Chapter 57: The Patron's First Daughter

The infirmary door stayed open behind Elara, but she did not step through. Nora crossed the threshold and closed it, leaving Maeve and Darius in the corridor with the other women. "Tell me everything you remember," Nora said. "The details that feel wrong." Elara sat on the edge of Iris's empty cot. The smell of the ink still clung to the room--bitter, floral, wrong. "Mara was seven when they came. Two women in gray cloaks. No pack scent. No pack mark. They said she had been chosen for a great honor." "Chosen by whom?" "They didn't say. But when Mara looked at me, her eyes were already changing." Elara pressed her palm to her chest. "She told me I wouldn't remember her face. She said the patron gave her the gift of forgetting. A mercy, so the separation wouldn't hurt." Nora's stomach tightened. "A gift that makes you forget your own daughter is not mercy." "My daughter believed she was going to something better." Elara looked down. "And part of me believed it too. Because if she wasn't, then I handed her to monsters for nothing." Silence stretched. Nora thought of Hope asleep in the unclaimed room. "Mara said something else," Elara whispered. "The night before they came. She said the patron was lonely. That she had been alone so long she forgot what warmth felt like. And then she said the patron was the first." Nora's pulse caught. "The first what?" "The first crown-moon daughter. The one who chose to stay instead of passing the mark on. She found a way to keep it inside her own body, let it turn her into something that doesn't age." Elara's voice broke. "Mara said the patron's skin is covered in scars from where the mark tried to leave her. She burned it shut." Nora felt her own mark pulse--Hope's mark, really, bound to Nora's protective claim. "Mara touched my face that night," Elara continued. "She had a scar on her palm. A crescent. Like a bite mark that never healed." Nora's blood went cold. She stood, walked to the basin, and splashed water on her face. She turned back. "I need you to stay in Frosthold. Do not leave until I tell you." Elara looked up. "What are you going to do?" "Find out what the patron looks like under the scars." Nora left the infirmary and walked toward the nursery corridor. Darius stood at the door, back to the wall. He didn't ask. He only looked at her face and said, "You saw something." "I saw a woman who chose to become a monster because she was afraid to disappear. And I think Seraphine was seven years old when she made that choice." Darius's jaw tightened. "You don't know that for certain." "No. But I know how a crown-moon mark behaves when it tries to leave a body." She pushed open the door. The nursery was quiet. Frostlight painted the walls silver. Hope lay in her cradle, one hand curled against her chest. Nora crossed to her and gently lifted the edge of the baby's blanket. The crown-moon mark glowed faintly on Hope's sternum. A perfect crescent since birth. But tonight, in the dim light, Nora saw a second line. Thin as a hair. A scar that had never been a wound--just a shadow of a mark that had tried to stay somewhere else. Hope's birthmark carried a ghost. And Nora knew whose skin she had seen it on before.