MARKED BY THE ALPHA I WAS TOLD TO FEAR

Chapter 30

Wren’s POV

Somebody has put a blanket round me, and somebody has put water in my hand, and I can’t hold the cup, so Ronan holds it, and I drink out of it, and neither of us mentions that.

“Say it again,” I tell him. “The part about the quartermaster.”

“Wren.”

“I’m not fragile. I’m just naked,d and I’ve been a wolf for nine hours.” My voice comes out in pieces. “Say it again.”

So he says it again. All of it. Two hundred and eleven names, four councils, nine at the eastern crossing, four out of the twelve who sat in his hall and discussed trading me, and every single one of them still sleeping under his own roof this morning, because arresting them today loses everything.

I listen to the whole thing, and I don’t cry, and when he’s finished I say, “Good.”

Rhys makes a noise.

“Good?”

“Nine days ago I was the most valuable object in this territory,” I say. “That’s what your quartermaster called me. And he’s on the list, and he said it in front of eleven people, so that when it all comes apart there’ll be witnesses who remember him saying something honest.” I get my elbow under me. “I’m not that anymore. I’m the only thing on this earth that has already read the list. That’s different.”

“That isn’t safer,” Ronan says.

“No. It’s better.”

I look down at my shoulder. It’s nearly gone. There’s a faint pattern under the skin like the last of a bruise, and while I’m watching, one more line of it thins out and stops being anything at all.

“It’s fading,” I say.

“Maren said it might.”

“Did you get all of it?”

“Two hundred and eleven. Maren thinks there was a fourth column that never fully surfaced.”

“So it’s gone.” Something goes out of me. “That’s it, then. That was the only copy, and now it’s on your bench in a clerk’s handwriting, and any court in three territories can call that a forgery.”

“Four territories,” Rhys says helpfully.

“Rhys.”

“Sorry.”

And that’s when I remember, and it comes back so hard and so complete that I make a sound, and both of them turn.

“She was alive,” I say.

The room goes quiet.

“My mother. She was alive on that floor. I saw her. I’ve seen it now, properly, and it’s mine, it’s in me, and it isn’t Garrick’s story anymore.” I can feel my face doing something I have no control over. “She looked at me,e and she told me to let them do it. She used her last words to tell me to let them take my wolf so I’d be worth nothing to them. And she called me Elske, and she nodded at me.”

Ronan doesn’t say anything. He sits there on the stone floor with the cup in his hand and lets me have it.

“Six years I’ve woken up every morning knowing I killed her,” I say. “And I didn’t. She saved me. She saved me twice, because she’d already put that list inside me eight days before, and she knew, Ronan. She knew they were coming for her. She had eight days, and she spent them making her daughter worthless and hiding two hundred names where nobody would ever think to look.”

“Wren.”

“I’m not finished.” I wipe my face with the corner of the blanket. “Nell said the men in that cart asked your mother where the register was. Over and over. Which means they knew my mother had made one, and they knew she’d got rid of it, and they have spent eleven years asking a woman in a yard about a piece of paper that was never a piece of paper at all.”

“Yes,” Ronan says.

“They’re going to keep asking her.”

“Yes.”

“Then we go and get her.” I look up. “Not at the bridge. Not their door, on their day, with their paper in my brother’s coat.” I hand him back the cup, because my hand’s steady enough now for me to notice that it isn’t. “We go to the Long Yard.”

“That’s ten miles inside a territory we don’t hold,” Rhys says.

“I know.”

“Containing two hundred and eleven people who would all rather we didn’t.”

“I know.”

“And your uncle is somewhere up that road doing something extremely stupid,” Rhys says, “and I’d like it noted that I have now agreed with you three times in one week, and it’s beginning to affect my sleep.”

Ronan hasn’t spoken.

He’s looking at the sheets on the bench, then at me, and I watch him arrive somewhere, and I brace for the argument, because with him there is always an argument.

“All right,” he says.

“All right?”

“You’ve read the list. I haven’t got a single person in this house I can trust to plan this who isn’t standing in this room.” He gets up and puts a hand out to help me up, then stops, turns it over, and waits for me to take it instead. “So it’s the four of us, and Maren, and Nell. We do it before the first of the month. And we tell nobody.”

I take his hand.

And that’s the moment somebody starts hammering on the west wing door hard enough that I feel it come up through the floor, and Rhys is out into the corridor before the second knock, and I hear a voice out there that I know, a voice I last heard nine days ago through iron bars, and it isn’t making any sense at all.

Rhys comes back into the ruined doorway with his face wrong.

“It’s Garrick,” he says. “He’s cut his own guard’s hand open getting in here. He says the Thornhollow house is burning.”

“Let it burn,” I say.

“Wren.” Rhys doesn’t move from the doorway. “They’ve put the boy back in the yard.”

The blanket goes cold on my shoulders.

“What boy?”

“The one who rode the north road for us. The one Corrin found lying there nine days ago.” His jaw works. “Somebody kept himfor nine days, and last night they carried him back into that yard and laid him out in front of the door, and there’s a paper pinned to his coat.”

“Pinned to his…”

“It’s addressed to you,” Rhys says. “By name. Both of them.”