The Alpha's Funeral Was My Wedding Day

Chapter 19

I got the name at the worst possible hour, in the worst possible way, from the worst possible person, which is to say I got it exactly as I have gotten everything true in my life.

Ravenna could not come to me again. Kane never left her side now, following his living wife around the hall with the dazed gratitude of a man who had forgotten what a day without pain felt like, and every hour that passed drew the summit closer to reconvening, and I was running out of night.

So I went to the recorder instead. My grandmother's brother. The one man who could not lie to me about family, because he had already told me the truth about his own share of it.

He was in the record room, alone, packing his instruments into their traveling case with the unhurried care of a man who has survived four Alphas by never appearing to be in a hurry about anything.

"You've cut the Blackridge boy free," he said, without turning. "The whole hall can feel it. He's walking. The rot's leaving him." He clicked a lid shut. "You could have kept him roped and bleeding and let him die slow. You unmade it instead. Cordelia's girl told you what you are, then."

"You knew Cordelia was Gold Temple."

"I knew Cordelia's mother hid my nieces from men with torches, yes." He turned at last, blanket-less now, standing, older on his feet than in his chair. "There are more of us woven through these packs than you would believe, child. That was always the temple's true work. Not healing. Surviving. We married into our own murderers and we buried ourselves in their records and their vaults and their nurseries, and we kept nine alive out of thirty one, and we did it by being no one, everywhere, for twenty two years." Something flickered. "You are the first of us in a generation to stand up in a hall and be someone. It is the bravest thing I have ever seen and it is going to get people killed, and I cannot decide, watching you, whether I have wasted my whole life or finally seen the point of it."

"There are two hidden signatures," I said. "You're one. You signed to save nine. Ravenna knows the other. She says it's family." I watched his face. "She says it's the last thing I'd expect. Is she right?"

And the old man, who had not flinched when he told me he sent six men to kill me, flinched.

"She should not have said that much," he said quietly. "Cordelia's girl always did carry too heavy a knife for her own good." He set down the case. "Sit, child. If you're going to have it, you'll have it sitting, because it takes the legs from people, and I have watched it take the legs from the only two others who ever learned it, and both of them are dead now."

I did not sit.

"Say it."

"The second seal on your family's death," said my grandmother's brother, "belongs to the Gold Temple itself." He held my eyes. "It was signed by our own high healer. The head of the line. The woman who ruled the temple the year it fell." A breath. "Your great-grandmother, Sera. Ines's mother. My mother. She signed the order to erase her own house."

The room tilted. I put a hand on the table without deciding to.

"That's not," I said. "That's not possible. Why would—"

"Because they came to her first." His voice was terrible and even. "Before the tribunal ever sat, the five packs went to the high healer of the Gold Temple, quietly, and they offered her a choice no one should be offered. The temple was going to fall regardless; the crown was already lost, the decision already made. But she was the head of the line, and she held the one thing they could not get without her. She knew every gold girl living. Where they were. Who they were. The temple kept its own census, and only the high healer held it." His hands had begun, very slightly, to shake. "So they offered her the arithmetic. Give us the census. Mark which of your daughters we may take, and which few you wish to hide, and sign the order yourself so the world believes the temple ended by the temple's own choice, and we will let you keep a handful alive in the dark. Refuse, and we hunt every last one of you and you die knowing you saved no one."

"She chose."

"She chose nine." His voice cracked clean in half. "She sat with her own census, Sera, the names of every gold woman and gold child alive, her granddaughters, her grandnieces, the babies not yet weaned, and she went down the list, and she marked the ones the packs could have and she circled the nine she would save, and she signed her name to the death of all the rest to buy those nine a life in hiding. Then she gave me the census and the escape routes and told me to spend the next twenty years being no one, and keeping the nine, and never telling any of them whose hand had drawn the circle around their lives." He was weeping now, openly, an eighty one year old man in a record room before dawn. "She saved you before you were born, child. Your grandmother was one of the nine. Ines was circled. You exist because our own high healer signed her name to a slaughter and chose your grandmother's line to live. And she made me swear that no gold girl would ever learn it, because how do you carry that? How does a child carry that she is alive because her own great-grandmother traded a hundred other children for her?"

I could not speak.

"That is why the second signature is sealed," he said, wiping his face with a steadiness that was worse than the weeping. "Not to protect a villain. To protect all of you from the truth of how you came to draw breath. Stellan thinks the sealed name protects a co-conspirator. It protects a martyr. Your great-grandmother is the most hated and most holy name in our house and there are exactly two people alive who know it, and now there are three, and I am so tired, child. I am so tired of being the only one who knew."

The bell had not rung yet. The hall still slept. Somewhere in the guest wing my children were breathing under a barred door, alive, circled, generations later, by a dead woman's terrible pen.

"Why tell me now?" I whispered. "You swore."

"Because you cut the Blackridge boy free instead of keeping him," the old man said. "You held a man's whole life in your hand, and you had every reason on the moon to close your fist, and you opened it instead. You chose freedom over the chain even when the chain would have served you." He looked at me with his sister's eyes. "The high healer chose the chain. She chose to buy nine lives with a hundred, because she could not see a third door. And I have spent twenty two years believing there was no third door, that the arithmetic was the whole of the world." His voice dropped. "And then her great-granddaughter walked into a hall and started finding third doors in every locked room, and I began to wonder, for the first time in my life, whether my mother was wrong. Whether the arithmetic was ever the only answer. Whether there was always another way and we were simply too afraid to look for it."

He picked up his traveling case.

"You are going to walk back into that summit tomorrow," he said, "and they are going to vote on whether your children are allowed to live. And you now hold three things no one expects you to hold. The truth of what the gold does. The truth of who signed. And me." He met my eyes. "I have kept the record of every pack in this room for forty years. I know where every one of them buried their own crimes. I signed a king's death and I have spent my life being no one, and I find, at eighty one, that I would very much like to be someone before I die, on the side of the girl who keeps finding doors."

"You'd testify," I breathed. "Against all of them. In the open."

"I would do more than testify, child." And my grandmother's brother smiled, for the first time, and it was a terrible and wonderful thing. "I would read them their own records aloud."

The bell for the morning session began to ring.

And from the doorway of the record room, a voice neither of us had heard arrive, silver-smooth and utterly calm, said:

"How disappointing. I had so hoped you'd stay no one, uncle."

We turned.

Stellan of Silver Moon stood in the doorway with two enforcers at his back and a drawn blade in his hand, and he was looking at the old man with the weary fondness of family, and I understood, one heartbeat too late, the thing Ravenna had been trying to tell me under all of it, the thing that made the second signature *family* twice over.

The high healer had a son who married into Silver Moon.

And that son's son was standing in the doorway.

"Hello, cousin," said Stellan, to me, and raised the blade.