Chapter 8 — What Selene Knew
Selene's request came through Cassian, of all people, delivered in a hurried whisper before morning drills: a private meeting, unescorted, at a disused mill just inside Hắc Lâm territory where the border ran close enough to Ashworth land that neither of them would have to travel far or explain themselves to anyone watching.
"She said it has to be just you," Cassian added, clearly uneasy about the arrangement. "No guards, no Rourke. I told her that wasn't happening, obviously, so I'm coming too, but I'll stay outside if that's what it takes to get her talking."
Wren almost refused outright. Every instinct built over eight years at Ashworth told her that an unsupervised meeting with any member of that household was, at best, a trap dressed as an olive branch, and at worst a deliberate step back toward a life she had no intention of returning to. But she thought of Selene's face in the courtyard three days before — the crack in her composure, the fear that had looked nothing like performance — and decided, finally, that the risk was worth what it might buy her.
Rourke, when told, did not forbid it, though his jaw tightened visibly at the plan. "I don't like it," he said. "But I trust your read on people more than I trust my own instinct to protect you from every possible risk. Cassian goes. A guard escort waits within call but out of sight. And you tell me everything the moment you're back, whatever it is."
The mill sat abandoned at the edge of a frozen millpond, its great wheel long since rusted still against the ice, half its wooden paddles rotted through and hanging loose. Wren left the guard escort out of sight beyond the treeline as arranged and crossed the last stretch of open ground alone, Cassian trailing a careful distance behind, watching the tree line rather than her back, which she understood without being told was precisely the arrangement Rourke had asked of him. Inside, dust hung visible in the thin bars of light slanting through the gaps in the old roof, and Selene was already waiting, pacing a small worn circuit across the dusty floor as though she'd been rehearsing and discarding the same opening line for the better part of an hour. She'd traded her usual fine wool for a plain traveling cloak, hood drawn up despite the mill's shelter, and she startled visibly at the sound of the door before recognizing Wren's silhouette against the light.
"I found a letter," Selene said, before Wren had even fully stepped through the doorway. No greeting, no performance this time — just the words, delivered fast, like something she needed to say before her own nerve failed her. "In Mother's desk. Weeks ago, before any of this happened with the seal. I didn't understand it then. I do now."
"What did it say?"
"Not much. That's what made me keep thinking about it." Selene pulled a folded scrap from inside her cloak, hand-copied rather than the original, which she'd clearly not dared remove from the house. "*Keeping E. calm in the Hollow remains manageable, but her strength returns faster than expected. Recommend increasing the sedative dosage before the next inspection.*" She looked up. "E. I thought it meant nothing, at the time. A tenant, maybe, or some minor family matter I wasn't meant to understand. I didn't think of my mother, your mother, until the word 'Hollow' started circulating after your Wardship."
Wren's hands had gone cold, and not from the mill's drafty interior. "E for Elara," she said quietly. "My mother's name."
"I don't know for certain," Selene said, and there was something raw in the admission, as though saying it aloud made the possibility more real than she was fully prepared for. "I want to be honest with you about that. But I know the cellar beneath Bloodmoon Hall connects to a maintenance passage I used as a child — before it was sealed off entirely, about eight years ago, right around the time everyone stopped mentioning your mother's name in this house at all." Her voice wavered, just slightly, the first real crack Wren had seen since the courtyard. "I used to play down there. Before. There's an access point through the old laundry cellar that I don't think anyone's remembered to seal properly, because nobody but me and one of the old kitchen staff ever knew it existed."
"You'd help us get in."
"I'll help you find the entrance," Selene corrected, quick and careful. "I can't be seen doing more than that. If Mother learns I've said any of this to you, I don't—" She stopped herself, jaw tight. "I don't know what she'd do. I used to think I did. I don't anymore."
Wren studied her for a long moment, weighing eight years of cold silence against the visible fear in front of her now, and made a choice she suspected she would have been incapable of making a month earlier.
"I believe you," she said. "And I'm not going to hold the last eight years against you for this. You didn't build the house we both grew up in. You just grew up in it too."
Something in Selene's face broke, briefly and completely, before she forced it back into composure. "That's more grace than I've earned," she said. "I've been cruel to you. Cold, at the very least, for years, because it was easier than asking questions I didn't want answered."
"Maybe," Wren said. "But I'd rather have you now than keep punishing you for who you used to be forced to act like."
Selene gave her the mill's layout as best she remembered it, the location of the laundry cellar entrance, the rough distance and turns to where the sealed passage should connect beneath Bloodmoon Hall proper. One more detail surfaced as she finished, almost as an afterthought, though her tone made clear she considered it important.
"Malrick's been at the manor constantly this past week," she said. "More than usual, even for him. Always with Mother, always in low conversation that stops the moment I enter a room. It's like he's the one steering her lately, not the other way around. I used to think she consulted him. Now I think she's started obeying him, and I don't think she's noticed the difference yet herself."
Wren filed that beside everything else Rourke had already begun to suspect about the quiet scholar with the too-precise attention, the fragment of altered prophecy still sitting uneasily at the back of her mind, waiting for the moment it would finally make sense.
Selene sketched the passage layout as best she could remember it on the back of the copied letter, marking the laundry cellar entrance with a small cross, tracing the rough turns toward Bloodmoon Hall proper with a hesitant, careful hand, pausing twice to correct herself when a detail didn't sit right in her memory. "It's been eight years," she said, almost apologetically, handing the sketch over. "I was eleven the last time I went down there. I can't promise every turn is exactly as I remember it."
"It's more than we had an hour ago," Wren said, folding the sketch carefully into her own cloak.
They parted at the mill door with nothing so warm as an embrace — neither of them had that history to draw on yet — but with something that felt, for the first time, like the beginning of one. Selene mounted her horse first, pausing before she rode, and glanced back once. "Be careful of Malrick," she said. "More than of Mother, if it comes to it. I don't think Mother fully understands what she's part of anymore. I don't think that's true of him."
That evening, back at the Warden's Hall, a scout's report arrived that stripped the small hope the mill meeting had given them down to something far more urgent: Council guards had sealed off all approaches to Bloodmoon Hall two full days ahead of the scheduled Rite, citing "final ceremonial preparations," a timeline no one in Rourke's study believed for a moment.
"They've moved before we could plan properly," Rourke said, jaw tight, spreading Selene's rough sketch of the passage layout across his desk beside Cassian's copied survey, the two documents lining up with unsettling precision along the same crossed-out boundary. "Which means we go in during the ceremony itself, in the only window the crowds and confusion will give us, with no chance to scout the route beforehand." He traced the laundry cellar marking with one finger, then the long uncertain stretch of turns beyond it. "Cassian, I want you covering the entrance and holding it open behind us. If something goes wrong below, that's our only way back out quickly."
"Understood," Cassian said, already reaching for the sketch to commit the route to memory rather than relying on the paper itself once they were underground. He studied it a moment longer than strictly necessary, then folded it carefully and tucked it inside his jacket rather than leaving it on the desk, a small, deliberate act of caution that told Wren he understood exactly how much was riding on a single hand-drawn scrap of paper.
Wren felt the weight of that settle over the room — the sudden compression of a plan that had, until an hour ago, still felt like it belonged to some safer, more distant future.
"I'm afraid," she admitted, quieter than she meant to say it aloud, surprising herself with the honesty of it.
Rourke, beside her, didn't offer easy reassurance, didn't tell her the fear was foolish or unnecessary. He reached over instead and took her hand — briefly, steadying, his grip warm and certain against the cold that had settled into her fingers without her noticing.
"You don't have to prove anything by going," he said. "Not to me, not to the Council, not to anyone in that hall who's already decided what to think of you."
"I'm not doing this to prove anything anymore," Wren said, and found, saying it, that it was entirely true. "I'm doing it because she's my mother, and because I'm the only one who can get through what's keeping her there."
He held her hand a moment longer than the conversation strictly required before letting go, and later that night, after the plans had been drawn and redrawn twice more and the weight of the coming days had fully caught up with her, Wren found herself standing alone in the Hall's dark courtyard, unable to settle enough for sleep. Rourke found her there, and said nothing at first — simply stood beside her in the cold, steady presence doing more to calm her than any words could have managed. When she finally admitted, in a voice smaller than she liked, that she was afraid of what she'd find beneath Bloodmoon Hall, he drew her into a brief, careful hug, his hand steady against her back, offering nothing more than warmth and the simple, solid fact of not being alone in the fear anymore. Neither of them spoke again for a long moment, the courtyard silent around them except for the faint sound of a night patrol crossing somewhere beyond the wall, and when Wren finally stepped back, she felt, for the first time since the frost had sealed the greenhouse door two weeks ago, something closer to steadiness than fear.