The Alpha's Final Witness

Chapter 4: Scrubbed Stone

"Left," Tilda whispers. "He held it in his left."

Jax doesn't move for the space of a breath. Then he crosses the linen room in three strides, crouches in front of the washtub, and says something so quietly I can't hear it. Tilda nods. He lifts his head and calls two names down the corridor, and two more guards appear in the arch as if they'd been waiting there all along.

"Take her to the king's wing," he says. "Not the servants' quarters. The king's wing, and a guard on her door. If anyone asks for her, anyone, you send for me first."

"Is she a prisoner?" I ask.

"She's the only person in Thornhold who has seen the man who knew what a dying woman said." His voice is flat. "I'd like her to stay seeing things."

Tilda looks back at me from between the guards, very small. I try to give her something with my face, something that says I will not let them hurt you. I'm not certain I can keep the promise, which is exactly why I make it.

When they're gone, Jax stands in the empty arch with his hands loose at his sides. He looks like a man doing sums he doesn't want the answers to.

"You didn't know about the hooded man," I say.

"No."

"Do you know who it was?"

"If I knew, he'd already be in the cells." He rubs the back of his neck, and for the first time I see how tired he is, the shadows under his eyes the color of bruises. "Left-handed. Fine. Half of Thornhold's scribes are left-handed. It's a clerk's trick, ink doesn't smear." A pause. "That isn't why I'm afraid."

"Then why?"

He doesn't answer. He turns and walks, and I follow, because the alternative is standing in a room full of folded sheets.

The bridal chamber is cold and has been aired. The body is gone. The coat Kael laid over Isolde is gone too, folded now on the foot of the bed with an orderly neatness that makes my skin crawl. Someone has opened the shutters. Pale morning light falls across the flagstones where she lay.

The stones are dry. They look clean. That is exactly what troubles me.

"Who washed this floor?" I ask.

"The steward's people. Second bell, after the physicians finished." Jax stays by the door. "The king ordered it. He didn't want her lying in it."

"Kael ordered it."

"I've told you what I know."

I kneel where I knelt the night before. The seams between the flagstones are the width of a knife blade and run with a dark film, brown in some places, almost black in others. I scrape a fingertip along the crack and bring it to my nose.

Blood, of course. Old and thin, scrubbed down the grout by whoever came after. But under the blood there is something sharper. Something sour, with a bite of green at the back of it, like crushed leaves steeped in vinegar.

I know that smell.

It rises out of a place I haven't let myself go in seven years: my father's study, the long cedar desk, a glass cruet with a cork stopper. Ink-lift, he called it, oak gall and vinegar and a pinch of alum, for taking a mistake off parchment without leaving a scar. He kept it on a high shelf, away from me and my brothers, because it ate skin.

"The steward's people used ink-lift," I say.

Jax's attention sharpens. "What?"

"Gall and vinegar. It's what you use to clean ink off vellum." I hold up the finger. "Not to wash a floor. You'd have scorched your hands. Whoever did this wasn't scrubbing blood. They were scrubbing ink."

"Ink on a floor?"

"Or ink that spilled. Or ink someone wanted off." I trace the seam toward the hearth. The sour smell grows stronger. It grows stronger still beneath the bed, where the stones haven't been touched at all. They are rimmed with a grey crust, as if the first cleaning had been done in a hurry and the second, the king's ordered washing, had been careful to leave it undisturbed.

Two layers, I realize. Someone scrubbed this floor with a solvent before the body was found. Then the steward's people came afterward and washed the blood, and never knew what lay beneath it.

"Who holds the Archive's ink-lift?" I ask.

Jax is quiet for a moment. "The Hall of Records keeps it. The royal scriptorium. Anyone with a key to either."

"And who has keys?"

"The Archivist. The Chancellor's office." He hesitates, and I watch him decide whether to say the last of it. "And Lady Isolde. She was trained there. The Archivist gave her a key as a wedding gift, a joke between scholars."

So the dead woman could have walked into the scriptorium for a bottle of acid, and so could half the court.

The hearth is cold. I bend to it anyway, because everything in this room is trying to be tidy and I have learned to distrust tidiness. A fine grey drift of ash lies across the stone. It has been raked flat. Not well. Someone's fingers have gone through it and left four faint furrows, as though in search of something that wasn't there.

Or something that was.

"Jax." I keep my voice mild. "Would you ask the guard outside whether anyone has been in since dawn? The steward said the chamber was sealed."

He looks at me for a moment too long. I wonder whether he knows exactly what I'm doing. Then he nods and steps into the corridor, and the low murmur of his voice begins.

I put my hand into the ash.

The cold goes up my wrist. I stir slowly, the way I've seen midwives sift for a lost ring, and my fingers close on something that isn't ash: stiff and curled and slightly greasy, with a char along one edge. A corner of vellum, no bigger than my palm.

I blow on it. Black crumbs fall away.

Ruled lines, faded brown. A scrap of a formal hand. Part of a seal pressed into the margin, and my breath stops, because I know the seal. A bare tree beneath a crescent moon.

The Voss seal.

My father's seal, which the royal guard supposedly melted down with the rest of the family's property the night the manor burned. I saw the ashes. I told myself I saw the ashes.

Below the seal, in lines the fire hasn't devoured, a date and a few words. Witnessed this fourteenth day of Harvestmoon, by my hand and my blood. And beneath that, in a hand I would know in a darkened room, a hand that taught me my letters at his knee, a single name: Aldous Voss.

The fourteenth day of Harvestmoon.

My family died on the thirteenth.

I count it again. I count it three times, the way I counted the footsteps in the vault while soldiers walked the manor floor above me. The thirteenth. Dawn on the fourteenth they carried the bodies out. Everyone in Veyr knows the date, because the royal criers read it aloud in every market square for a month.

My father signed this the day after he died.

I should give it to Kael.

The thought arrives whole and unwelcome, like a hand on my shoulder. Kael, three flights above me, counting stairs in last night's shirt. I could climb to his study and set the scrap in his ink-stained fingers. If he's what Tilda believes he is, a king who kneels on a floor to ask a maid whether she's hurt, then he deserves to see it. He's the only person in Thornhold who might know what a Voss signature dated the fourteenth is worth.

If he's the other thing, he'll know the same, and so will whoever he tells.

I can't tell which man I'm looking at. That is the whole problem. I've spent seven years sure, and in two days I've been handed a coat laid over a dead woman, a mug of willow bark, and a guard who folds sheets badly, and not one of them belongs to the man I came here to destroy. The wishing frightens me more than the evidence does. I would so very much like him to be innocent. It's the most dangerous thing I've found in this room.

So I do what I have always done. I keep it.

In the corridor, Jax's voice has stopped. A boot scrapes stone. I fold the scrap into my sleeve and straighten before I have decided to, ash smeared to my elbow, my face as blank as I can make it, and turn to meet his eyes.