Chapter 16
1310 Words
Chapter 16 — Spit and Stone
By dawn the packhouse was a fist, closed tight.
Every gate barred. Every window shuttered. Royal guards doubled on the east wing stair and doubled again at the nursery door, standing so close together their shoulders touched. Nobody in Ironridge slept, and nobody complained about it.
Sierra had not sat down since midnight.
"Nothing," Orin said. He set the report on her table like a man laying down a dead bird. "No print. No thread. No broken latch. The dogs in the yard never barked — and Majesty, those dogs bark at weather." He rubbed his face with both hands. "In thirty years I have never written the word nothing on a crown report. It's on this one four times."
"Scent?"
"That's the fifth." He hesitated. "There isn't any. Not faint. Not masked. None, Majesty. The toy has no hand-smell on it at all, and the note is worse — clean paper, clean ink, no sweat in the fibers. The trackers stood in that corridor for an hour and looked like men going deaf." He lowered his voice. "One of them asked me whether wolves can be — unmade."
Sierra thought of a cell three floors down and a smiling old man saying give my regards to the frost.
"Search the crypts and the old cellars," she said. "This house is older than the pack that lives in it. If nobody came through my doors, then there's a way in that isn't a door."
"At once."
"And Orin." She turned. "The guards on that corridor last night. I want their names on my desk — not for punishment. For protection. Whoever walked past eleven of the crown's best without waking one of them will not want witnesses."
The twins took it differently, the way they took everything.
Ash had already made a list. He presented it before breakfast, six items in careful lettering, ending with 7. Whoever did this wanted us awake and afraid. We should not give them the second one.
Knox had spent the night sitting up in bed with his practice knife across his knees, facing the door.
"You're not eating," Sierra said.
"I'm on watch."
"Knox."
"He came to our door, Mom." Five years old, hollow-eyed, jaw set like a man three times his age. "He stood right outside it while we were sleeping and we didn't even know. So I'm not sleeping tonight. Or the next night. I've decided."
Sierra sat down on the bed and did not tell him it was foolish, because it wasn't, and he'd have known.
"Then here's the Crown's counter-offer," she said. "You sleep. I take the watch."
"You can't stay up forever."
"No," she agreed. "Which is why I'm about to do something I will hate."
They met in the great hall an hour later, with the whole senior guard watching, because Sierra wanted witnesses to what came next.
Kade had been up all night too — she could see it in him, the gray under the eyes, the mud to the knee from walking the outer wall himself. He came in and stopped a careful ten feet away, the distance he'd kept since the gates.
"Majesty. The wall is clean. I've walked every foot of it twice and put my own warriors on the—"
"Why are you here, Alpha?"
He stopped. Started again, lower. "To ask for something. Then to be refused."
"Ask."
"Give me the twins' door."
Behind her, Orin made a sound. Sierra lifted two fingers and it died.
"Not the wing," Kade said. "Not the wing, not the corridor, not near your rooms. Just the door. Nights. Outside it, on the stones, from dark to dawn, unarmed if you prefer it." His hands were open at his sides. "There's a way into this house nobody's found yet. I grew up in it. I know which floorboards lie. And whatever walked past your eleven men last night, it will have to walk past me twice."
"You've given me forty warriors already."
"Warriors follow orders. I'd be there for a different reason." His jaw worked. "Majesty — if something comes through that door, your guards will die for their queen. I'd die stupidly. Loudly. All the way down, taking furniture with me. That's worth something at three in the morning and we both know it."
The hall was very quiet.
Sierra let him stand in it. Every instinct she had, every scar, every year, said no in a voice like a slammed gate. And underneath the no, the cold arithmetic she'd built her survival on said: the strongest wolf in this territory is offering to sleep on the floor outside my children's room, and he is offering it because it costs him everything and buys him nothing.
"You'd be a guard," she said. "Not a father. There is no door in this house that opens onto that word for you. Cross that line once and you'll leave this territory in irons."
"Understood."
"You'll report to Captain Orin like any spearman. You'll be searched at the stair every night, by my men, in front of the household."
"Understood."
"Say it in front of them, Alpha. All of it."
Kade turned to face the hall — his hall, his warriors, his elders in the doorway, the household that had watched him rule for five years — and said, without a flicker, "I ask the Crown's leave to serve as a common night guard at the royal children's door. I'll answer to Captain Orin. I'll be searched at the stair. I claim nothing and I'm owed nothing."
Somewhere near the wall, an old warrior turned his face away, unable to watch.
"Granted," Sierra said.
He came at dusk, and the household found reasons to be in the east corridor to see it: the Alpha of Ironridge, stripped of blade and belt, arms out while two royal guards patted him down like a poacher at a gate.
Knox came out to watch. Nobody had told him. Nobody ever had to.
He stood in his nightshirt in the doorway of the nursery with his practice knife in his fist and looked up at the enormous man taking his post on the stones. Kade looked down. For a moment neither moved, and the corridor held its breath.
"They said you're guarding our door," Knox said.
"That's right."
"Because you feel bad."
"Because it needs guarding."
"You threw my mom away." Knox's voice was clear and carrying and utterly steady, and every guard in that corridor heard every word. "She was having us. She told me it was raining and she was cold and everybody yelled at her, and you turned your back and walked up the stairs."
Kade did not move. "Yes."
"So you don't get to stand here like you're something."
"I'm not anything," Kade said. "I'm a wall. Walls don't get to be anything. They just have to be standing in the morning."
Knox looked at him a long moment.
Then he stepped forward and spat on the Alpha's boot.
The corridor went rigid — a guard's hand went to a spear, an elder gasped, someone in the back said the boy can't—
And Kade Sinclair went down on one knee in front of his son, took the corner of his own sleeve, and wiped the boot clean himself.
"Anything else, young highness?" he asked, from down there, quiet as a man in church.
Knox's chin trembled once — furious that it had — and he slammed the door.
Kade rose, and turned, and took his post facing the corridor, and stood.
He was still standing at three in the morning when the door creaked open behind him, six inches, and a small voice that was not Knox's said, "Don't turn around."
Ash had his notebook.
"I have eleven questions," he said.
- Writer
