Chapter 27

On the first Thursday of every month, the Luna of Vaelmoor held what the pack called the Hearth.

It wasn’t a court, Lyra explained, not exactly. The King’s court dealt with land and treaties and blood feuds, the big, loud things. The Hearth dealt with everything else: a widow whose neighbor’s fence had crept two feet into her garden, a mated pair who couldn’t agree on whether their pup should go to school in the city, a grandmother who wanted her late husband’s den kept for her grandson and not sold. Small things. Things that mattered enormously to exactly one family at a time.

“Vivienne did it for a while,” Lyra said, sprawled across the end of my bed with a stack of old petitions on her stomach. “Badly. She used to rule for whoever brought the nicest present. Before her, nobody did it at all from the day Caspian took the crown, because he kept not having a Luna, and the council kept not letting anyone else do it.” She tossed a petition onto the pile. “So you’re going t