MARKED BY THE ALPHA I WAS TOLD TO FEAR

Chapter 14

Wren’s POV

I make them argue about it in front of me, which is new.

“Absolutely not,” Maren says.

“She said run,” Isen says. “Nell surfaced for four seconds after eleven years, and she used them on a warning, and you want to sit in this kitchen and wait for morning.”

“I want the girl to have a day. One day, Isen. She learned her mother’s name this morning.”

“She doesn’t get a day. Nobody’s ever given her one, and I’m not able to be the first.”

“Then say the true reason.”

“That is the true reason.”

“Say the other one.”

“Fine.” Isen slaps the table. “The other reason is that my wife spoke this morning and I would sell this entire valley for another four seconds of it. There. Is that ugly enough for you?”

“It’ll do,” Maren says.

I put my cup down.

“I’ll do it,” I say.

Both of them start talking at once,e and I let them go for a moment, because I’ve spent six years being the quietest thing in every room and it turns out there’s a particular pleasure in being the reason people are shouting.

“On conditions,” I say.

Isen stops. “Conditions.”

“Three.”

“Girl, you don’t…”

“That’s the first one,” I say. “Stop calling me girl. You know my name. Both of them. Pick either. I don’t care which. Just stop using a word that means nobody in particular, because I’ve been nobody in particular since I was sixteen and I’m finished with it.”

Isen sits back.

“All right,” he says. “Wren.”

“Second. Maren tells me exactly what she did to me six years ago. All of it, the whole night, every hand that was on me, before I put my hands on anyone else. If it goes both ways, I want to know what it felt like from the inside when it was done to me.”

Maren’s face does something complicated.

“That will not be pleasant,” she says.

“None of my memories are. At least this one would be mine.”

“And the third?” Isen says.

“The third is that if I go under,” I say, “you don’t come after me. Neither of you. Nobody sits in a chair beside my bed for eleven years filling a cup. You put me in the ground, and you go and live like people.”

The kitchen is very quiet.

“That’s a hard condition,” Isen says.

“It’s the only one I actually care about.”

They tell me. It takes two hours, and it’s worse than I expected, and I don’t cry until the part where Maren says my mother’s body was still in the hallway while they worked, because nobody had moved her yet.

Then I go down the cellar steps on my own.

The lamp’s already lit. Somebody’s turned Nell onto her side and put a fresh cup on the shelf. I sit in the chair, in the dent eleven years of a man has left in it, and I put my hands on my knees and look at her for a while.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I tell her. “I want that on the record.”

Her breathing goes in and out.

“Here’s what I’ve got. Maren said they went looking for a knot and pulled it tight. So I’m not going to look for a knot. I don’t think that’s the way in.” I flex my fingers. “When you called me across the water, I felt it here. Not in my head. Here. So I’m going to try meeting you where the sound came from, and if that’s wrong, then it’s wrong, and Isen’s going to have a bad night.”

I take her hand.

It isn’t like the growl. It isn’t heat, or light, or any of the things I braced for.

It’s a house.

I’m standing in a corridor that goes on further than any corridor should, and every door in it is shut, and every door has been nailed. Not locked. Nailed, roughly, by somebody in a hurry, boards hammered across in an X, and behind each one a woman is screaming so far away that the sound arrives as almost nothing.

I put my hand on the first board, and it burns, and I take it off.

Not that way, then.

“Nell,” I say out loud, in the corridor, in the cellar, in both places at once. “I’m not going to open them. Not from out here. You’d have to do it, and I don’t think you can, and I’m not going to break your doors down and call it a favor.”

The screaming behind the wood stops.

Something listens.

“So here’s what I can do.” My voice is shaking, and I let it. “I can take the nails out. That’s all. I take the nails out, and I go and sit at the end of the hall, and if you want to open the door, you open it, and if you want to stay in there another eleven years then that is your business, and nobody will make you.”

Silence.

Then, very small, from behind the nearest door, a woman’s voice says, “Take them out.”

I do.

It’s the worst thing I have ever felt. It goes up my arms, and into my teeth, and somewhere in it I lose track of which of us is which, and there’s a long stretch I have no account of at all.

I come back on the cellar floor with the chair over and my nose bleeding and my ears ringing like a struck bell.

The bed is empty.

Nell is standing in the middle of the cellar in a nightdress with her hands out in front of her, staring at them as they’ve just been handed to her, and she is breathing in great, tearing gulps, and she is entirely, obviously, furiously awake.

She looks at me.

“You’re Alva’s,” she says.

“Yes.”

“Then listen, because I’ve only got this once before I fall over.” She grabs my wrist. Her grip is nothing, and it’s still the strongest thing that’s touched me in six years. “Eleven years ago they took me out of a house in Ravencross territory. There were two of us. Me, and a woman they carried out ahead of me because she’d already been stabbed and they wanted her alive enough to talk.”

The cellar goes cold.

“They put us in the same cart,” Nell says. “She told me her son’s name so somebody would know. She said it eleven times so I wouldn’t lose it.”

“Nell.”

“Blackwood,” she says. “Her son’s name was Ronan Blackwood, and she was not dead when they drove her out of that valley, and I have been lying in that bed for eleven years with her voice in my mouth.”