Game of Alphas Batlle for Vengence

Things That Cannot Be Faked

By the end of his second week, James had a clearer picture of the Bloodthorn Clan than most of its members probably had.

He knew which warriors were loyal to Draven out of genuine devotion and which ones were loyal because they were afraid. He knew the tax routes, the guard rotations, and which gates were left understaffed after midnight. He knew that Rowan ran the military operations with the cold efficiency of a man who had stopped finding any of it interesting a long time ago. He knew that Varek moved through the compound like smoke, always just out of the center of the room, always positioned to watch without being watched.

He also knew that Sarah had not spoken to him again since the lane outside the slave quarters.

He found this harder to ignore than he would have preferred.

She had a pattern. He had not meant to notice it, but he was a man trained to notice patterns and she made the same rounds at the same times with enough small variations to suggest she was paying attention too. Mornings: water collection from the eastern well. Midday: the cooking houses. Late afternoon: nothing on schedule, which was when she seemed to do most of her dangerous things.

He found her on a Thursday afternoon quietly arguing with three other slave women in the narrow space behind the grain stores. They stopped the moment they saw him. Two of them looked frightened. Sarah looked at him the way she had looked at the tax collector: with the expression of someone doing math.

"Garrick," she said.

"I was not following you," James said. "I was walking past."

"Of course you were."

The other women drifted away with the practiced disappearance of people who had learned that visibility was dangerous. Sarah stayed. She leaned against the grain store wall and crossed her arms and waited with the particular patience of someone who had decided they were not going to be the first one to speak.

James leaned against the opposite wall.

They looked at each other for a moment.

"You are not like the others," she said finally.

"The other what?"

"The other Bloodthorn warriors." She tilted her head. "They make themselves known. Every room they enter, they make sure everyone in it understands who they are. You walk into a room and you watch it instead."

"Perhaps I am simply curious."

"Curious about what?"

"You, apparently."

That was not something Garrick would have said. James knew it the moment the words were out. He moved on quickly.

"There is a story I hear among the slaves. About someone who has been organizing them. Refusing the tax collection. Teaching them to resist."

Her expression did not change at all. That in itself was information.

"I have heard the same story," she said.

"You are either very brave," James said, "or very foolish."

"People who have nothing to lose are neither. We are just accurate."

He looked at her for a long moment. She held the look without difficulty.

There was a decision he had been turning over for two weeks, pressing at its edges, testing the weight of it. Now, standing in the narrow shadow behind the grain stores, he made it.

* * *

He took her to a section of the eastern wall where the stones had shifted slightly over years and left a gap behind a fall of ivy — not large enough to be useful for much, but large enough for two people to stand in without being seen. He had found it on his fourth day and kept it to himself since.

Then he turned to face her, and he took off his face.

Not literally. But almost. He reached up to the place behind his left ear where Odell had told him the key to the spell was anchored and pressed once, firmly, with two fingers, and watched Sarah’s expression change as Garrick’s features dissolved and his own settled back into place. Same height. Same build. Different jaw, different nose, eyes that were dark brown instead of grey.

Sarah stared at him.

She did not step back. He had half expected her to step back. Instead she stayed exactly where she was and her eyes moved over his face with the careful attention of someone who was deciding whether to trust what they were seeing.

"Who are you," she said. Not a question, exactly. Something more like a demand.

"My name is James. I was born Silverfang."

Something shifted in her face at that. Small, and quickly controlled, but there.

"You are the Alpha’s son," she said.

He stared at her.

"How do you know that."

"Because I was born Silverfang too," Sarah said. "And some of us remember more of what we were told to forget than others."

The silence that followed was one of the most significant silences of James’s life. He would remember it later — the smell of ivy and old stone, the distant noise of the compound beyond the wall, the look on her face which was not shock and not fear but something like recognition of a thing long suspected.

"My parents," she said. "They were Silverfang royal guard."

"I believe that," James said slowly. "I believe that more than I think I should be able to."

"They hid my identity the night of the attack. They did not survive." She said it plainly, the way she said everything, with the composure of someone who had already done whatever grieving needed doing and was now operating on the other side of it. "I grew up knowing I had a name that was not my real name and a history I was not allowed to ask about."

"And you never told anyone."

"Who would I have told." Not bitterness. Just fact.

James looked at her for a long moment. He thought about Odell, back in the hills, who had kept his own counsel for twenty years. He thought about the difference between secrets kept from weakness and secrets kept from survival.

"I came to take it back," he said. "All of it. The clan. The people. My sister." A pause. "I have a wizard and a plan and not nearly enough time. And I think I need someone who knows this place better than I do."

"You need someone who knows the people in it," Sarah said. "That is different from knowing the place."

"Can you do that."

"I have been doing it for three years." She uncrossed her arms. "The women I was speaking with this afternoon. The men who take the water to the grain stores. The children who run messages. I know which of them would fight if someone showed them it was possible." She met his eyes. "I have been waiting for someone to show them."

James held out his hand. Old custom, Silverfang. The joining of palms. A pact between equals.

Sarah looked at his hand, and then at his face, and then she reached out and took it.

* * *

That night, Selena knocked on his door again.

She had been doing this. He had begun to expect it and dread it in equal measure, the particular torment of someone standing in front of you with her face, your face, the face that belonged to a family line, and not knowing who you were.

She came in with wine this time. Two cups. The gesture of someone who had decided something and was enacting the decision.

"Sit with me," she said.

James sat, because refusing would have been stranger than agreeing.

She poured and handed him a cup and settled across from him with the ease of someone comfortable in her own presence. He had been watching her for two weeks now. She was clever, he had decided. Genuinely clever, and not only in the calculating way. There was something warm in her too, buried under the performance of belonging, and he found himself hating the Bloodthorn Clan freshly every time he saw it.

"You look at me sometimes," she said, "like you are trying to remember something."

His heart performed a complicated maneuver.

"I look at most things that way," he said. "Force of habit."

"What do you think when you look at me."

"That you are more interesting than you pretend to be."

Selena blinked. It was the answer she had not expected, and the unpredictability of it seemed to genuinely please her. She lowered her cup and looked at him with something more honest than she usually showed.

"Most people here are less interesting than they pretend to be," she said. "It is a quality I find exhausting."

"Then surround yourself with fewer of them."

"That is not how courts work."

"No," James agreed. "It isn’t."

They sat in silence for a moment that was almost comfortable. James was aware of how carefully he had to hold himself — how much of his face to show, how little, the exact calibration of a stranger who was interested but not too interested, warm but not known.

And then Selena did something he had not expected.

She reached across and touched his hand. Not romantically. Something older than that. Her fingers over his knuckles, barely there, and she looked at him with an expression he did not have a name for. Like someone hearing a piece of music from very far away and not being sure whether they have heard it before.

"I don’t know why," she said, very quietly, "but I feel as if I know you."

James looked at her.

He looked at her sister’s eyes in a stranger’s face and felt the truth pressing against the back of his teeth like something trying to get out.

"Perhaps you knew someone like me once," he said.

She withdrew her hand. The moment passed. She finished her wine and said goodnight and left, and when the door closed James sat in the chair for a long time in the dark.

He thought: I am going to get her out of here.

He thought: I am going to give her back her name.

He thought: I just need to stay alive long enough to do it.

Down the corridor, he heard Rowan’s footsteps pass his door, slow, deliberate, pausing for just a second outside before moving on.

James sat very still in the dark and listened until the footsteps faded.

Then he put down his cup, stood up, and got back to work.