The Alpha's Funeral Was My Wedding Day

Chapter 15

The first arrow was already in the air when my daughter finished the sentence.

I did not see who shouted. It might have been me. What I remember is the shape of the next half second laid out flat and slow the way emergencies lay themselves out for me, the archer's release in the high dark, the line the shaft would travel, the small dark head it was traveling toward, and the exact and total certainty that I was ten feet too far away and made of nothing that stops arrows.

Caspian was not ten feet away.

He moved the way he had moved in the ravine, in the snow, five years ago, which is to say he did not seem to move at all and then he was simply somewhere else, over Rowan, and the arrow that should have gone through my son's throat went into the king of Thornmere's shoulder instead, and he did not make a sound.

Then the hall came apart.

There is no clean way to tell it. Four hundred wolves in a stone room, half of them on their feet already, arrows coming out of the gallery, and the summit's careful truce evaporating between one breath and the next into the oldest thing wolves have, which is teeth. Iron took a man off the high table with her spear. Finch had a gallery archer by the ankle and then by the throat. My students, the two of them, moved to the twins and put their own bodies in the gaps, the way I had drilled into them without ever letting myself imagine a day I'd need it.

I got Nell under the great table and Rowan after her and I knelt over both of them with gold in my hands, not to heal, there was no time to heal, but because a Thornmere queen lit up is a thing wolves flinch from and I wanted every eye in that gallery to know exactly where the light was and to fear it.

"Stay small," I told my son, who had once apologized for forgetting to. "Stay small, both of you, and if I tell you to run you run and you do not look back for me. Say it."

"I run," Rowan said. Flat. Furious. Five. "I don't look back."

"Nell."

"They came from the west stair," my daughter said, instead of answering, watching the chaos with those still eyes. "Six. One's gone to the doors."

Six. One at the doors, to hold them, to keep help out or keep us in. She had counted them in the dark while grown wolves screamed. I put my hand on her head for one second, just one, and then I did the thing I did not want to do, which was leave my children under a table and stand up into it, because Caspian was down on one knee across the hall with an arrow in his shoulder and a second archer drawing on him, and the king of Thornmere bleeding in the open was the one thing that would turn a m******e into a rout.

I never got there.

***

Ravenna got there first.

I did not understand what I was seeing at first. She came off the dais in her pale summit silks with her husband's ceremonial blade in her hand, the ornamental one, the one that is not supposed to be sharp, and she went not toward the doors and not toward safety but straight across the open floor of the hall toward the west stair, toward the archers, and she moved like someone who had been drilled harder than anyone in that room suspected.

The founder's daughter of Silver Moon put herself in the gallery stairwell, in the one choke point that mattered, and held it.

She was not a warrior. I want to be clear. She took a cut across the forearm in the first three seconds that would scar. But she was in the gap, and she was screaming names, pack names, in a voice pitched to carry, and I realized what she was doing a half beat before it worked.

"Ironford, to me! Blackridge enforcers, to your Alpha, NOW! These are not the summit's archers, they wear no colors, they are murderers under truce and every pack that lets them loose forfeits standing, MOVE!"

She was not fighting them. She could not fight them. She was making it a choice, out loud, in front of witnesses, the way I had made the ledger a choice, the way she had spent her whole life making things choices, and it worked on a hall full of leaders exactly the way she knew it would. Ironford's Alpha, who had risen to sentence my children two minutes ago and looked ashamed doing it, took the out she gave him and turned on the archers instead, and his enforcers moved with him, and the thing broke.

It broke fast once it broke. Unmarked killers under truce have no friends in a room full of leaders whose whole lives run on truce. The gallery emptied in a rush of pack enforcers going up the west stair. The archer drawing on Caspian went down under three Blackridge wolves. The one at the doors ran and did not make it to the second landing.

And in the middle of it, in the sudden turning of the tide, Ravenna of Silver Moon stood in the stairwell with her husband's dull blade and her arm running red and found me across the hall with her eyes.

I was already moving toward Caspian. She saw where I was going. And she did a thing I did not expect and have never forgotten.

She nodded at me. Once. Go. I have this.

Then she turned back to the stair and kept the choke point until it was over, because she was better at this than any of us had let ourselves believe, and because Ravenna of Silver Moon, it turned out, had been fighting a war of her own for five years, and I had only ever seen the front of it.

***

The arrow had gone into the meat of Caspian's shoulder and stopped on bone, which is the good kind, if there is a good kind.

"Don't," he said, as I dropped beside him.

"Quiet voice, my king." I had my hands over it. "You stepped in front of my son."

"I stepped in front of my—" He stopped. His jaw worked. "In front of the pup. Yes."

"Say it. You've an arrow in you, you've earned the pronoun."

He looked at me, silver eyes gone dark with pain, in the wreck of a hall full of the dead and the routed, and he said, low, only to me, the truest thing the day had pulled out of anyone:

"In front of my son."

I broke the shaft and drew it and put the gold in, and it answered, the way it always answers with him, doubling, ringing, iron and light in the middle of a battlefield, and the wound closed under my hands and the bond of it went through both of us like a struck string and neither of us had the luxury of pretending we didn't feel it.

"There will be a reckoning for this hall," he said, quietly, while I worked. "Stellan called for the standing. Stellan's founder-lie was read aloud. And unmarked archers came out of Blackridge's own gallery within the hour. This does not end at a summit, little healer. This ends at a war."

"I know."

"Do you want it?"

I thought about four hundred wolves rising to sentence my children. I thought about the gallery in the dark.

"I think," I said, "it wants me."

***

It was over within the half hour, in the way these things are over, which is not truly over at all but only paused while everyone counts.

Six unmarked archers. Four dead, two taken, and the two taken would not talk, which surprised no one, and one of them bit down on the same glass the hunter had five years ago in a rogue camp, and died foaming on the floor of Blackridge in front of the continent. Family looks after family.

The summit was suspended. It had to be. You cannot hold a recognition vote in a room still being washed. The Alphas withdrew to their wings under guard, to argue and to reposition and to decide, each of them, which way the wind was now blowing, and Blackridge's own enforcers took up every door, because the one thing every faction could agree on was that murderers had come out of the host's own house and the host was in no condition to explain it.

I got my children back to the guest wing with Iron on one side and Finch on the other and did not breathe properly until the door was shut and barred and I had counted them, twice, with my own hands, whole. Nell fell asleep against my side almost at once, the terrible stillness finally cracking into something that was just a tired child. Rowan would not sleep. He sat by the door in his plain coat with his back very straight, keeping a watch nobody had assigned him, and I did not tell him to stop, because I understood the impulse better than he did.

And near midnight, there was a knock. Soft. Deliberate.

Iron opened it on the length of her spear.

Ravenna of Silver Moon stood in the corridor. Alone, again. Her arm was bound in clean linen someone competent had done, her silks were gone, she was in plain dark traveling clothes, and she carried no lamp and no guard and no performance. She looked, for the first time since I had met her, simply like a tired woman at the end of a very long day.

"I'm not here to fight," she said. "Your king is mending. My husband is dying, and now that the founder-lie is read, my father's protection is worth precisely nothing, and by dawn there will be four factions in this house and I will have a place in exactly none of them." She looked past me, at the sleeping child and the watching one. "I have spent five years, Sera, deciding what to do with something. Tonight I decided. May I come in."

I looked at her for a long moment. Iron looked at me.

I stood aside.

Ravenna came in, and sat, and for a moment simply breathed, a woman setting down a weight she had carried so long she'd forgotten the shape of standing without it. Then she reached into the breast of her traveling coat and drew out a single folded page, soft at the creases from five years of handling, and she held it in both hands and looked at it, not at me.

"You asked me, in the corridor, what was on the page I could not burn." Her voice was very quiet. "You asked me why I kept one sheet out of a whole workroom I put to the torch." She turned it in her hands. "I told you I'd never decided what it was for. That was true, until tonight. Watching them stand up to sentence your children. Watching a boy your son's age get shot at in a hall full of wolves who signed the paper that made it lawful." She looked up at me at last, and her composure was gone, all of it, and what was under it was something I had never once let myself imagine was there. "I know why they came for you, Sera. I've known for five years. It isn't only the gold line. It isn't only what your son can do."

She held the page out to me across the small warm room.

"It's what's written here," she said. "In your grandmother's hand. Addressed to mine."

I took it. My own hands, I noticed, had begun to shake.

I unfolded five years of Ravenna's keeping, and I read the first line in my grandmother's writing, the narrow loops I would know anywhere, the same hand as the man by the window because of course, of course, they were brother and sister, and the first line said:

*Cordelia. If you are reading this, then they have found the child, and you must decide, as I could not, whether to tell her what she truly is before they kill her for it.*