Winter's Claim

Chapter Seven: What Mira Carried

The pain in my side was nothing compared to the silence after that door slammed. I lay there counting my own breaths, because counting was the only thing keeping me from imagining what Bjorn was doing to Mira right now. Petra pressed a cold cloth to my forehead and told me to stay still. I did not listen. I never do when it matters most.

I pushed myself upright, and the wound screamed at me, a hot line of fire across my ribs. Petra grabbed my arm.

"You will tear the stitches," she said.

"Then I'll bleed on the way there instead of bleeding here," I said, and something in my voice must have convinced her, because she let go, muttering under her breath, and helped me stand instead of stopping me.

The corridor to the great hall felt longer wounded than it had the night I first walked it whole. Every step landed like a struck bell in my side. I heard the shouting before I reached the doors, Bjorn's voice, low and terrible, and underneath it, Mira's, cracking in a way I had never once heard from her.

I stopped in the doorway and the whole hall turned to look at me, bloodstained and upright, and for one long second nobody said anything at all.

Mira was on her knees in the center of the floor, wrists bound, her dark hair loose and wild around a face that had lost every ounce of its cold composure. Bjorn stood over her, and I understood, looking at him, that the man who had held my hand by the fire was gone, replaced by the Alpha his pack needed him to be right now, and it frightened me more than the attack had.

"Say it again," Bjorn told her, "so everyone in this hall hears it."

Mira's eyes found mine across the room, and something flickered there, not guilt exactly, something closer to desperation.

"I opened the west door," she said, loud enough to carry. "I told Grimfrost when the hall would be full and when the guard rotation was weakest."

A furious murmur rolled through the gathered wolves. Someone near the back shouted for her death, and I flinched, because I had grown up in a palace where punishment was cold paperwork, not a crowd calling for blood in the same breath.

"Why," Bjorn said, and it was not a question so much as a demand carved from two years of grief he had never let anyone see.

"Because you were never going to choose me," Mira said, "not even after Viktor died, not even when the contract should have made room for it. I told myself if I helped Drake shake the alliance loose, you'd need me again the way you needed me before she came." Her eyes cut to me, sharp even through her fear. "I did not know they meant to kill her. I swear that. I only meant to embarrass the wedding, not end it."

I believed the second part and not the first, and from the stillness in Bjorn's jaw, so did he.

"That does not undo what almost happened to that child," he said. "Or to Aria."

"No," Mira said, and here her voice dropped, and something in it made the whole room lean closer to hear. "But it is not the only thing you should be asking me tonight."

The hall went utterly silent. Even the fire seemed to hold its breath.

"What does that mean," Bjorn said.

Mira's gaze slid to me again, and this time it held something almost like pity, which frightened me worse than her hatred ever had.

"Drake did not come to me first," she said. "Someone reached him before I ever opened my mouth. Someone who wanted this alliance broken long before your wedding was ever announced." She swallowed hard. "Someone south of here."

My stomach dropped before my mind had even caught up to what she meant.

"Say it plainly," Bjorn said.

"A rider came through Grimfrost territory two months ago," Mira said, "carrying a letter sealed with the crest of Ashwood. I only know because Drake's men bragged about it the night they recruited me, said the southern king wanted his daughter's marriage to fail quietly, without his own hands on it, so the alliance debt would look broken by chance and not by his choice."

The room tilted around me, and it had nothing to do with the wound in my side.

"That's not possible," I said, though my voice came out smaller than I meant it to. "My father needs this alliance. He said so himself, at the table, in front of you."

"Your father needs the appearance of trying," Mira said, and for the first time since I'd known her, there was no cruelty in her voice at all, only a terrible kind of honesty. "A dead contract by misfortune costs him nothing. A broken contract by his own hand costs him the rest of his southern alliances. He gets to keep his hands clean either way, princess. That's the only kind of love your father knows how to offer anyone."

I thought of my mother's silence at that breakfast table. I thought of my father reminding me, calm as weather, that the three years were up. I thought of how easily he had let Viktor's death slide past me without a single word of comfort, only a schedule.

Bjorn crossed the floor to me before I realized I had swayed on my feet. His hand found my elbow, steady, grounding, and for a moment the fury in his face gentled just enough to ask, quietly, only for me, "Are you able to stand?"

"I don't know anymore," I admitted, and I meant more than my legs.

He turned back to Mira, and whatever softness had been in his voice for me vanished entirely. "You will be held until Drake's messenger can be found and questioned properly. If what you've said is a lie meant to spare yourself, you will wish the wound in Aria's side had been dealt to you instead."

Two guards hauled Mira to her feet, and as they dragged her toward the door, she looked back once more, not at Bjorn, but at me.

"Ask him about the second letter," she said. "The one that came after the first, once your father learned Viktor was already dead and the contract had passed to Bjorn instead. Ask him what your father offered Drake to make sure the marriage still failed, even with a different groom standing in the room."

The doors closed behind her, and the hall erupted into noise, voices arguing over what should happen next, whether Grimfrost would strike again, whether the alliance itself was already poisoned beyond saving. I heard none of it clearly. I was still standing in the wreckage of Mira's last sentence, staring at Bjorn, watching him realize, at the exact same moment I did, that there was a second letter neither of us had known existed, sent after my own father knew exactly which brother I would be standing beside when the ink dried on it.

"Bjorn," I said, and my voice shook in a way I hated. "What second letter?"

He did not answer me. He turned, instead, toward Ingrid, who had gone pale near the platform steps, her hand pressed flat against her mouth like she was holding something back that she was afraid to let out in front of the whole pack.

"Ingrid," Bjorn said, very slowly, very carefully, the way a man speaks when he already suspects the answer will break something in him. "What do you know that I don't?”