The Alpha's Funeral Was My Wedding Day

Chapter 16

I read my grandmother's letter twice before I let myself understand it.

*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.*

*You know the lie we tell. The Gold Temple heals. It is a beautiful lie and it kept our daughters useful and alive for nine generations, because a healer is a treasure and a treasure is worth protecting. But you and I know what gold is truly for, and so did the five packs, which is why they did not merely want the crown dead. They wanted the temple gone. Erased. Not one girl left breathing.*

*Because a healer mends what is broken. And a bond, Cordelia, is only a thing that can break.*

I stopped there. Ravenna was watching me across the small room, saying nothing, her bound arm in her lap.

"Keep reading," she said. "I've had five years. You can have five minutes."

*Gold does not only close wounds. It closes and it opens. A gold-touched queen can sever a mate bond clean, where a rejection only tears it. She can forge one that was never fated. She can unmake an Alpha's claim on his own pack, dissolve the thing that binds wolves to their ruler, and leave a strong pack a crowd of strangers in an afternoon.*

*Now you understand the tribunal. A crown is only a crown. But a gold queen is a knife held to the throat of every bond that holds every pack together, and there is no Alpha alive who can sleep while one of us breathes. They did not kill us for treason. They killed us because we were the one thing their whole world is built to forbid, and they were right to be afraid.*

*I never told your granddaughter, if she is who reads beside you now. I could not put a weapon like that into a child and send her into a world that murders us for holding it. I chose to raise a healer and bury a queen. Perhaps I was a coward. My brother would say so; he chose to bury himself in their records and call it survival. We are none of us clean.*

*But if they have found her, then the choice is yours now, and hers. Tell her what her hands are. And then, Cordelia, moon help us both, tell her the last thing, the thing I could never write to her directly, which is that a gold queen cannot always tell her own forged bonds from her fated ones. The gift does not ask permission. It reaches for what would make her strong, and it binds, and she feels it as love. Warn her. A gold queen must never trust her own heart until she is certain her own hands did not write it.*

The fire cracked. Nell slept on against my side. Rowan watched the door.

I set the letter down very carefully, because my hands had started to glow and I did not want to burn my grandmother's writing.

"You've known this for five years," I said. "And you married a man whose bond to another woman was rotting him alive, and you kept the one page that explains it, and you never once used it."

"I never decided what it was for." Ravenna's voice was flat and tired. "I could have brought it to my father. He would have had you killed as the letter itself proves you deserve, in his arithmetic. I could have brought it to Kane, who might have begged you to unmake his rot and might have begged you to unmake his marriage, and I did not want to find out which." She looked at the fire. "Or I could keep it. And watch you. And decide, when I finally understood you, whether the most dangerous woman on the continent was someone I wanted to destroy or someone I wanted alive." Her eyes came up. "Tonight I watched you kneel over your children in a hall full of wolves who wanted them dead. I've decided."

"Why give it to me now? Tonight, of all nights?"

"Because tonight my protection ended," she said, simply. "The founder-lie is read. My father falls. My husband dies. By dawn I am a woman with no pack and no shield and one thing of value, which is that I am the only person alive besides you who knows what you are." She almost smiled. "I am not giving you a gift, Sera. I am buying my way into the only tent on this continent that might keep me breathing. I know exactly what I'm worth and I am spending it precisely."

That, I believed completely. It was the most honest thing she had ever said to me, and it was the reason I trusted it.

***

I did not sleep. Of course I did not sleep.

I sat by the fire with my grandmother's letter and my daughter's weight against me and I let the whole book of my life reread itself in the new light, the way you reread a message once you know the sender.

The stripping that took my wolf and could not touch my gift, because the packs stripped what they understood and never knew the rest was there. The candle I lit under a dead king's name as a child, not knowing my own hands could have unmade the bonds that held his killers' packs together. Kane's rot, which everyone called a broken bond and which I now understood was a broken bond festering in the presence of the one hand that could close it or cut it, and which had been getting worse, I realized, since the exact season I came south.

And I let myself, at last, near dawn, think the thing I had been holding off since the healing table.

Iron and light. The pull I had spent five years disciplining. The way the gold doubled when it touched him, rang, came back like a wave. I had told myself it was the old law, crown and gold, fated, ancient, real.

But the gift does not ask permission. It reaches for what would make her strong, and it binds, and she feels it as love.

What would make a hunted gold queen stronger than a crown at her side? What would her own blood reach for, in a snowbank, dying, if a king with an empty throne knelt down and offered her his hand?

I looked at the fire for a long time.

Then I got up, quietly, so as not to wake my daughter, and I crossed the guest wing to the room where they had laid Caspian to rest and mend, because I had to know, and there was only one way to know, and it was going to cost me either way the answer fell.

He was awake. Of course he was awake. He does not sleep either.

He was sitting up against the headboard with his mended shoulder bare and the brand on his hand catching the low light, and he looked at me standing in his doorway before dawn with my grandmother's letter in my hand and he read my face the way he always reads my face, and something in his own went still and careful.

"You've learned the last of it," he said. Not a question.

"You knew." My voice did not sound like mine. "You knew what the gold truly does. From the beginning. In the ravine, you said I could raise a dead king, and I thought you meant heal you, and you didn't, you meant—" I could not finish it. "You've known this whole time what my blood is. And what it does. And what it reaches for."

"Yes."

"Then answer me one thing." I stayed in the doorway. I did not trust myself closer. "Five years. This. Whatever this is between us. The pull, the light, the way it doubles when I touch you." My hands were shaking and glowing and I let them. "Is it fated? Or did my blood build it, that first night, because a king with a throne to reclaim was the strongest thing in reach and my gift took what it wanted while I was dying and called it love?" The fire caught in my wet eyes. "Do you feel me, Caspian? Or do you feel the thing my own hands made you feel and neither of us ever agreed to?"

And the king of Thornmere, who answers every question with a question, who says less the more he feels, looked at me across the room for a long moment.

Then he said the last thing I expected, in a voice gone very low and very even.

"I knew what you were," Caspian said, "before you touched me. I knew in the ravine, before your gift ever woke, before you had the strength to bind a fly." He held my eyes. "So whatever I feel, little healer, your blood did not build it. It was already there. I have simply been waiting five years for you to be able to ask."

I stood in the doorway and could not speak.

Because that answered one question and detonated the worse one, the one I had not thought to ask, the one his answer made suddenly, horribly plain.

If his feeling came before my gift ever touched him.

Then mine might not have.

And there was no one alive who could tell me whether the thing in my own chest, the thing that had gotten me across a guest wing before dawn, was my heart.

Or my hands.