THE ALPHA THEY TRIED TO ERASE

Chapter 2: The Stag Does Not Bow

POV: Lucas Voss

Joss Harrow had been trying to put me on the ground for a quarter hour, and he was providing commentary the whole way.

"Your left is open," he said, circling.

"It's open on purpose."

"It's open because you haven't slept." He feinted high, I bit, and the flat of his practice blade cracked against my ribs. "There. Dead. Buried. The council weeps."

"The council throws a feast." I rubbed the spot and lifted my blade. "Again."

"You said that three bouts ago."

"And you agreed three bouts ago."

"I agreed because you're my Alpha, and I'm a coward." He settled into his stance, grinning. "Also because the last time I refused, you made me muck the east stables."

We went at it again. The training grounds were empty at that hour, only wet grass and the stone walls and a few apprentices pretending to sharpen spears so they could watch. Joss was the only one in Voss who would hit me properly. Everyone else pulled the strike at the last instant, and I could feel the courtesy in every blow like a hand on my shoulder, so I had stopped sparring with anyone else a year ago.

I caught his blade on mine, turned it, and put him on his back in the mud.

"Better," he wheezed.

"Say it again."

"Better, my Alpha."

"Not that. The part about being a coward."

"I stand by it." He took my forearm and let me haul him up. Then his eyes went past my shoulder and the grin left his face, which was how I knew who was coming before I turned.

Elder Marcus Vale crossed the grounds the way he crossed every room, unhurried, with his silver hair combed back and his gray robes kept clear of the wet by a clerk who trotted beside him holding the hem. He carried a folded paper in one hand. He was sixty-one and had served my father and my grandfather, and in nine years of my rule I had never once seen him arrive anywhere out of breath.

"Alpha Voss," he said. "Forgive the interruption."

"You've never asked forgiveness for one yet." I handed my blade to an apprentice who had materialized at my elbow. "What is it?"

"A small matter of housekeeping. I thought you should hear it from me before the gossips carry it to your table." He glanced at Joss. "In private, perhaps."

"Joss stays."

Marcus inclined his head, as if he had expected that and approved of my consistency. "Very well. A petition has come through the northern charter. Blackridge, a holding in the high peaks, rogues and the cast-off, mostly. Their leader is asking the council for recognition as an Alpha. The council in session voted to hear the petition at a formal hearing, nine days from the writ."

"Blackridge." I turned the word over. "I've seen it on a border map. Forty wolves, perhaps fifty. Who leads them?"

"A woman named Calder."

Joss's head came up. I did not look at him.

The water bucket stood on the wall beside me, a wooden ladle hooked to its rim. I took the ladle down, filled it, and drank, because my hands wanted something to do and the ladle was there. I drank all of it and hung it back on its hook with some care.

"Calder is a common enough name in the lowlands," I said.

"It is." Marcus watched me with mild, patient eyes. "This one was born in our own servants' quarter. Five years gone now. I confess I did not expect the petition. She styles herself Alpha. I believe the word is the Alpha, if one asks her."

"A female Alpha." Joss said it quietly. "That's not been seen in three hundred years."

"It has not been proven in three hundred years," Marcus said. "Claims are cheap in the mountains."

"And the writ?" I asked. "Who put it before the council?"

"The council in session."

"I sit above the council in session. Why was I not shown it?"

"A summons for a hearing requires no Alpha seal, only a verdict does. You were at the northern watchposts when it was voted, and it seemed a trivial thing to chase you with." He offered the paper at last. "This is a copy of the summary. Nothing in it requires your attention until the day itself."

I did not take it. "I'll read the original."

"The original has gone north with the courier."

"Then the courier will come back with her answer, and I'll read that, and I'll read the writ when he does." I held his gaze. "Elder Vale, I want to be plain. There are two kinds of housekeeping. One is done in daylight with my knowledge. I'd advise you toward the first kind."

Marcus smiled, a thin and gracious movement of the mouth. "As you wish, Alpha. I serve at your pleasure."

He walked away with the clerk trailing behind him like a loose thread. Joss waited until they had passed the second gate before he spoke.

"Aariana," he said. It was the first time her name had been spoken between us in four years and some months.

"Don't."

"Lucas..."

"I said don't." I went to the wall and put both hands flat on the cold stone. "She's in the mountains. She leads a pack. I'd wondered where she ended up, and now I know, and that's all there is to it."

"Is it?"

"Go and wash the mud off, Harrow."

He went. I stayed at the wall until the apprentices lost interest and began arguing over a dropped spearhead, and then I went to the Alpha chambers and sat for the better part of the afternoon with a stack of grain reports that I read four times without taking in a single figure.

The courier returned on the second evening, a day sooner than the roads should have allowed, which told me he had ridden hard and that somebody had insisted on it. I was already in the Council Chamber when he came through the great doors, mud to the knee, a leather tube under his arm. The council sat in their ring of nine high-backed chairs. Mine, the tenth, stood at the head. I had come early and taken it before anyone else arrived, and Marcus, entering with his clerk, had noticed this and said nothing.

The courier knelt and presented the tube. Marcus rose to take it, but I held out my own hand, and the courier, who had the look of a man who had been tired for several days and was done with politics, put it in mine.

"Name," I said.

"Edric Hallow, Alpha."

"You saw her?"

"I did."

"Did she receive you well?"

Hallow's mouth did something complicated. "She made me dismount on her ground, my lord. Then she fed me and watered my horse, and I have rarely been so well treated by a person who was so thoroughly telling me off."

Somebody on the council coughed to cover a laugh. I broke the seal. The reply was short, written in a firm, upright hand I had not seen in five years and knew at once, the way you know a voice through a wall.

Aariana Calder, Alpha of Blackridge, will attend the Succession Hearing on the ninth day. She will bring her son, Wren, as the writ commands. She will bring her own guard of twelve. She asks the council to name who put the boy's name before it.

I read it to the end. Then I read the middle again.

Her son.

I looked up. The ring of faces watched me, and I made mine do what it was trained to do. "She has a child," I said.

"A formality," Marcus said smoothly. "The writ required..."

"The writ you didn't show me."

"The writ, which named the boy as a claimant of blood in the matter of the Blackridge charter." He spread his hands. "A technical clause, Alpha. A way of testing whether the woman's pack is stable enough to be recognized. Councils ask for children at hearings all the time."

"Do they?" I turned to Hallow. "Courier. Did she say anything beyond the page?"

Hallow glanced at Marcus, then at me, and I watched him decide something.

"She said one thing, my lord, and she said I was to say it in front of the whole ring." He swallowed. "She asked who told the council the hour."

"What hour?"

"The hour of the boy's birth. It's on the writ, to the minute. She said she burned the only record of it herself, and she'd like to know who kept a copy."

Nobody coughed now. Nobody moved. I was looking at the council, and what I saw was a ring of nine people studying the floor, the ceiling, the grain of the table, anywhere but one chair.

Elder Marcus Vale was looking directly at me, and he was smiling again, and this time the smile had no gracious movement in it at all.