Chapter 15: The Ultimate Truth
The original prophecy was seven pages long.
Aldric—the Lycan King, grey-faced and upright, leaning on nothing and accepting no help with a pride that was clearly pathological—had retrieved it himself from the Council vault during the battle. He set it on the table between them without ceremony, and she understood from the way he did it that he had already read it. That he had known, perhaps for years.
"How long?" Lex asked. His voice was very even.
"I had suspicions when you were a boy." His father looked at the table. "Your mother was isolated the same way they were beginning to isolate this girl. Forbidden from the same things. I accepted it because accepting it was easier than fighting a five-hundred-year tradition." He stopped. "That is not an excuse. That is a confession."
Ava read the prophecy.
Then she read it again.
The laws forbidding the Moonheart from love were absent. Not edited out—absent. They had never been in the original text. What was there, in the complex and symbolic language of moon theology, was almost their exact opposite:
The Moonheart's power flows not from isolation but from bond. She is not made complete by separation from love but by its fulfillment. The joining of the Moonheart and the rightful King is the great sealing—the darkness that has sought to corrupt the wolf-kind since the first age shall not survive their union.
The laws forbidding her from Lex were not the will of the Moon Goddess.
They were the work of an Elder Council three hundred years ago who had decided that a Moonheart with political freedom was a Moonheart who could diminish their own power, and had rewritten the sacred texts accordingly, carefully, over generations.
The silence in the room had a particular quality to it.
"They isolated every Moonheart," Ava said slowly, "to make sure the power stayed theirs to control."
"Yes." Aldric's voice was rough.
"And your mother—" Lex had gone very still across the table. She felt him arriving at the same place she had. "They did the same to her. The law they used against her was—"
"Fabricated. Yes." His father looked at him directly for the first time since they'd entered the room. "She didn't have to go. I believed—I was told—there was no other way. I accepted it." A pause. "I should not have accepted it."
The apology was incomplete and overdue and clearly cost him everything he had.
Lex said nothing for a long moment. She felt him making some internal accounting—grief, anger, the particular pain of understanding your parent fully enough to see both the crime and the human frailty behind it.
"Where is she?" Lex asked.
Aldric closed his eyes.
"She's why we don't have long," he said.
