The Alpha's Funeral Was My Wedding Day

Chapter 10

Ravenna came to me before dawn, alone, which told me more than anything she said.

Powerful women send people. That's the whole point of being powerful; you acquire hands so your own stay clean. Ravenna of Silver Moon had spent five years acquiring hands. And she came to the guest wing herself, in the grey hour before the summit woke, with no guard and no witness and a lamp she carried low, and I understood as I opened the door that whatever this was, it was the one kind of conversation she could not afford anyone else to hear.

"Luna." She said it without the audience-warmth now. Flatter. Truer. "Walk with me. Your king is asleep and mine is dying, and you and I are the only two people in this hall doing arithmetic. I'd rather do some of it together, where it's quiet."

I should not have gone. Iron would have skinned me for going. But she'd said your king and my dying one in the same breath, plainly, no performance, and I had spent five years wanting exactly one thing from the people who ran this place, which was to be spoken to without the show.

I stepped into the corridor. I left the door open behind me, and Iron behind that, awake, I made sure, before I did anything so foolish. Ravenna noted the open door and the sense of me leaving it open, and something almost like approval crossed her face.

"Good," she said. "Careful. We'll get further."

We walked. The guest wing of Blackridge at that hour was cold stone and guttering lamps and the two of us, and Ravenna held her light low and got, with no wasted motion, to the point.

"I know your son is Kane's," she said. "You know I know. So we can leave that in the box where it's useful and neither of us opens it carelessly. That's not why I'm here." She stopped at a window, grey with coming light, and looked out at the yard where I'd been dragged across the snow five years ago. "I'm here because you said something in the hall that Kane didn't understand and I did. You said you'd read his father's signature. On things."

The corridor was very quiet.

"I've been Aldric of Blackridge's daughter-in-law in spirit since I was promised to this pack at fourteen," she said. "I grew up in my own father's library. Stellan of Silver Moon kept excellent records, Luna. Meticulous. My father was a meticulous man." She turned the lamp slowly in her hands. "There is a certain document. A tribunal instrument, twenty two years old. Sealed. Its existence is denied by every pack that signed it, and it is the single most dangerous piece of paper on this continent, and I have known where a copy of it sleeps since I was nineteen years old and looking for something else in my father's vault."

My pulse went arrhythmic. I kept my face a healer's face.

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because I've watched you for one evening," Ravenna said, "and I've concluded you already know it exists. You said his father's signature like a woman who's seen it. So we're not trading secrets. We're establishing that we're holding the same knife from opposite ends, and it would be well for both of us to know that before tomorrow, when the summit puts us at the same table and expects us to smile."

She was right, and she'd built the whole approach on being right, and I hated how clean it was.

"Five signatures," I said, testing the depth of the water. "On that instrument."

Something flickered in her eyes. Not surprise. Assessment. I'd shown her I knew the number, and she recalculated what I was worth as a party to talk to.

"Three named," she said, matching me, coin for coin. "Two sealed away separately. Anonymous even to each other. Yes. You do know it." She almost smiled. "Then let me tell you the part you don't, Luna, because it's the part that should frighten you, and I find I would rather you were frightened by the truth than comfortable with a guess."

She stepped closer, and dropped her voice, and for the first time all night Ravenna of Silver Moon looked not like a schemer but like a woman standing near something that scared her too.

"One of the two hidden signatures," she said, "is still writing. I've seen the hand. The same hand keeps the summit's own records, has for decades, moves between packs as a neutral clerk that everyone trusts because a clerk has no allegiance. That person signed a king's death twenty two years ago and has spent every year since inside the machinery of every pack on this continent, keeping the books, reading the letters, deciding what the record says." Her knuckles were white on the lamp. "I have spent five years trying to learn who it is. I have failed. I, who fail at nothing, cannot put a name to the one hand that has been under everything my whole life. And two nights ago your gold light walked into this hall, and I watched that same careful person, who I will not point to in this corridor because I do not know who's awake, go very still. Because you, Luna of Thornmere, are the one loose thread they were promised was cut. And they are still here. And they are still writing."

The window light was coming up grey and cold. I thought of my grandmother turning my hands palm up by lamplight. Never show them the whole of it. I thought of a runner boy and a workroom and a lamp that was always lit.

"You kept something," I said. "You said a copy sleeps somewhere. You didn't say in your father's vault. You said you know where it sleeps. Present tense. You moved it."

Ravenna went still.

I'd caught her. One slip in an hour of perfect footing, and I'd caught it, the way she'd caught my your father did. We were even now. She knew it.

"Yes," she said, finally. Quietly. "I keep one page. Not the whole instrument. One page. It has been in a locked drawer under a false bottom in my traveling desk for five years, and I have moved it three times, and I have never once decided what it's for." Her composure, for one breath, was simply gone, and what stood in the corridor was a woman who had been holding a live coal in a closed hand for half a decade and was tired, very tired, of the burning. "Do you want to know why I burned an innocent woman's records five years ago and kept exactly one page, Luna? Do you want to know what's on the page I couldn't put in the fire?"

"Yes," I said. It came out of me before I could dress it.

And Ravenna of Silver Moon opened her mouth to tell me, in a grey corridor before dawn, the thing she had never told a living soul—

"Sera?"

Kane's voice, from the mouth of the corridor.

He stood there swaying in the half light, grey and terrible, one hand on the wall, and he had heard nothing, I could see that, he'd come looking and found only the shapes of his wife and his rejected mate standing too close in the dark. But the sound of his voice shut Ravenna's mouth like a slammed door, and I watched the woman vanish and the wife slide back over her face in the space of a breath, and the moment, the one true moment, the page, all of it, gone.

"You should be resting, my love," Ravenna said, warm again, moving toward him, lamp raised. "You'll make yourself worse."

But Kane wasn't looking at his wife.

He was looking at me, in the grey light, with five years of dying in his face and something underneath it that had survived all of it, and he said, hoarse, quiet, the question he'd crossed a sleeping hall in the dark to ask, not about the summit, not about the child, not about anything but the thing that had apparently been eating him longer than the bond had:

"Was it real? Any of it? The three years. Was any of it real, or did I throw away nothing?"

And I stood between the dying Alpha who'd rejected me and the calculating Luna who might hold my freedom in a locked drawer, in the hall I'd been dragged out of on my knees, and I understood that everyone in this corridor wanted something from me that only I could give, and that this, not the kneeling, not the title, not the gold, was what coming back had really meant.

Being, once again, the one with the power to answer.

I looked at Kane for a long moment.

"Go to bed, Kane," I said. "You're dying. You should know that, since no one in this hall has had the courage to tell you." I turned to Ravenna, and gave her back her own coin, level and quiet. "Ask your wife what's killing you. She's known since your wedding night."

And I walked back to my open door, past Iron's watching eyes, and left the two of them alone in the grey with that between them, because I had learned, five years ago on a marble floor, exactly how much damage the truth does when you set it down and walk away.

Behind me, the silence was total.

I did not look back. But I heard, as I reached my door, Kane turn to his wife.

"Ravenna," he said. "What does she mean."

And for once, Ravenna of Silver Moon had nothing ready to say.