The Alpha's Final Witness

I am about to touch a dead woman's blood in the house of the man who murdered my family. "Three hours," Jax Raven murmurs at my shoulder. He stands close enough that his sleeve brushes mine, as if nearness could stop me bolting. "The physicians say a clean cut, a quick death. The king wants to know why a clean, quick death left her looking like that." Like that is Lady Isolde Marr, betrothed of Kael Draven, lying on the flagstones of the bridal chamber with her wedding veil spread under her head like spilled milk gone red. Water still beads in the seams between the stones. Someone has been at the floor with a brush, and whoever it was worked in a hurry, and was too frightened to touch her. I wear borrowed grey wool and carry a bonesetter's satchel with a hand knife in the bottom of it. The name I gave at the gate was Mara Finch. No one in Thornhold is supposed to know I am anyone else. I am not sure about Jax. For seven years I have rehearsed this: the walls, the black stone, the king's house. In every version, I am calm. In every version, I get close enough to see his face and learn whether it looks like a man who ordered a nursery burned. Seven years have taught me how to touch the dead without looking as if I'm touching anything. I kneel, set down the satchel, and study the wound: a single line beneath the jaw, precise, almost tender. The physicians are right. It is too clean. "Give me the room," I say. "The guards stay at the door." "Then they stay at the door, and you stand where they can't see my hands." He hesitates for half a breath, then steps sideways and puts his back between me and the doorway. A man who didn't know what my hands could do wouldn't have understood the request. I file that away. I have no time to be afraid of it yet. The veil is the only place the blood is still wet. I peel off my glove with my teeth, which looks like clumsiness, and press two fingers into the silk. The room goes. Cold first. The lamp is guttering. A bell is ringing somewhere far down in the keep, slow, like a funeral already. My throat is open and I can't make it close. The taste in my mouth is wrong, sweet and bitter together, like a root crushed under a thumbnail. Someone stands in the doorway with the light behind them. I can't make out a face. I can only see a hand on the frame, and on it a ring, the crown and wolf pressed into gold, on the left hand. Elara Voss is alive. The thought isn't mine. It arrives in Isolde's voice, clear and terrified. If he learns it, he'll finish what was started, and then no one will be left to witness. The hand lowers. The door closes. I am alone with the bell, and I whisper to the empty room, because someone should hear it: "The ink was never dry." I come back on my knees with my fingers still pressed into the silk and my pulse pounding in my teeth. Warm wetness slides over my lip. Nosebleed. It always follows, along with the headache, and for a day or so a borrowed grief that sits under my ribs like a swallowed stone. Isolde's fear is already thinning, but not fast enough. I know exactly how it felt to be her. Elara Voss is alive. She knew my name. A woman I have never met died with my name in her head, and the last thing she felt was terror at the thought of me. I make myself breathe. Under the shock, the cold part of my mind, the part that has kept me alive, begins to work. The bitter sweetness on my tongue is still there. A dying woman might taste her own blood. She would not taste that, unless something had been done to the memory, or to her. Silverroot can twist a vision. I have read that it can. Visions do not tell the truth. They only tell me what a dying person believed. "Mara." Jax's voice is low and careful. He has turned and is watching my face. "What did you see?" "A hand on a doorframe. A ring." I press my glove to my nose. "I need to know who in this keep wears the crown seal." "Anyone who speaks with the king's authority." He says it too smoothly, a man reciting what he'd prefer the answer to be. "That's a long list." "Then it's a long night." I reach for the satchel, because I need something in my hands, and the guards at the door stop talking. All of them, mid-word. Boots shift on stone. Jax's face goes the color of tallow. I know who has entered before I turn. I have spent seven years learning his name the way you learn the shape of a wound. My hand closes on the satchel strap and the hand knife is somewhere under it, a few inches from my fingers. I think: not here, not yet. I think it twice. Kael Draven walks in without hurry, and without his crown, and with ink on two fingers of his right hand, as if he's been pulled from a desk in the middle of a column of figures. He is taller than the stories and plainer. His dark coat hangs open, and there are shadows beneath his eyes that sleep hasn't touched in a long while. He doesn't look at me. He doesn't look at Jax. He walks to the edge of the stone where the veil lies and stops, as if the floor itself were something he'd rather not step onto. He looks at Isolde for a long time. "You'd have hated that veil," he says, quietly enough that I almost miss it. "You said it made you look like a ghost at your own funeral. I told you it was a bit early for that joke." His voice does something odd on the last word, and he clears his throat and says, in a drier tone, as if she might correct him, "I'm sorry. I should have been here." I have been ready for many things. Not for this. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, a quick, ugly gesture, like a man trying not to be sick. Then it's gone, and his face closes like a book and he turns around. Grief can be performed, I tell myself. A king who orders a house burned has had practice at looking sorry. I tell myself that twice as well. "Raven. Who is this?" "Mara Finch, my king. A bonesetter. I thought she might see what the physicians—" "You thought." Kael's gaze comes to rest on me, and for the first time I understand that the stories left out how closely he looks. It travels from the glove at my nose to my bare, bloodied fingers. "Your nose is bleeding." "I'm unwell, my king. I came straight from the road." "The physicians knelt where she lay. They were very thorough about it." He crosses the stone toward me, three unhurried steps. "You went to the veil." A small cold feeling opens beneath my ribs. No one else in this room has asked that question. "It's where the blood was wet," I say. "That's a good answer." He tilts his head. "It's also exactly what you'd say if you wanted me to stop asking." "It's also true." "So it is." There is something that might be the first ghost of humor at the corner of his mouth. It isn't friendly. It's the look of a man who has found a sum that doesn't balance and means to find out why. "And you were whispering." I hadn't known I was. My own voice rises in my memory, thin and shaking, speaking words that weren't mine. "Where did you hear them?" "I don't know what you mean." He stops at a courteous arm's length and keeps his hands to himself, the ink-stained one at his side and the other hooked in his belt. "A maid heard Lady Isolde say those words through that door," Kael says, soft enough that only I and Jax can hear. "She came to me and told no one else. Not the guards. Not the physicians. Not the Council." He doesn't raise his voice and he doesn't need to. "She said Isolde died whispering about ink. So tell me, bonesetter, who told you?" The truth will get me killed. A lie will only get me killed more slowly. "Nobody told me," I say. "She did."