The Alpha's Final Witness

Chapter 2: Mara Finch

"She did," Kael repeats. "Lady Isolde told you."

He doesn't make it a question, which is worse. A question I could answer badly. Behind him, Jax has gone very quiet, and the two guards at the door have developed an interest in the ceiling.

"Not told. Left." I press the glove harder to my nose. "Some bodies hold on to the last thing their owners said. It's rare, and it isn't reliable. A bonesetter sees a lot of dying. Sometimes I hear the end of it."

"A death-listener." He tests the word like a loose stone. "My father's inquisitors hanged people for less."

"Your father's inquisitors are the reason I introduced myself as a bonesetter."

He looks at me for a moment longer than is comfortable. Then, without a word, he shrugs out of his coat, lays it over Isolde from shoulders to feet, and tucks the hem beneath her bare heel, the way you'd cover someone who had fallen asleep in a chair. The guards look away. So do I. I'm annoyed to find that I've looked away out of courtesy and not out of spite.

"Right," he says, straightening. "You say you hear what the dead say. I say anyone could tell me that." He turns back to me with his hands loose at his sides. "Humor me. The maid told me Lady Isolde said the word wine. Just before the ink. What do you make of that?"

I almost answer.

It's a good trap. It's the ordinary kind, a small false thing set down in the open where a person who wanted to look clever would step on it. Anyone with a story to prop up would nod and say yes, wine, I heard that too. I've watched liars do it for seven years.

"She didn't say wine," I say.

"No?"

"She said ink. Twice. There was nothing else." The leftover grief under my ribs makes the words come out rough. "If your maid told you otherwise, she's mistaken, or you're testing me."

There is a short pause.

"I'm testing you," says Kael. He doesn't sound sorry. He sounds, if anything, a little pleased, the way a man sounds when a long column adds up. "She said ink. And she didn't say wine, and you wouldn't pretend she had." His eyes narrow slightly. "That's curious. You lie very well about yourself, Mistress Finch. You lie badly about her."

"I don't lie about the dead." It's out before I can stop it, and sharper than I intended. "They've no one else to speak for them."

Something moves behind his face, quick and unguarded, there and gone. He doesn't press it. I'm almost grateful and a good deal more wary.

"Who else knows what you are?" he asks instead.

"Nobody living."

"That isn't an answer."

"It's the only one I have." True, in its way. My mother and father and brothers are the only people who ever knew, and they've been in the ground seven years.

"Then tell me what you heard. All of it."

All of it is a bell, a bitter taste, a hand in a doorway, and my own name. I decide, in the space of one breath, what he gets.

"The ink was never dry. She said it twice." I leave the bell and the taste to her. "And she was afraid of someone who might finish what was started. That's all."

It's a lie of omission, and a dangerous one. If I hand him the ring, I hand him a list of everyone who speaks with the crown's voice, and he's at the top of it. I want to see which direction he looks first.

He looks at his own hands.

Not quickly. A short, almost involuntary turn of the wrists, as if checking them against something. The seal ring gleams on his right. His left is bare, apart from the ink on two fingers. I note it and put it in the place where I keep such things, beside the taste of silverroot and the way the floor was scrubbed. It proves nothing. A man can wear a ring on either hand, and rings can be moved. But a mystery is a lock, and I've found the first pin.

"Ink," he says, mostly to himself. "She wasn't a scribe."

"She was an archivist," Jax says. "Trained at the Hall of Records before the betrothal."

"I know what she was." It comes out harder than he means. He breathes and the hardness goes. "She corrected my arithmetic at our first dinner. In front of the Council. I'd added the Greywater levy wrong and she said, very politely, that it was the sort of mistake a clever man makes when he is thinking about something else." A breath that could almost be a laugh, if there were anything in it to laugh at. "I wasn't in love with her. I'd like that understood. I'd have been a decent husband. She'd have made a better king."

I don't know where to put that. A man who orders a house burned shouldn't have a dead woman's arithmetic in his head. I tell myself it's cheap, a king's trick, to hand the stranger a small true thing and call it honesty. I tell myself that again, more firmly, because I'd rather think it than be sure.

"Raven. Guard on the door, and no one in this room until dawn. And find out who scrubbed that floor."

"Already doing it, my king."

"Then do it faster." He rolls his shoulders, as if he's been carrying something heavy, and turns to me. "You'll sleep in the east gallery. It's a guest's room, but it has a lock on the outside, and I won't pretend otherwise. By day you may go where you like, if Raven is with you. If you run, I'll take it as an answer to my earlier question."

"And if I stay?"

"Then you'll tell me what the dead tell you." He says it without any softness, but also, I notice, without any threat. "The Council meets tomorrow at noon. I'll want you there."

I've been hoping for a reason to hate his voice. So far he's refused to supply one.

He is at the door when he stops, a hand on the frame. The torchlight shows the tired lines at the corners of his eyes, which are older than his twenty-nine years.

"One more thing, Mara Finch."

"Yes?"

"There is no bonesetter by that name in the guild registry." He says it mildly, as a man might mention that it looks like rain. "I had the gate-books checked before you reached this room."

The air leaves my chest. Beside me, Jax doesn't move.

"I let you in anyway," Kael says. "Think about why." And he goes, and the guards close ranks behind him, and I'm left standing at the edge of a dead woman's blood with his coat spread over her like a second shroud.

The east gallery is small and warm. The bed is too soft for someone used to roadside floors. A fire has been laid, and a tray of bread and cold meat waits on the table, which I look at and cannot want.

Jax closes the door behind us and stays on my side of it.

"You didn't tell him about the ring," he says.

I don't answer. He leans against the wall, arms folded, expression carefully empty. I can't tell whether I'm looking at an ally or a jailer.

"You expected me to?"

"I expected you to be smarter than to trust me with it." He pushes off the wall. "Eat. You're white as the sheet. Listening takes it out of you."

"I don't—"

"Whatever you call it." A shadow of a smile, humorless. "Lock's on the outside. I'll be in the corridor."

The lock turns. I sit on the edge of the bed with my hands pressed between my knees until the borrowed grief in my chest stops sounding like Isolde's voice.

He checked the gate-books. He knew, before I ever knelt by the veil, that there was no Mara Finch, and he let me kneel anyway, and kept a straight face while I lied to him, and then set a trap so small I almost walked into it. A king who was careless would be a fool. A king who was careful and let a suspected liar touch his dead bride's blood has a reason.

Either he's desperate, or he's curious. I lie in the dark and can't decide which one I'm more afraid of.