IRON BLOOD

Knives at the Table

Mira Valkur was younger than her brother by two years and had spent those two years building what Cael had not: a network of obligation that ran through the sub-clan structure like roots through stone—invisible until you pulled something up and found how deep it went. Renna had observed this from a distance the way you observed weather on the horizon: noting the pattern, respecting the implications, staying out of the path. She had perhaps underestimated the degree to which being in the path was no longer optional.

Mira was waiting for her when she came back through the secondary gate. Not dramatically—she was standing in the practice yard with a cup of something hot, watching the enforcers run drills in the cold, and she turned as Renna came in with the unhurried confidence of someone who had known exactly where Renna had been and when she would return.

"The eastern ridge," Mira said, conversationally. Not a question.

"You wrote the note."

"I needed to know if you were good enough to find what I needed you to find." She took a sip of her drink. Her eyes were her father's—pale grey, winter-ice—but where his had been cold and assured, hers were calculating and almost warm, which was more frightening. "Were you?"

"Depends on what you needed."

"Two camps. Draveth primary. Mixed secondary, three days old."

Renna said nothing. Mira watched her not say anything with the expression of someone ticking items off an internal list.

✦ ✦ ✦

"I didn't kill him," Mira said, and for the first time the calculation dropped slightly and something rawer showed through. "He was my father. I had reasons to want him gone, and I am not pretending otherwise, but I did not do this."

"The mixed-scent camp—"

"Was mine. I have been in contact with a Draveth sub-clan head—Veth Prann, the one who controls the Ash River valley access. He has been willing to discuss a revision of the southern boundary in exchange for certain trade concessions." A pause. "My father would not have sanctioned it. He considered the Draveth irredeemable. He was wrong."

Renna processed this. A secret diplomatic initiative, conducted without the Alpha's knowledge, which would have been grounds for serious censure at minimum. A motive, clearly. But also—if she was telling the truth—a separate line of activity that created a trail precisely at the moment it would look worst for her. "Cael knows about this."

"Cael has known for three months. He has been planning to use it to discredit me in the succession." Mira set down her cup. "Now he doesn't need to. The succession is already happening, and I'm standing here talking to a tracker instead of in the council room, which should tell you what my position is."

"Then what do you want from me?"

Mira looked at her with those winter-ice eyes. "I want you to find who actually did it. Because if it was the Kovrath—and I believe it was—then Cael inheriting this pack and marching us into open war with both Draveth and Kovrath simultaneously will not end with a pack. It will end with a territory and a lot of bones."

She picked her cup back up and turned toward the practice yard, watching the enforcers. "You're good at reading dead things, Ashvale. Read this one before it buries all of us."

Renna stood in the cold yard for a moment after she left. Around her the den-hold went about the particular business of a pack in crisis: preparation and grief and the low hum of factional calculation. She was a tracker. She was low-ranked. She had no political power, no alliances, no institutional standing beyond her professional record.

She had, apparently, become the hinge on which several very large things were about to swing.

She went to find Davan Ashcroft, because whatever else he was, he was the person in this den-hold most likely to tell her something true.