The Alpha Threw Me To The Hyenas

Chapter Two: Treason

"No," I said.

Louder this time. Not shouted. I have never had the kind of voice that shouts well. But loud enough that the man standing nearest the dais turned his head like something had gone past his ear.

Then somebody laughed.

That is the part people forget when they tell this story back to me now. There was no gasp. Nobody screamed. A man about halfway down the hall let out one short laugh, the kind you make when a waiter drops a tray, and it was that sound and not my voice that broke the room open.

After that it was noise. Six hundred people all deciding at once that they needed to say something to the person beside them. I heard my own name in it, or the name they used for me, coming from four or five directions like weather.

I stood still. I had spent twenty-two years in that house learning how to stand still.

Kael had not moved. He was looking at my face now with his jaw set and his hand half lifted, and whatever had gone through his expression a moment ago had been put away somewhere.

Then Halvard Varro stood up.

He did not do anything else. He did not raise a hand or clear his throat or ask for quiet. He simply came up out of the chair, and the hall shut its mouth so fast you could hear the last few words land in the silence and die there.

"Sit down," he said. "All of you."

They sat.

He came down the three steps off the dais without hurrying and stopped a little to the left of his son, close enough that the two of them made a line I was standing at the end of. Up close he was smaller than I had thought. There was grey in the hair at his temples and a pale scar under his jaw that looked old enough to have been a childhood thing.

"What is your name," he said.

It took me a second. Not because I did not know it. Because nobody had asked me in a very long time.

"Zaira."

I said it clearly. I watched it go out across that hall and land on six hundred people, and I watched almost every one of them fail to recognise it. They had fed me and stepped around me and sent me for things since I was four years old, and my name meant nothing to any of them.

Somewhere near the back, one voice said it back. Just once, quietly, like a woman checking a word she had misheard.

"Zaira," Halvard said. He said it the way you repeat a figure back to a clerk. "Do you understand what a binding is."

"Yes."

"Tell me."

"It is a bond the house witnesses."

"That is what it looks like." He put his hands behind his back. "It is a contract. The bond names two people and the house stands as witness, and the witness is what makes it law. Do you follow."

"Yes."

"Then follow the rest of it." His voice did not change at all. "You have not refused my son. My son is a man and men get refused. You have stood in the middle of the house of Ilthar and told six hundred witnesses that the house is not owed what the bond gave it. That is not a private matter and it is not a girl changing her mind. There is a word for it and the word is treason."

The hall was so quiet I could hear the ventilation.

"Do you understand what you have done," he said.

"I do."

"No," Halvard said, almost kindly. "You do not."

Behind me, off to the right, there was a scuffle. I knew the sound of Mira moving before I knew it was her, because I had heard her come through kitchen doors my entire life. She got about four feet into the aisle before two men had her by the arms, and she did not fight them, she just kept talking, saying my name and then saying she is a good girl, she is a good girl, over and over in a voice that was already going ragged.

I did not turn around. I knew that if I looked at her I would fold, and I would say yes, and I would eat properly for the rest of my life.

Kael stepped in front of me.

He did it fast enough that his father had to take half a step back, and he put himself between me and the room, and when he spoke it was low and quick and only for me.

"Take it back."

I looked up at him.

"Say you misspoke." His eyes went over my face like he was reading something with the light behind it. "Say you are ill. You have been standing under those lamps for twenty minutes and you are not eating properly, anyone can see it. Say you fainted and misspoke and I will finish the words and this ends here. Zaira. Look at me."

He used my name. He was the second person in that hall to use it.

"Whatever you think this is," he said, "it is not that."

And for about one second I believed him. That is the thing I have never been able to explain to anybody afterwards, including myself. There was something underneath his face that I wanted very badly to be true.

"You didn't look at me," I said.

He stopped.

"When you said the words." My voice stayed level. I was proud of that for years. "You looked at the wall. You stood in front of everyone who has called me Scrap since I was nine years old and you did me a kindness with your eyes on the wall, and they all watched you do it."

Something moved through him. Whatever it was, he did not let it get as far as his mouth.

"That is what you are burning your life for," he said.

"Yes."

In the second row, Ivette Sarn had not moved once. When Halvard told the hall to sit down, she had already been sitting. She had her hands folded in her lap and she was watching the two of us with an attention so complete it was almost rude, and she was the only person in that entire room who did not look frightened.

By the far door, Ilyas had come off the wall. He had not come forward. He had simply stopped leaning, and his arms were no longer folded, and he was watching Halvard rather than me.

Halvard said, "Kael."

Kael did not turn round.

"Kael."

"I heard you."

"Then finish it."

I have gone over those two words more times than any other two words in my life. Finish it. I have taken them apart and put them back together and held them up to every light I have ever found, and I still cannot tell you with any certainty what the man meant.

Kael stood very still with his back to his father.

Then he reached down and took hold of my wrist.

His hand closed over the house marks, the two short lines they put under my skin when I was three days old, and his grip was not rough. That was somehow worse. He held my wrist the way you hold something you are trying not to break, and he lifted it between us, and I felt the whole room lean in.

And I looked up at his face and I could not tell, I could not tell at all, whether the man was about to save my life or shut my mouth.