The Alpha's Funeral Was My Wedding Day

Chapter 3

The dead king's camp tried to kill me before breakfast.

To be fair to them, it was a test, and to be fair to me, I didn't know that when Iron put her spear through the space my head had occupied a half-second earlier. I was carrying water. The bucket died instead of me.

"Fast," Iron said, to the camp at large. "For a pack softbelly."

"You missed," I said, "for a woman who's clearly never missed."

"If I wanted you dead, healer, you'd be dripping off the cliff." She planted the spear and looked me over, braid to boots. "Camp rule. Everyone who eats, fights or works. You can't fight. So work. The boy's arm."

The boy's name was Finch, he was nine, and his forearm had been broken in the autumn and left to heal however it pleased. It had healed wrong. The bone bowed like a green branch, and he carried it against his ribs the way pups carry shame.

I sat him on a log in front of the whole watching camp, because Iron arranged it that way on purpose, and I told him the truth, because he'd been lied to enough by adults who let the arm set crooked.

"It healed wrong. To fix it, I have to break it again."

Finch looked at the bone. Looked at me. Nine years old, rogue-raised, thin as thread.

"Will it work after?"

"Yes."

"Then do it fast, before my mum comes back from the ridge."

Somewhere behind me, Iron made a sound that in a softer woman might have been a laugh.

I broke his arm fast and clean between two heartbeats, and before the pain could finish arriving I put both hands over the break and opened the thing my mother's line taught me to keep closed.

Here is what I expected. A trickle. The banked coal, damped by the stripping, enough warmth to knit a child's bone over days instead of months.

Here is what happened.

The gift came up like a river through a broken dam. Gold light poured between my fingers, actual light, throwing shadows at noon, and I felt the bone leap straight and seal and the old crooked healing melt and remake itself right, and I felt his cracked knuckle from last winter, and the hunger scars in his blood, and I fixed those too, without deciding to, the way water doesn't decide to fill a hole. It took four seconds. It should have taken four days.

Silence in the camp. Complete.

Finch flexed his arm. Straight. Made a fist. Held it up over his head, and screamed with joy loud enough to bring his mother running off the ridge with her knife out.

And around the fire pit, one by one, without any order given, forty rogue wolves went down on one knee.

"Get up," I said. My voice came out unsteady. "All of you, get up, I'm nobody's—"

"They're not kneeling to you," said Caspian, from the edge of the clearing.

I hadn't heard him arrive. Nobody ever did. He crossed the camp slowly, eyes on my hands, where the last of the gold was still guttering out, and there was something in his face I hadn't seen there before and didn't yet have a name for. Later I'd learn it was recognition.

"They're kneeling to that," he said. "Rogues are old-blooded. They keep the old stories the packs threw out. Gold healing hasn't been seen on this continent since." He stopped. Rewrote the sentence. "In a long time."

"Since when?"

"Eat something. You've gone gray."

"Since when, Caspian."

It was the first time I'd used his name. It landed somewhere; I watched it land.

"Since the last time a Thornmere queen was alive to do it," he said, and walked away, and left me standing in the snow with forty kneeling wolves and my hands still warm.

***

I want it noted that I did try to sleep.

The east room was warm, as promised. My body was a used bandage. I lay under the furs doing inventory, which is what I do instead of thinking. Two heartbeats, steady. One gift, wildly stronger than it had ever been, as if the pregnancy had thrown fuel on the coal. One dead king who knew what the gold meant and wouldn't say it. One phrase, circling: a Thornmere queen.

That's when I heard it. Or rather, that's when I heard the camp stop.

A rogue camp at night is a body making noise. Coughs, dogs, someone on watch humming badly. All of it cut out at once, the way sound dies when a predator crosses a meadow, and I was up with my boots on before I'd decided anything, because pregnant or not, stripped or not, I'd spent three years patching border patrols and I knew what that particular silence was.

Wolves in the dark. Moving wrong. Moving trained.

I cracked the door of the east room and the night came apart.

It was fast and it was quiet and I understood, watching, why forty hardened rogues went still when Caspian walked into camp. Six shapes came over the north rocks, hunters, black-harnessed, moving in a wedge like they'd drilled it, straight for the east room. For my door. Iron took the first one out of the air on her spear. The camp took three more in a boil of bodies and snow.

The last two never broke stride. Trained. Straight at me.

And then Caspian was simply there, between me and them, no cloak, shirt open at the collar in the freezing dark like the cold was beneath his attention, and he didn't shift and he didn't hurry. He caught the first hunter by the throat, one-handed, and held him off the ground the way you'd hold a lamp up to read by.

"Sera," he said, conversationally, while the man thrashed. "Go inside."

"He's wearing Blackridge harness."

"I know what he's wearing. Inside."

I did not go inside. I went through the dead men's gear while the camp held the survivor down, because a healer's hands are fast and nobody thinks to stop the woman checking bodies. Standard border kit. Silver shot. Rations for a week's travel, which from here reaches exactly one place.

And on the wedge leader, inside the harness lining, sewn flat where patrols carry their orders, a strip of oilcloth. I worked it out with two fingers while my heart went arrhythmic.

No pack seal. Smart. Unsigned, unmarked, deniable. Neat clerk's writing, five lines.

The healer lives. Rogue territory, north ravines. This cannot reach a tribunal. She carries. Make certain nothing does.

I read it four times. The cold I felt had nothing to do with the snow.

She carries. Two words. I had told no one. Kane didn't know. The midwife herbs I'd bought, I'd bought three villages away, under another name, in the rain, alone.

Someone had known before the coronation. Someone had watched me closely enough to count what I drank at solstice. Someone inside Blackridge, close enough to see, careful enough never to be seen, and whoever it was hadn't whispered it to Kane, who'd have been bound by law to claim his heir.

They'd sold it to the people who wanted me dead.

Caspian read the strip over my shoulder in silence. When he finished, he took it from my hands gently, the way you take a blade from someone who's just realized they're holding one.

"Well," he said. "Now we know why the frame was ready before the wedding was." He folded the oilcloth once, twice, into his palm. "You were never an inconvenience, little healer. You were scheduled."

Behind us, Iron's voice, flat: "The survivor's ready to talk."

"Good," said Caspian, and the temperature of the word dropped the whole clearing. "I have exactly one question."

He walked toward the pinned hunter, and I followed, one hand on my stomach, doing the only inventory that mattered now. Two heartbeats. Still steady. Still secret.

Except they weren't a secret. They never had been.

Somebody in Blackridge had known my children existed before their own father did, and had signed them over to the snow.

The hunter looked up at Caspian, then past him, at me, and I watched the man's face do something I will remember for the rest of my life.

He wasn't afraid of the dead king.

He was afraid of me.

"You're her," he whispered. "The gold. They told us it was a lie. They told us the line was finished, they promised us the line was finished—"

Iron's hand tightened in his hair. Caspian went very still.

"Whose line?" I said.

The hunter laughed, high and broken, a man already dead and past caring, and gave me my answer with his eyes on my hands.

"Ask your grandmother's grave, Thornmere."