Alpha's Ocean Born Luna

I learned three things about the land in the first hour. The ground does not move. Everyone is very loud. And bread costs money.

Harrowmere sat in a bowl of gray hills at the edge of the eastern sea, a town of stone houses with steep roofs and smoke leaning out of every chimney. I came into it at dawn with my wool coat buttoned wrong and my shoes full of black sand. Nobody looked at me twice, which I took as a good sign until I realized it was because they were all looking at the sky. The snow had followed me from the beach. It was the middle of autumn, the old women muttered, and they had never seen such a thing.

I felt guilty. I kept my hands in my pockets.

The bakery was easy to find. I followed my nose, and then I stood in front of a window full of golden loaves, unable to move. In the sea, we eat kelp and fish and sweet pearl moss. I had never smelled anything as wonderful as warm bread.

"Help you, miss?" The baker was a large woman with flour up to her elbows. She frowned at my coat.

"Bread, please. That one." I held out a seed pearl from my purse, the smallest. "Will this do?"

She took it between two fingers and went very quiet. "Where did you get this?"

"It's mine."

"A pearl like this would buy my whole shop." She glanced at the door, then back at me. "You're from the coast folk. You've got that look. And you've got the salt on you. Who sent you?"

"Nobody sent me." That was true, but it felt like a lie. "I only want bread."

"Hey, Mrs. Tolliver!" A boy slid across the doorway on a patch of ice and caught himself on the counter. He was maybe fourteen, all knees and elbows, with a wool hat pulled down over curly red hair. "Don't shout at her. She's from my aunt's village. She doesn't know about prices."

"Tobias Reed, you don't have an aunt."

"I've got several. Two coins for the loaf, and one for the milk, and I'll carry her bag." He turned to me and winked, quite unsubtly. "Give her your smallest pearl and Mrs. Tolliver gives you change in copper. Everybody wins."

The baker looked between us. She sighed, wiped her hands and counted out six copper coins and a loaf of bread, fresh and hot and wrapped in paper. I was so grateful that I nearly cried.

Outside, Tobias walked backward in front of me, grinning. "You're a terrible liar."

"I didn't lie."

"You said it was yours. Then you looked guilty. Wolves can smell guilt, you know. Half this town can. You should practice." He stuck out a hand. "Tob. I work the ferry in summer and run errands in winter, and I know everything. Ask me anything."

"What are wolves?"

He stared at me. Then he started to laugh, then realized I wasn't joking. "Where in the world are you from?"

"Far away." I tore off a piece of bread. It was the best thing I had ever eaten. "Explain wolves."

So he did, walking me down a street of closed shutters while the snow thickened. Lativeran, he explained, was a kingdom of wolf folk. Most people could shift into a wolf at will. The strong ones ruled, and the strongest of all were called Alphas. They led the packs, and the packs served the Crown, and the Crown lived in a city far to the north called Orrenhall. There was a king, and since the old queen had run off, there was a new one.

"The old queen ran off?"

"Twenty years ago. Left her baby behind, everybody says. Or her baby was a monster. Depends who you ask." He lowered his voice. "My granny says she was a dragon. That's why the old stories say the king's family can't stand the cold. There's a whole song about it."

"A dragon," I said slowly.

"Don't tell anyone I told you. Wardens put you in the stocks for singing that song." He nodded toward a wall at the end of the street. "Look. They've been putting these up since last night."

A paper had been nailed to a post, already damp with snow. The top line was printed in thick black letters.

REWARD. FIVE HUNDRED GOLD CROWNS FOR THE SEA THIEVES WHO STOLE THE CROWN'S STARLIGHT PEARL.

Below it was a drawing of a white sphere in a silver chain. I knew that sphere. I had watched it laugh and flicker in the Hall of Lights for twenty years. Underneath the drawing, in smaller print, someone had written: The Queen urges all loyal subjects to report strangers from the coast. By order of Her Majesty, Queen Ilvane.

"Stolen," I said. My voice was very flat.

"Fancy thing, isn't it? Fell off a royal ship, they say, or was snatched by coast thieves. Nobody's seen it." Tob shrugged. "I think the Queen lost it herself and wants somebody to blame."

The finding shell in my pocket grew warm against my thigh. I took it out under cover of my sleeve. The silver pearl at its center had turned, like a compass needle, toward the north.

Not stolen, I thought. Taken. And whoever took her had the nerve to put up a reward.

"I need somewhere to sleep," I said. "Tonight. And somewhere to listen."

Tob considered me with new interest. "The Drowned Lantern. It's the loudest inn in the east, and the loudest place is always the best place to listen." He tugged his hat down. "Fair warning. It's full of wolves."

It was. I counted forty before I stopped, big men and women in fur collars, packed around long tables with mugs the size of my head. The noise was extraordinary. A fiddle screeched in one corner. Someone had set fire to a tablecloth and was being cheered. When I walked through the door, three people near the fire stopped talking and turned their heads at the same moment.

One of them, a lean woman with a gray braid, sniffed the air. "Salt," she murmured. "And something else. Cold. Like the smell before lightning."

My stomach turned over.

"Don't look," Tob whispered, gripping my sleeve. "Sit. Eat. Act boring."

I sat. A bowl of stew appeared in front of me, and it was so hot and thick that I forgot to be afraid for nearly a minute.

Then the front door flew open and cold air rushed through the room. Twelve men in gray cloaks stood in the doorway, each with a silver pin shaped like a wolf's head on his shoulder. The fiddle stopped. The tablecloth fire went out.

A man walked in behind them. He was tall, in a long black coat with snow on the shoulders, and he moved like something that had never once needed to hurry. His hair was dark and cropped close. A pale scar ran from his jaw to his ear. He didn't look at the room. He didn't need to. Every head in it had already turned toward him.

"Alpha Halvard," someone whispered.

"Nobody leaves," said the man. His voice was quiet and level and it went through the room like a blade. "Search every floor."

And the thing inside me, the thing that had howled that morning on the beach, lifted its head again, and I had a terrible, clear feeling that it knew him.