The Alpha's Funeral Was My Wedding Day

Chapter 13

I have been accused of poisoning a man in this hall twice. The first time, I begged.

I want that on the record, since we are all so fond of records here. Five years ago I got up off this floor with my hands out and my voice going thin and I said test the elders, test my stores, test anything, and it made no difference at all, because a room that has decided a thing does not want your evidence. It wants your fear. It wants to watch you scramble. A woman scrambling looks guilty in every language there is.

So this time I did not scramble.

"May I see it?" I said.

The steward blinked. "Luna, the vial is evidence, it will be held for—"

"It will be held for the summit's judgment, yes, and the summit will judge better if someone in this room knows what they are looking at. I am the only healer standing." I put my hand out, palm up, and let it stay there in front of four hundred people. "I'll not touch the seal. Bring it under guard and hold it yourself if you like. But somebody is going to examine that vial before the summit votes on my life, and the alternative is that a hall full of Alphas decides a question of medicine by show of hands."

Somebody at the Reaches table laughed once, sharp, and cut it off.

The steward looked at Kane, who was upright now in his chair with two stewards bracing him and a color in his face like wet ash, and Kane moved one finger, and that was that.

Ravenna surrendered the vial without a flicker. That, too, I noticed.

***

Green wax. Willow leaf, pressed clean.

I turned it in the light with the steward's fist wrapped around my wrist, which I had suggested myself, because a healer who lets herself be held while she works looks like a woman with nothing to hide, and I had learned a great deal in five years about what things look like.

"This is my seal," I said. "That is the truth and I'll not waste the summit's time pretending otherwise."

The hall shifted. Stellan of Silver Moon sat back with the expression of a man watching a debt come due.

"It is also," I said, "five years old."

I held it up.

"Wax ages. It shrinks off the glass, it cracks along the pressure lines, it goes matte where it was glossy. This is old wax, and I can show any Alpha who cares to look how it has pulled away from the neck. Second." I tilted it. "The stamp. There is a nick in the willow leaf, right here, at the base of the stem. I dropped that stamp on a stone floor in the spring of my second year in this pack and it has carried that nick ever since. Any vial I sealed after that spring has this mark, and any vial sealed since I left this pack has no mark at all, because the stamp went into the snow with me and it is currently in a box in a healing hall two hundred miles north where my apprentice can produce it inside a week."

Silence.

"So no, this vial is not a forgery," I said. "It is genuinely mine. I sealed it in this pack, more than five years ago, in a workroom I have not stood in since the night my wolf was taken. Which leaves one question, and I would like the record to hold it in plain words." I set the vial down on the table. "Where has it been?"

Nobody said anything.

"The night I was exiled," I said, "my stores were confiscated. Every jar, every vial, every ledger. That is standard. Contaminated healer, sealed workroom. So somewhere in this house there has been a locked store of my sealed vials for five years, and this morning one of them was emptied into the Alpha's cup." I looked up the length of the table. "I did not have a key. I have not been inside these walls in half a decade. So who did?"

And Ravenna of Silver Moon said, calmly, before anyone else could speak:

"I did."

***

You could hear the hall stop.

She stood very straight at the high table with her husband's cup still in her hand, and she said it the way you'd confirm the time of a meeting.

"The healer's store has been under the Luna's key since the night it was sealed. That is also standard. Contaminated stores are the Luna's charge." Her chin came up a fraction. "Anyone who wishes to imply something may imply it out loud. I have never enjoyed being gestured at."

"Ravenna," Kane said, from his chair.

"There is a second key," she went on, over him, unhurried. "There has been for four years. The pack healer holds it, because the pack healer needs the room, and because I am not so stupid as to be the only person in Blackridge who can open a door full of poison." She set the cup down. "Summon her."

I had not thought about it. That is what I keep coming back to. In five years I had thought about Kane and about Ravenna and about the clerk I did not yet know existed, and I had built a hundred versions of this hall in my head, and in not one of them had I stopped to ask myself who had inherited my workroom.

The doors opened. A young woman came in, escorted, in the grey apron of a pack healer, and she walked the length of the hall with her hands twisted in that apron and stopped ten feet from me.

Twelve years old when I took her. She used to fall asleep in the drying room. She had a gift for setting fingers and no stomach at all for blood and I told her once, laughing, that she would grow out of one of those and I had bet on the wrong one.

"Marit," I said.

She looked at me and her whole face came apart, and she said, "Sera," and then remembered where she was and what I was called now and stopped.

"You are the healer of Blackridge," the steward said.

"Yes."

"You hold the second key to the sealed store."

"Yes."

"Has that store been opened?"

Marit's eyes went, for the smallest fraction of a second, to a chair by the window where an old man sat with a blanket over his knees.

It was nothing. It was less than nothing. A girl in front of four hundred wolves looking anywhere but at the accused, and I would have missed it entirely except that my daughter's hand tightened around two of my fingers, because Nell had seen it too and Nell notices things first.

"It has," Marit said. "Three days ago. I opened it myself. There is an entry in the healing hall log, signed."

"Signed by whom?"

"By me." She swallowed. "I was instructed to inventory the old stores before the summit. Standard, before a full hall. So that nothing dangerous is in an unwatched room while four hundred guests are in the house."

"Instructed by the Luna?"

And Marit, who I had taught to set fingers, who had fallen asleep in my drying room, looked at the floor and said, "By the summit's recorder. He keeps the log schedules for the packs. He always has."

The pen by the window did not stop moving.

***

After that it went fast, the way these things do once a room has a shape it likes.

Stellan of Silver Moon was on his feet demanding the accused be taken into the summit's hold pending judgment, which is a phrase that means a cell with better manners. Two of the smaller packs backed him because two smaller packs always back Silver Moon. Ironford wanted the whole matter deferred until after the reading, which was self interested and, for that reason, honest.

And the steward, who was by now visibly praying for a fire or a flood or any act of the moon that would end this summit, produced the law.

"An accusation laid under truce against a delegate of a recognized party," he read, "shall be answered in one of two ways. The accused may submit to the judgment of the seated packs." He cleared his throat. "Or the delegation may withdraw entire, under arms, before the sun sets, and the accusation stands unanswered in the record against that party's name."

Withdraw. Ride out today, all of us, whole. And leave the instrument sealed in its box, and the motion dead with our departure, and every wolf on this continent knowing that Thornmere ran, and my son's name in the record next to the words unanswered accusation for as long as anyone keeps records.

Or stay. And be judged by five packs, three of which had signed my family's death, in a hall where I have already been convicted once by acclamation on the strength of a vial exactly like this one.

"Luna," the steward said. "How do you answer?"

Caspian moved beside me. Not much. He put himself half a step forward, which anyone else would have read as a king shielding his Luna, and said, quietly enough for only me, "Say withdraw and we are on the road in an hour. I will burn the recognition and the summit and the whole southern half of this continent and consider it a fair trade. Say the word and it is done, and I will never once ask you about it again."

"And the reading?"

"There will be other years," he said. "There is only one of you."

From his chair by the dais, grey and shaking and holding onto the arms of it with both hands, Kane was watching me. He had heard none of that. He had heard the law, though, and he knew exactly what withdrawing would cost, because it was his own motion dying, and I watched him work out that he could not ask me to stay, and could not bear me to go, and had no right left in the world to say either.

Nell's hand was still around my fingers. Rowan had come up on my other side without being told and stood there in his plain coat looking at the Alphas of the continent the way you look at weather.

Four hundred wolves waited.

And by the window, in the good light, my grandmother's brother dipped his pen and waited to write down whatever I said next.