Vows To The Void Moon

Chapter 3: The Things Kept Quiet

Saoirse P.O.V

He ran a fever for six hours.

I know because I stayed. That's the part I can't fully account for, not the initial rescue, which I had reasoned into a kind of cold logic by the time I got back to the Sanctum with warm water, but the staying.

I had filed a routine sweep completion with Brael. I had forty-eight hours before my next required check-in. I had, by any reasonable measure, fulfilled whatever obligation my conscience had generated by depositing a bleeding man at the door of people capable of treating him.

I stayed anyway.

The Sage gave me no explanation for how he knew my name or why he'd been expecting me. He gave me a cup of something hot and bitter and pointed me toward a chair near the fire, and then he and his assistant worked through the fever hours with the focused economy of people who had done this many times before. I watched. I am good at watching. I let the firelight do what firelight does to a room and I catalogued what I could about the man on the table.

Cadryn Voss. I turned the name over. I had heard of the Virenmoor succession trial; it had rippled through the Riftlands eleven months ago, significant enough that even our politically isolated sector had registered it.

An Alpha-Heir convicted of murdering a Hollow Courts treaty envoy. The conviction had been swift. The exile from succession had been immediate. The pack world had spoken about it for a few weeks and then moved on to its next crisis, the way the pack world always did.

I had not thought much about it. I thought about pack politics the way I thought about weather in regions I didn't live in, relevant as background, not as reality.

Now the convicted man was three feet from me and burning up, and the Sage who knew my name was watching me watch him.

Around the fourth hour, Cadryn's fever broke. I saw the exact moment it happened — his breathing changed quality, deepened, and the rigid way he'd been holding his body even unconsciously released all at once like something had finally decided to stop fighting.

His hand, which had been pressed flat against the table edge in that same curled grip I'd seen at the marker stone, went slack.

I looked at the Sage. 'He's going to survive it.'

'Yes,' the Sage said. He was sitting across from me now, his own cup in his hands, watching me with that layered expression. 'He was going to survive it regardless. He is more difficult to kill than the people trying to kill him have accounted for.'

'Who's trying to kill him?'

'That is a longer answer than you have asked for.' He paused. 'The arrow was Hollow Courts enforcement grade, as you noted. But it was not Court-sanctioned. Someone within the Courts' enforcement structure is operating on private instruction.'

'Soveth Draal,' I said. The name surfaced without my deciding to offer it. I didn't know why. The Sage's eyes sharpened almost imperceptibly.

'What do you know about Draal?' he asked.

'High Warden. Runs the Courts' enforcement arm. I have been running it for nineteen years.' I kept my voice level. 'My brother is in Duskfen. Under treaty ward. Draal's office administers the ward.'

The Sage was quiet for a moment. 'Your brother's ward status was elevated three weeks ago,' he said. 'From standard treaty ward to priority hold. You were not informed.'

Something cold went through me that had nothing to do with the temperature.

'Show me,' I said.

He did. He produced a document the Courts-formatted, bearing the Virenmoor treaty seal and I read it twice because the first time my eyes moved over it without actually processing what they were seeing. Thessaly Vael, ward elevation, priority hold, pending Void Moon political review. Signed eleven days ago.

My brother. Eleven days and no one had told me.

I set the document down carefully. I smoothed the corner where I'd bent it without meaning to. Behind me, the man on the table made a sound, not distress, just the small audio of someone moving in sleep.

'Why are you telling me this?' I asked.

The Sage looked at me for a long moment. Then he looked at Cadryn Voss.

'Because the answer to your brother's situation and the answer to his situation,' he said quietly, 'come from the same place. And you will need to understand that before he wakes up.'

I didn't ask anything else that night. I sat with the fire and the information and the particular internal cold of a threat you cannot yet see the shape of, and I waited for morning.