SARA

Chapter 4

Nobody moved for a while.

Sara stood in the middle of it and tried to think clearly.

This was harder than usual because the scar on her collarbone had stopped burning and it was like something pressing outward from beneath the skin, like a door being pushed open from the inside by something that had been leaning against it for a very long time.

She pressed two fingers against it through her jacket, a small unconscious movement, and made herself stop when she realized she was doing it.

Around her, the room was beginning to recover.

It happened slowly and in order of rank, she noticed, which told her something about how pack hierarchy interacted with whatever had just happened. The soldiers by the door came up last, still visibly unsteady, their hands going to the walls for a moment before they straightened. The officials along the wall rose with the careful movements of people whose bodies had done something without their permission and were not entirely certain it wouldn’t happen again.

Dorian came up from one knee with his jaw tight and his eyes on her, the warmth completely gone from his expression, it was now sharp and calculating, something he didn’t quite manage to put away before she saw it.

Caius rose last among the princes, and he rose the way he did everything, completely, with no acknowledgment that it had happened at all. He was on his feet and his face was exactly as controlled as it had been before he went down, which Sara recognized as an act of will significant enough to be impressive. His eyes found her immediately.

The Queen Regent was already standing. Sara didn’t see her rise. One moment she was down, and the next she was upright, one hand still resting on the table’s edge, her eyes fixed on Sara. It had moved past both of those into something quieter and more dangerous.

Elder Brynn spoke first.

Sara hadn’t noticed the old woman when she entered the room. She was seated in a chair against the far wall, away from the table, which explained it. She was ancient in the way of things that have decided age is simply not going to be the thing that stops them, white-haired and small and wrapped in grey robes, with the particular quality of stillness that came not from composure but from genuine calm. Her eyes were milky with age and Sara thought for a moment she might be blind, but then those eyes moved directly to her with an accuracy that settled that question.

“The altar has not moved in two hundred years,” Elder Brynn said. Her voice was steady and unhurried. She was speaking to the room but looking at Sara. “The last time it activated, it chose a king. Before that, the time before, it chose differently.”

“What did it choose before that?” Dorian asked. His voice was back to its pleasant register but his eyes hadn’t changed.

“A Primordial,” Elder Brynn said simply, as if this were an answer that explained itself.

The word landed in the room and sat there. Sara watched the faces around her and noted who reacted and how. Dorian went very still. Riven, who had risen from the floor with considerably less drama than his brothers and was now standing slightly apart from the table with his arms crossed, looked at everybody in the room. Caius’s expression didn’t change, which meant either the word meant nothing to him or he was controlling his reaction better than anyone Sara had ever encountered.

The Queen Regent turned away from Sara and looked at the altar. Just for a moment. Then she turned back and her face was composed again, every crack sealed, the mask rebuilt with the speed of long practice.

“This is irregular,” she said. Her voice was perfectly even. “The Rite requires a formal presentation. The altar’s response to an unregistered trespasser is not a legal activation.”

“The altar doesn’t practice law,” Elder Brynn said mildly.

“The succession does,” the Queen Regent replied.

“Grandmother.” Caius’s voice cut across the exchange, quiet and final, “Leave the legal argument for the council.” He looked at Sara. “Take her to the east wing. Separate quarters. Under guard.”

“She’s a trespasser,” the Queen Regent said.

“She was a trespasser,” Caius said. “The altar has complicated that.”

He didn’t look at his grandmother again after that. He looked at Sara, and the look said nothing except that he was aware of her position in the room and had already calculated the appropriate response to it, and that she should not mistake any of this for anything in her favor.

The soldiers came to collect her and she went.

The east wing was different from the rest of the Keep. The corridors were wider. The torches were spaced closer together so the light was consistent rather than interrupted. The floors had been covered in dark rugs that silenced footsteps in a way the bare stone of the main Keep did not.

Her room was at the end of a corridor that had two other doors on it, both closed. The room itself was larger than any space she had occupied in four years of Ashfen living, stone walls hung with tapestries that did the double duty of decoration and insulation, a bed that was actual furniture rather than a surface to sleep on, a window that was real this time, tall enough to look out of, though the view it gave her was an interior courtyard with high walls and a single gate.

She stood in the middle of the room after the soldiers left and the door closed and the lock turned, and she breathed for a moment.

Then she went to the window and assessed the courtyard.

Three guards at the gate. Two more on the courtyard perimeter. The walls were thirty feet at a minimum with nothing to grip on the interior face. The window she was standing at was on the second floor, which put the drop at approximately fifteen feet onto stone, survivable but not clean.

She moved away from the window and sat on the edge of the bed and did what she always did when the immediate physical options ran out. She thought.

The altar had done something apparently strange.

She didn’t know what that meant. She knew what it looked like and she knew how the room had responded to it and she knew that Elder Brynn had said the word Primordial. She knew that the Queen Regent had looked at her in a way that was difficult to describe before she looked at the altar, which meant whatever had just happened was maybe a complete surprise to the most powerful woman in the Keep.

She knew that the scar on her collarbone, which had never done anything in twenty-one years of existence, had responded to Caius’s proximity in the forest and then again to the altar, and was not doing anything to her at the moment. She knew that she had a confiscated ledger somewhere in this building that needed to either be retrieved or destroyed before morning.

She focused on that last problem because it was the one she could actually act on.

The door, she had noted, was locked from outside with a standard iron bolt. The lock itself was straightforward, she had seen the soldier turn it, and she had seen what kind of key he had used. A flat iron key, standard garrison issue, which meant it was a standard garrison lock, which meant it was the same category of lock she had opened seventeen times in the last four years using a piece of stiff wire she kept wound around her wrist beneath her jacket sleeve.

She checked her wrist. The wire was still there. The soldiers had taken the ledger and her outer jacket when she was processed but they hadn’t taken the wire because they hadn’t found it. After all, she had been keeping it in place since she was sixteen years old and she had learned by then how to hold her arm in a way that made the slight rigidity of it invisible.

She looked at the door.

She looked at the window.

She thought about Caius’s face in the forest when she had said she would try to age faster, the slight shift of expression that wasn’t quite amusement and wasn’t quite irritation and hadn’t fit cleanly into either.

She thought about the Queen Regent’s face when the altar lit and the room went to its knees and Sara was the only one still standing.

She lay back on the furniture, crossed her ankles, and stared at the ceiling.

She would wait until the third hour of the night. The guards would be at their most settled then, the first rush of alertness from a new watch worn down and the second wind not yet arrived. She would go for the intelligence rooms first, find the ledger, assess its contents in less than five minutes, and make a decision from there.

She closed her eyes and did not sleep.