate proximity,” she reported, which meant only that either the de had been washed at some point in the moment between stab and mor, or the scent had been absorbed by her clothing and was not exposed at the wound. Monica did not look like a woman who guessed. “But she used the de–there is a cut, shallow. We will know more when I clean it.”

A soldier who’d stayed silent stepped up, eyes like flint. “We saw her hold the de,” he said. “She was in the shadows. She fell to the stones. She cried out for help.”

“For help,” a woman repeated, not unkindly, and the crowd hummed with the appetite for certainty.

I could feel the room tilting again – some people rebought their belief in the brand–new story that was being

embroidered.

Rumor is a needle.

–

At the head of the room, Francesco’s presence became a line of iron. He held me with one hand, and with the other heid out orders: “No–one leaves the square until I say it. Bring everyone who saw the moment — all of you. And bring me anyone who gave Isolde ore or coin in thest week.” He looked to Marlow. “Lock the gatehouse; no one in or out.”

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