The Alpha's Funeral Was My Wedding Day

Chapter 5

Caspian kept the names of his killers in a tin box, like recipes.

I didn't know that yet on the morning he came to the east room, three months into my seven years, and offered to give me back my wolf.

Winter had loosened by then. The camp had stopped watching me like a knife left on a table. I'd straightened Finch's arm and cleared the old woman's lungs and pulled a barbed arrowhead out of Iron's shoulder while she insulted my technique, which I'm told is how Iron says thank you. My waist had thickened past hiding. Nobody counted. Caspian had made counting expensive.

He stood in the doorway with the light behind him and said, without preamble, because he never carried any: "I can restore what they stripped. Your wolf. It's within the crown's gift, even a buried crown. I'm offering."

I put down the willow bark I was cutting.

Understand what he was holding out. The gray flatness, gone. The silence where she used to be, gone. My wolf, who went out like a lamp on a marble floor while five hundred people watched, back, warm, mine. There are nights I'd have crawled to Blackridge on open wounds for it.

"What does it cost you?"

"That's my concern."

"Wrong answer. Try again."

A muscle moved in his jaw. "It draws on the crown's own strength. Substantially. For a time I would be. Less."

"Less. In a rogue camp two hundred miles from packs that legally executed you, you'd be less, for a time, and the only thing standing between forty rogues and every hunting party north of the sea is you being exactly what you are." I went back to the willow bark, because my hands needed somewhere to be. "No."

"Sera."

"No. I won't owe you my wolf. And I won't be the reason this camp is standing over your body a second time." The knife slipped; I set it down before it could make my point for me. "She's gone. I lived through it once. I'm not spending your life to skip the grief."

He was quiet for long enough that I looked up.

I'd surprised him. I understood by then how rare that was, and something in his face had come open, just slightly, like a door in a wind, and what was behind it wasn't gratitude. It was worse. It was interest, the real kind, the kind neither of us had anywhere safe to put.

"Everyone wants something from a king," he said, finally. "Even a dead one. I've had three months to learn what you want, little healer, and I still don't know."

"Currently? The bark cut, and the doorway empty."

He didn't smile. His eyes did. He also didn't leave.

"Come with me. It's time you saw the box."

***

The tin box lived under the floor of his lean-to, wrapped in oilcloth, and it held everything a dead man had gathered on his own execution in five patient years.

He laid it out for me on a plank table. Copies of tribunal records, bought or stolen. A page of testimony from a witness who'd died the season after giving it. And at the bottom, folded like a letter someone had read a thousand times, the thing itself.

The order of execution, Thornmere. Under seal.

"Five packs sat the tribunal," Caspian said. "Five signatures ratified the sentence. The record you're holding is the clerk's fair copy. Three names are on it. The last two signed a separate instrument, sealed away, which was the price of their cooperation. Anonymity. Even from each other." His voice stayed level the whole way through, and I finally recognized what that level voice was. Not calm. Discipline over a wound that had never once closed. "Three names I've had for years. Two I've hunted for five and never touched."

I read the three.

Stellan of Silver Moon. Ravenna's father. No surprise, only confirmation, another stone in a wall I'd started building the night of the coronation.

Varga of the Reaches. A border pack, absorbed years ago, its Alpha long dead. A dead end that had cost Caspian a year, he said.

And third, in a firm officiant's hand, the ink barely faded:

Aldric of Blackridge.

The plank table was rough under my palms. I heard my own breathing change.

Aldric. Kane's father. Dead these six years, honored in the pack songs, his portrait above the hall where I'd stood ten steps from the dais. The Alpha who'd been served by my grandmother's herbs at his table. The pack that had sheltered the last daughter of the Gold Temple without knowing it, and would have burned her in an afternoon if the sealed order had ever crossed her scent.

I had spent my whole life healing the pack that signed my family's death.

I'd loved its Alpha's son. I'd carried his—

I was carrying his.

"Sera." Caspian's voice, from somewhere. "Breathe."

"He knew." My voice didn't sound like mine. "Kane's father sat a tribunal and murdered your entire family and hunted mine for twenty years, and Kane grew up under that portrait, and I, I stood in that hall, I lit a candle under your name on a wall his father put you on—"

"Kane was a pup when it was signed. Whatever he is, he likely doesn't know." Caspian said it evenly, fairly, and the fairness of it, from him, of all people, about Kane, of all people, undid something in me. "Sons aren't their fathers' signatures. If they were, I'd owe answers for mine."

"Then who inherits it?" I was on my feet. I don't remember standing. "Who inherits twenty-two years of drowned aunts and burned cottages and my grandmother going silent when I asked her one question, one, who pays for that if the signatures are all dead men—"

"The ones still hiding," said Caspian. "The two who bought their names out of the record. They're alive. Executions like mine don't stay tidy without living hands tending them, and living hands sent six hunters to your door with a week's rations and your solstice wine counted." He slid the oilcloth strip from the hunters across the table, next to the tribunal record. "Which brings me to why you're seeing this today. Look at both. Tell me what you see."

I looked. Tribunal fair copy, twenty-two years old. Kill order, one week old.

The room went very still around the two pages, and the cold walked up my arms one vertebra at a time.

The same hand.

Not similar. The same. The particular narrow loop of the l. The clerk's habit of finishing each line with a hairline flick, like a scribe getting rid of excess ink, twenty-two years apart, identical.

"The tribunal's clerk," I said. "The one who wrote the fair copy of your death. They're alive. They're still working." I looked up at him. "The same hand that recorded your execution wrote the order for mine."

"Yes."

"Whoever they are, they've been inside this from the start. Before Ravenna. Before Kane. Twenty-two years." My hands had begun, very faintly, to glow. I felt it before I saw it, the gold rising with the anger, ungovernable, lighting the two pages from below like a hearth. "They watched me my whole life. They're watching me now. And they knew my grandmother, they'd have had to, to find me, they knew her……"

"Sera."

"What."

"Look at my hand."

I looked.

The inverted crown branded into his skin was glowing. Faint, deep, red-gold, like iron remembering the forge, and it was pulsing, and it took me three full seconds to understand what it was pulsing in time with.

My light flared. His brand answered. My light steadied. His brand steadied.

Iron and light.

Crown weds gold. Nine generations. That was the law there.

Neither of us had touched the other. Neither of us moved now. Across the table, over the pages of both our executions, the dead king looked at me with an expression I had never seen him wear, and would have paid to never see, because it was the first honest, helpless thing his face had ever done.

Behind me, at the door of the lean to, Iron's voice, gray and quiet as ash:

"It's started."