The Alpha's Funeral Was My Wedding Day

Chapter 14

"I answer with the old law," I said. "Since we love it so well here."

The steward's face did something complicated. "Luna, the two answers before you are—"

"The two answers you read me are summit procedure, and summit procedure is what, ninety years old? A hundred?" I did not take my eyes off the table. "I am a delegate of a pack older than this summit, older than most of the packs seated at it, and I am invoking the law that predates all of it. Trial by record. You have an accusation against my name, and you have, in this very hall, sealed in a box, a tribunal instrument twenty two years old that has never been read. Both concern the same house. I will answer the new accusation the moment the old one is read into the record, and not one moment before, and I will submit to the judgment of the seated packs on both at once."

The hall made a sound like a held breath letting go.

Because they saw it. Even the slow ones saw it. I had just chained my poisoning to Caspian's execution, welded them into a single question, and made it impossible to judge me without opening the box. Convict me, and you read the instrument first. Acquit me, and you read the instrument first. The only way to keep that paper sealed was to let the accusation drop entirely, and Stellan of Silver Moon had shouted for my hold too loudly, in front of too many witnesses, to let it drop now.

I had made the sealed thing the price of my conviction.

"That is not," Stellan began, "how—"

"It is precisely how." A new voice. Dry, unhurried, thin with age and carrying anyway. My grandmother's brother set down his pen. "Trial by record is valid law. It has simply not been invoked in the lifetime of anyone in this hall, because the packs found it inconvenient and let it fall out of use." He folded his hands. "But I keep the records, Alpha Stellan, and the old law does not lapse because it is unpopular. The Luna is within her right. If she stakes her answer on the reading, the summit must read, or drop the charge and clear her name entirely in the record. There is no third door."

I looked at the old man across thirty feet of the hall that both our families had died in.

He looked back at me, mild and terrible, and I understood that he had just handed me a sword, and that I did not know which way it was pointed, because he had spent twenty two years being the reason nine of us were alive, and he had just made it certain that the instrument would be read, and I could not for the life of me tell whether that was help, or the beginning of something worse.

*You should be praying that instrument stays sealed, child.*

He had said that to me himself. And then he had just guaranteed it would be opened.

Which meant either he had changed his mind. Or he wanted it read, and had wanted it read all along, and had needed someone else to be the one who demanded it.

"Read it," Kane said, from his chair. Grey, upright, holding on. "As host. My motion stands. Read it now."

The steward gave up.

"Bring the instrument," he said.

***

They brought it in a flat iron box, and it took two keys and the summit's seal to open, and inside was a single folded sheet gone the color of weak tea, and the whole hall of four hundred wolves leaned toward it like grass toward a wind.

The steward would not read it. He said his voice was not fit, which was a coward's dodge and an honest one, and the reading fell, by law, to the keeper of the record.

My grandmother's brother took the sheet in both hands. He did not need to hold it close. I understood, watching him, that he had written it, and that a man does not forget what he writes with his own hand into the death of a king.

He read it in that thin, pleasant, carrying voice, and the hall did not breathe.

He read the date. He read the charge, treason, that Thornmere of the Iron Crown and the Gold Temple had grown beyond the tolerance of the five packs and conspired against the common peace, which was a lie so old and so total that saying it aloud in daylight made several Alphas look at the floor.

He read the sentence. Execution of the crown line, entire. Suppression of the temple line, by any means, the order not to lapse.

And he read the signatures.

"Stellan of Silver Moon." Ravenna's father did not move. His face was stone. "Aldric of Blackridge." A sound went through the hall at that, and Kane closed his eyes, and did not open them for a moment, and when he did they were wet and fixed on nothing. "Varga of the Reaches, deceased." The old man turned the page slightly. "And two signatures appended under seal of anonymity, as was the tribunal's provision, their names withheld from the record and from each other by their own instrument, which I am bound by that same instrument not to break."

He set the page down.

"That is the record," he said. "It is read."

The hall erupted, and I stood in the noise of it and understood that he had given me everything and nothing in one breath. The crime was real, and named, and witnessed now by the whole continent. Aldric of Blackridge was a murderer in the open at last. Silver Moon's founding was a lie any pack could see. Thornmere's fall was a crime, which meant Thornmere's return was justice, and no pack in that hall could ever again send hunters north and call it law.

And the two hidden names were still hidden. He had read them into the record as unreadable. He had protected himself, and the other one, the one who signed because they wanted something, with the very instrument he was reading, in front of everyone, and there was not a thing I could do about it.

"The temple line," Caspian said.

He had not raised his voice. He did not have to. He said it into the noise and the noise died around it, because when the restored king of Thornmere speaks in the hall of his executioners, wolves stop talking to hear how it will go.

"The instrument orders the suppression of the temple line," Caspian said. "By any means. Not to lapse." He looked, slowly, down the whole length of the table, at Stellan, at the empty Reaches seat, at Kane, at the old man by the window. "The temple line is standing in this hall. Two of its children are standing in this hall. That order is twenty two years old and, by its own words, it has never lapsed." His voice was very quiet and very even. "So I would like the seated packs to say, out loud, in the record they are so fond of, whether that order is still in force. Because if it is, then every wolf in this room is bound by law to try to murder those two children, and I am bound by nothing at all in stopping you. And if it is not, then someone in this hall needs to strike it, by name, on the record, tonight."

Nobody spoke.

I had my hand on Rowan's shoulder and my other hand around Nell's fingers and I felt both my children go still in the way they do, the way that is too still for their ages, and I understood that Caspian had just done the most dangerous and necessary thing in the room. He had forced the question into the open. Are these children under a death sentence, yes or no. Say it now, in front of everyone, so it can never again be done in the dark.

The old man dipped his pen.

"Shall I record the motion to strike?" he asked, mild as milk.

And Stellan of Silver Moon said, "No."

***

The hall turned to him.

He rose. Silver haired, straight backed, unhurried, the founder's son of a pack built on a lie that had just been read aloud to the continent, and he was not a stupid man, and he had clearly decided that the only way out of a burning house is straight through the fire.

"I will not strike an order I signed lawfully," Stellan said, "to spare the feelings of a hall gone soft. The tribunal sat. The tribunal ruled. The line was a danger then and I see no evidence it is less of one now." He looked directly at my children, and his voice did not change at all. "A five year old brought four hundred Alphas to their knees two nights ago with a word. You felt it. Every one of you knelt. And you would like me to sign a paper promising to leave that alone, to let it grow up, to let it reach its full strength in the hands of a rival crown that hates every pack in this room." He let that sit. "The order was wise then. It is wiser now. It stands."

"Stellan," Kane said, and there was warning in it, ruined as it was.

"You are dying, Kane." Stellan did not even look at him. "We can all see it. You have been dying all season and now the healer who did it stands in your hall wearing a crown and you have not the wit left to see that she is the single most dangerous thing that has ever walked into Blackridge. That woman, and her light, and her children who bend Alphas like grass." He turned to the hall. "I call the seated packs to affirm the order. Now. By show of standing. Any pack that wishes to see that bloodline reach adulthood, keep your seat. Any pack that remembers what the tribunal knew, stand with Silver Moon."

And across the great hall of Blackridge, in ones and twos, wolves began to rise.

Not all of them. Not most, even. But enough. Ironford rose, and looked ashamed doing it, and rose anyway. Two of the smaller packs. Then a third. The scrape of benches, the shift of bodies, men and women standing up in a hall to affirm, out loud, in daylight, that my children should not be allowed to live.

I moved without deciding to. I put Nell behind me and I felt the gold come up my arms unbidden, and Iron was suddenly at my shoulder with her hand loose and ready at her side, and Finch had come off the wall, and the whole small Thornmere delegation drew in around two children like a fist closing, and across the hall the standing spread, bench by bench, and the air went tight as a held note.

Caspian did not move. He watched the packs rise to sentence his heirs and he was perfectly, terribly still, and I knew that stillness now, and I knew what it meant, and I knew that in about four more seconds the great hall of Blackridge was going to stop being a summit and start being the second Thornmere m******e, in the same room as the first, with my children at the center of it.

Nell tugged my sleeve.

I did not look down. I could not look down. The hall was rising and my hands were full of light and every exit had wolves standing in it.

She tugged again, hard, twice, the signal, the one that means listen to me now, and I dropped my eyes to my daughter's small certain face, and she was not looking at the standing packs.

She was looking up, at the high gallery above the hall, where the shadows were, and she said, in her small clear voice, under all the noise, the thing she had seen first, the way she always saw it first:

"Mama. The men in the dark have bows."