The Alpha's Funeral Was My Wedding Day

Chapter 12

The instrument was to be read at the evening bell. Three people tried to stop it before then, and one of them was me.

Not because I didn't want it read. Because between the noon recess and the bell there were six hours, and I had spent five years learning what people do with six hours when the thing they buried is being dug up in front of witnesses.

"They'll go for the paper," Iron said. We were in the guest wing with the door shut and the twins parked in the corner under Finch's eye, Finch being nineteen now and armed and insulted by how much I fussed. "Burn it, lose it, discover it was damaged by damp. Clerks lose things."

"No." Caspian stood at the window with his back to us, watching the yard. "The paper is the safest object in Blackridge today. Four hundred wolves just heard that it exists. You can't unring that." He turned. "They'll go for the motion. A host's motion dies with the host."

The room went quiet.

"They'll kill Kane," I said.

"They'll kill Kane, and everyone will call it the illness, because he has spent a season being visibly ill, and the record will show that the Alpha of Blackridge died before the instrument could be read." He said it without heat, the way he says most true things. "You understand my position. I am the last man on this continent who can be seen keeping that one alive."

"But someone has to."

"Yes," said Caspian, and looked at me, and did not say the rest, because he never says the rest.

***

I went looking for the clerk instead.

I told myself it was strategy. Six hours, a hidden signature sitting by a window, and a woman who had been reading his handwriting for five years without knowing his face. What I actually wanted, and I have decided to be honest in this account, was for someone alive to tell me about my grandmother.

He was where he had been all morning. Chair by the good light, blanket over his knees, ledger closed, as though he had been waiting since dawn.

"Luna of Thornmere." He gestured at the bench across from him. "Sit. You have questions and I have hours. I've sent for the instrument, in case that was one of them. It will be here before the bell. I told the summit it would be, and so it will be."

"You're not running."

"Child." He looked amused. "I'm eighty one."

I sat down across from the man who had written my death.

"Say it," I said. "Whatever you are to me, say it out loud. I've had a week of strangers knowing my family better than I do and I've stopped enjoying it."

"Ines Vale was my sister." He said it the way you'd give a date. "Older by four years. She kept bees at the end. I'm told she was good at it."

Ines. My grandmother turning my hands palm up under a lamp. Never show them the whole of it.

"She never once said your name."

"No. She wouldn't have. That was the arrangement." He folded his hands. "Do you know how many of the Gold Temple were alive the night the tribunal sat? Thirty one. Do you know how many are alive now?" He waited. "Nine. Nine, counting you and your two. Out of a house that five packs agreed, unanimously, should end entirely, because a healing line loyal to a dead crown is a war standing in a field waiting for weather."

"You signed."

"I bargained." Something came up under the pleasantness then, old and iron hard. "The crown was lost before I was brought into that room. They wanted a Thornmere hand on the paper for the look of the thing, and they offered me a price instead of a grave. The gold line lives. Quietly. Unclaimed, unmarked, and never again standing beside a crown. And in exchange, one of us keeps the books. One of us watches. One of us makes certain the promise holds." He smiled at me, warm as any grandfather. "I have kept nine of us breathing for twenty two years. I have moved girls out of villages the night before the hunters came. I found your grandmother a beekeeper to marry and a border to be nobody on. My whole life has been the reason our family still exists."

"You sent six men to kill me in the snow."

"Yes."

He did not blink. That is the part I still cannot put down.

"You lit up like a beacon in rogue country, carrying an Alpha's pups, with a crown standing next to you." He said it gently. "Do you understand what you were that night? You were the promise broken. Every pack that signed would have come north, and they would not have stopped with you. They would have gone back through the villages, through the nine, through babies in beds, because that is precisely what they did the last time and no one ever punished them for it." He leaned in slightly. "I have done this arithmetic before. It does not get easier. One of us or all of us. I chose you. I would choose you again. And I won't insult you by pretending I lost sleep, because I have not slept properly since your grandmother stopped writing to me."

"You're insane," I said, and my voice was not level.

"I'm arithmetic," he said. "Your grandmother thought the same. She called me a coward in her last letter. Then she took the false name I bought her, and the husband I found her, and she lived to sixty three and died in a bed with her granddaughter's hands on her." He picked up his pen. "You're welcome, by the way. That last part was mine."

I stood. I had to. My palms had started to warm, and the last thing that hall needed was gold light coming off the Thornmere Luna at the clerks' table.

"There are two hidden signatures," I said. "You're one. Who is the other?"

And for the first time in the whole conversation, the old man's face changed.

"Ah," he said. "No. That one I keep, and not out of loyalty." His hand, I noticed, was no longer entirely steady. "You should be praying that instrument stays sealed, child. I signed to save nine people. The other signed because they wanted something. I've spent twenty two years trying to decide which of us is worse and I have never once landed on an answer."

The bell rang for the afternoon session.

And somewhere above us, in the upper gallery, a man began shouting that the Alpha was down.

***

Here is what four hundred wolves look like when the host collapses at his own table.

They look like a wave. Alphas coming out of their chairs, guards drawing, every single person in the room deciding at once that every other person in the room did it. And from the foot of the table it looked exactly like the shape of my life five years ago. Chaos with a body at the center and nobody in it actually helping.

Kane was on the floor beside the dais and his lips were going blue.

I got there first because I had started moving before the second shout. Healer's reflex does not consult you.

"Back." I had his collar open and two fingers at his throat, and the pulse under them was fast and thready and wrong in a way that had nothing to do with any broken bond. "All of you, back. Somebody hold the doors."

"Do not let her touch him." Stellan of Silver Moon, above me, somewhere. "Have you all lost your minds? Get that woman away from the Alpha."

"His pupils are pinned, he's blue to the ears, and he has about four minutes. If you make me repeat myself in front of witnesses, Alpha Stellan, the record will show precisely who obstructed a healer." I didn't look up. "This is not the bond. This is poison, and it's a good one."

Then I put my hands over the Alpha of Blackridge and let the gold out in front of the assembled leadership of the continent.

I'm told it filled the hall like a hearth. I'm told grown Alphas stepped back from it. I wouldn't know. I was inside the work, and the work was ugly, because a good poison spreads itself thin through the small vessels and the linings and the walls of a heart that is already tired, and pulling it back out is like drawing thread through wet cloth. It came up slow. It came up grudging. It left me shaking on my knees on the marble I had knelt on once before.

His eyes opened. Focused. Found me.

"Sera," Kane said, hoarse. And then, with everything he had left, loud enough to carry: "Don't let them stop the reading."

"Shut up and breathe."

"Whatever they do to me. Don't let them—"

"Breathe."

His hand came up and closed weakly around my wrist. The same wrist Caspian had held that morning.

And I felt it. Not a bond. Not a living one. The ghost of one, thin as a hair, the frayed end of something torn off five years ago and never properly finished dying, and it moved under his fingers like a plucked string.

He felt it too. I watched him feel it. I watched a dying man's face do something I had no room for and no time for, and I took my wrist back and got to my feet and turned to the hall before he could put any of it into words.

"He was poisoned," I said. "In this room, within the hour. He'll live."

The hall came apart.

And through the noise, clean and unhurried and pitched with exquisite care to reach the back rows, a woman's voice I knew very well.

"Then perhaps someone might explain this."

Ravenna stood at the high table with her husband's cup in one hand and, held up between two fingers for four hundred wolves to see, a small glass vial.

Empty. Plain. Sealed at the neck in green wax.

Willow leaf. My mother's stamp. My grandmother's before her.

The same seal she had held up in this hall, in this exact spot, on the night they took my wolf.

"Found beneath the table," Ravenna said. "At the foot of it. Where the Thornmere party has been seated all week."

Four hundred faces turned. Again.

And from his chair by the good light, my grandmother's brother dipped his pen, unhurried, and asked pleasantly into the ringing silence:

"How shall I record the accusation, Luna?"