The Alpha Threw Me To The Hyenas

Chapter Eight: Three Questions

They held it in the council room.

I want that on the record, because of everything that came before it. Six hundred people in a hall with a glass wall and a view of the whole city, and then five days later they decided what to do with my life in a room off the second landing with eleven people in it and a jug of water on the table.

It had a long table and a rug and a photograph on the wall of some Varro from four generations back standing beside a car. No windows. They had put the chairs down one side of the table so everybody was facing the same way, and there was a single chair on the other side, which was mine, and nobody said sit down so I stood behind it for a while like an i***t until Halvard glanced at it and I sat.

They walked me up through the hall to get there.

That was not necessary. There is a stair from the lower levels that comes out by the council room directly and I had used it a thousand times carrying things, and instead two men took me the long way, up through the hall, across the whole length of that floor.

There was a rug in the middle of it that had not been there before. Dark red, about eight feet by six, laid down flat over the boards where four slabs of stone used to be. Nobody had bothered to match it to anything. It sat in the middle of that beautiful room like a sticking plaster and every person who walked through there for the rest of that year had to step around it or over it.

I stepped on it.

Small thing. It was the only thing I had.

In the council room, Halvard sat in the middle. Odren, the heavy man from the front table who had wanted me put down, sat three along, and there was a woman from the legal side whose name I never learned taking everything on a laptop, and seven others I recognised without being able to place.

Kael stood.

There was a chair for him. It was empty and it stayed empty for the whole thing, and he stood at the end of the room with his back to the wall and his arms folded and the stitches still in his head, and his father did not once look at him.

"This is a hearing of the house," Halvard said. "It is being recorded. Do you have anything you wish to say before we begin?"

"No."

"Do you understand that you may say something at any point?"

"Yes."

"Good." He put his hands flat on the table. "There are three questions. Answer them plainly."

Mira had told me. Four days in a room with nothing in it and the thing I had thought about most was not the sentence, it was that she had known the shape of it well enough to warn me.

"First question. On the last night of the year, in the hall of this house, before the assembled witness of the house, did you refuse the binding."

"Yes."

The woman with the laptop typed.

"Second question. Do you say that at the time of the refusal you were ill, confused, under influence, or otherwise not in possession of yourself."

I looked past him, down the room, at Kael.

He was not moving. He had his arms folded and his jaw set, and he was watching me the way you watch somebody standing on a ledge, and I could see the entire four days he had spent on this sitting in his face.

Kneel, he had said. Say you were ill.

It is the only real gift anybody had ever tried to give me and it had been painted on a wall the whole time, and the terrible thing, the thing I have not been able to put down since, is that I could have taken it anyway. I could have said yes, I was ill. And then Halvard would have refused it in front of everyone and it would have gone on the record that I tried, and Kael would have known that I tried.

I could have given him that.

"No," I said.

Something went out of him. I watched it happen from thirty feet away.

"Answer in full," Halvard said.

"I was not ill. I was not confused. I was not under anything. I knew exactly what I was saying and I said it twice."

"Thank you." He did not sound anything at all. "Third question. Do you now, before this hearing, accept the bond and the witness of the house."

"No."

"Consider it."

"I have considered it for five days on the floor of your store room."

Odren said something under his breath. The woman kept typing.

Halvard sat back.

"Then it is entered," he said, and I remembered Ivette saying that exact word in a doorway and I understood that she had been right about all of it.

He looked down at nothing for a moment. When he spoke again it was in the same tone he had used to tell a boy not to clean a floor.

"Zaira of no house. You are stripped of the name of Ilthar and of any claim under it. From this moment you have no rank, no protection, no standing to petition, and no right of return. Your marks are forfeit and will be taken tonight."

"Father," Kael said.

"You are not recognised by this house, by any house allied to it, or by any person under obligation to it, and any person who feeds you, shelters you, employs you, or carries a message for you is in breach and will be treated as such."

"Father."

"You have no name," Halvard said. "Say it back to me."

I sat in a chair in a room with a photograph of a car in it and eleven people watching me, and I said, "I have no name."

"Good."

Kael came off the wall. "This is a girl who cannot shift and has never held anything. What exactly do you think she is going to do to this house from outside it?"

"Sit down."

"There is no chair," Kael said, "because you did not put one out for me."

Nobody in that room breathed.

Halvard turned his head and looked at his son for the first time since the hearing had opened, and he held it long enough that I watched a man of twenty-eight who owned a third of the city work out that he was not going to win, and stop.

"The sentence," Halvard said, "is exile beyond the salt line."

I did not know what that meant.

That is the honest truth and I need to set it down, because of everything people said about me afterwards, that I chose it, that I knew what I was walking into. I did not know. I had heard the phrase perhaps twice in my life, in the way you hear the names of countries you will never go to. Somewhere out past the edge of everything, two hundred miles of white nothing where the maps stop being useful.

Down the table, the woman with the laptop had stopped typing. Odren had gone a peculiar colour. And every single one of the other nine people in that room was looking at the table.

That was when I understood that it was worse than being killed. Not from anything Halvard said. From nine grown adults finding somewhere else to put their eyes.

"There is a process," Kael said. His voice had gone strange. "There is a process for exile, it goes to the allied houses for counter-signature, it takes eleven days, she is entitled to be housed and fed for the duration of it and she is entitled to speak at the end of it. That is the law. That has been the law for two hundred years."

"Yes," Halvard said.

"So she has eleven days."

"No." He was already gathering his papers together, squaring the edges of them against the table the way a man does at the end of a meeting that has run slightly long. "She goes tonight."