24. Cain
Cain
I took Gregor off his feet before he reached the boy.
I moved forward. The wolf inside me had been very still since the empty cell. The still wolf did the moving. I hit Gregor at the hip and we went through a council bench and into the open floor of the great hall, the long ceremonial knife still in his hand and my own sword still in mine.
The hall didn't move.
The Stoneveil-Ashfen riders at the doors didn't move. Neither did the entire audience of Swiftwater wolves. I saw Marion put her hand on the back of Noah's neck and pull the boy behind her hip, fierce and fast.
I came up on a knee.
Gregor was already standing.
He shed the ceremonial cloak. The silver clasp at the throat broke open in the fall and the wool lay across the broken bench between us, and Gregor was in his shirt, his belt, and his boots, the knife loose in his hand, his weight forward on the spurs of his feet.
He didn't bleed. He was awake one night.
He was bigger than me, fresher than me, and he had no wound to hold off.
I was awake three days straight.
I rose.
We went at each other in the middle of the floor.
The first exchange was clean. He came at the chest. I turned the blade.
He came at the shoulder. I turned the blade.
He came low under the rib and I was a half-beat slow and the long knife went past the bone and out again.
I felt the wide thin line of it open across my side.
A man would feel that wound later if he was still alive to feel anything.
I didn't slow down. He stepped back and reset.
He talked, keeping a wide brotherly voice. The voice of a beta who hadn't yet quite given up the room.
"You think I'm the traitor in this hall, Brother Cain."
I didn't answer. I turned the blade. I took a half-step back and brought the dais behind my shoulder where he couldn't get above me again.
"I'm not the man who betrayed first. You are. You betrayed us first. You betrayed all of us. You betrayed me!"
He came forward. I met him at the high line. The hall heard his blade ring against mine.
"You bound yourself to her," he spat with disgust.
He drew breath. The brotherly voice held.
"You stood in the great hall and bound your line to a human woman in front of every wolf of Swiftwater and every elder of every house.
I stood at your shoulder. I carried the cup.
I said the words." His voice didn't rise.
It went flatter. "I held my mouth shut. I held my mouth shut!
I told myself you were the Alpha and the Alpha chose. "
He came at me again. The knife went for the inside of my forearm. I turned it. The blade caught the wool of my sleeve and opened the skin underneath — a shallow cut.
"Then she carried your child," he continued.
I held the blade.
"Then I held a half-blood child in this hall and watched our lore-keeper turn his face. Then she began to fail and you grieved her like a man grieves a wife! That's when I knew, brother. I knew you had not learned. I knew you had not learned anything."
He stopped at the inside of the high line. He didn't come forward. He had the knife and I had the sword and the hall around us stopped breathing. Gregor of Swiftwater was about to say the sentence he carried inside him for six years.
“I gave her the tea so you would be free of her. I told myself it was love for you. I held the cup to her mouth."
His voice cracked.
"She thanked me for it."
I stood in front of my wife's murderer. The anger in me went cold.
Something in Gregor came undone. He came into the hall planning to depose me by speech and by lore.
He did not come planning to confess. The confession came up through the seam of his own voice before he could close it, and the wolf inside him — the wolf that had been pacing in the dark for six years waiting for permission — took the seam.
The shift came up through his shoulders.
The shirt split at the collar. The bones of his face moved under the skin.
The hair came up his spine in the hot fast ripple of a wolf coming up not in the clean control a beta practiced in every shift of his adult life, but in the broken hurry of a man whose own confession broke him open.
The ceremonial cloak on the bench behind him went under the swell of his weight.
He came up silver-grey and broad at the shoulders, bigger than the wolf I knew him to carry — the wolf he was grooming for the seat.
Until this morning, I didn't know he meant to take it.
The wolf landed on the floor of the great hall.
I didn't shift.
I stood at the foot of the dais in my torn shirt, my bleeding side, my sword in my hand, and faced the wolf that was my brother for twelve years.
I didn't move.
The wolf inside me was screaming to surge. I held it. The wolf wanted out. The man said no.
The hall watched.
Several of the older warriors at the wall — the ones who were quietly agreeing with Gregor — saw the Alpha of Swiftwater hold his human form against a fully-shifted beta. They understood what they were watching. Gregor's shift said wolves couldn't love humans. My standing said otherwise.
The wolf circled.
He was faster than the man would have been. He had reach. He had jaws. He went for the hamstring once and I turned the blade and took him in the shoulder — a shallow strike, a warning, the cut a swordsman gave a wolf he wasn't yet ready to kill.
The wolf reared back.
He circled.
He tried again. He came at the inside of my off-hand and I met him with the cross-guard and turned him off, and he circled again, and I held my feet, and the line of the dais was behind my left shoulder where he couldn't get above me a second time.
He came at the chest.
I took him in the flank.
He pulled back. The blood on his coat went into the wool where the silver-grey came together at the shoulder, and the wound wouldn’t kill him. It was a wound that told the hall I knew where his shoulder was.
I met him each time as a man.
I didn't shift.
I bled.
The wound at my rib was worse now. I didn't look at it. The cloth at my side went dark and the inside of my arm where his knife opened the skin was a slow steady run that I could feel in my boot. I kept the blade. I kept my feet.
Marion stood three paces from the dais with Noah behind her hip.
I saw her once.
Saw her when the wolf circled the wide way and the line of the hall came open between us.
She didn't move. She had her hand at the back of her son's neck.
The leather pouch at her belt was open. The last vial — I knew where it was — was up under the cuff of her left sleeve.
She was watching me. Watching the man holding his body in front of a wolf for the only reason a man ever did.
The wolf inside me said something low.
Mate.
I didn't let it out of my throat. I let it stand under the bone where it belonged. The hall didn't need it said aloud. The hall could see it in how I held myself.
He circled again.
The wolf in Noah surfaced at the edge of the room. He made a sound at the back of his throat — not a growl, not yet, but the shape of one. Marion's hand on his neck tightened. She didn't look down. She watched me.
Gregor's wolf circled once more.
The circle widened.
He put his eyes on the boy behind Marion's hip.
He began to speak.
The hall heard the words come out of the wolf's mouth and didn't yet know what to do with them.
He preached from the floor of the great hall.
"He is not ours," Gregor said.
The hall heard it.
"He is half. He is theirs. The humans built their soft houses and their soft tables and their soft books while we held the line of the woods for them.
Six generations of Swiftwater. Six generations of wolves.
We don't bleed for them. We don't bind to them.
We don't put their children at our council tables. "
He turned his head toward Marion.
"The boy is not the heir," he told the hall. "The boy is the rot. The boy is what your Alpha brought into this house and what your Alpha is asking you to kneel for."
He showed his teeth.
"I will not let him grow."
He made the ducking motion a wolf made before it ran.
Gregor's wolf moved on the boy.
Marion moved at the same beat.
I moved a half-beat before either of them.
I didn't shift because my wolf overran me. I shifted because the man in me made the decision the wolf could finish faster. The wolf in Gregor said the thing aloud and the man in me heard the doctrine that killed Savannah named in front of my own pack.
And I shifted because he threatened my son. My cub. My Noah.
The wolf in me arrived.
The shift took me on the floor of the great hall in front of my pack.
The tearing of my shirt at the shoulder. The pull at my spine. My bones cracking into the new architecture. The wolf coming up through the skin. I went into it without thinking, the wolf in me moving the man.
The wolf, when it landed on the floor, wasn't an angry wolf.
It was a clean cold wolf.
The wolf was given a job the man couldn't do.
To protect his family.
The two wolves met in the center of the floor.
He was bigger and fresher and angrier. I was a wolf that rode for three days, hadn't slept, and was bleeding from a wound at the human ribs.
The first pass we made at each other was the pass of two wolves who knew each other inside the same pack for twelve years, and the muscle memory of that knowing was in the shoulders and the jaws.
He went for the throat. I turned. I went for the flank.
He turned. He came at me low and I went over him and we crashed against the dais with our jaws locked and the wood under our weight cracking once and holding.
He got above me.
He was bigger his whole life. He bore down again with the same wide shoulder-and-weight, and my wolf went under him — jaws on his foreleg, weight against the wood of the dais.
He twisted.
His jaws went for my throat.
I held.
I didn't have, in the wolf, the strength to throw him off. I had, in the wolf, the certainty of a man whose mate and son were behind him. I held my throat where it was. I held the muscle of my neck against the muscle of his jaw.
Then Marion moved.
I felt her before I saw her — the clean run of her feet across the stone, the cloth of her dress in the air, the smell of mugwort and salt the wolf in me would have known anywhere.
She crossed the floor at a run and she was over us.
Her hand was at her sleeve and the glass vial was out, and she flung it into Gregor's face.
It shattered on his snout.
He roared.
He reared back. The blinding agent went up into his eyes, into his open mouth, and down his throat. I came up off the wood of the dais and went for him.
I struck the killing blow.
I took him at the throat. He didn't have the second to set his weight. It did the work the man couldn't do, and the silver-grey wolf of the beta of Swiftwater went down in the middle of his own pack's hall, and the hall didn't move.
I stood over him.
I shifted back to the man in me — bones cracking into the architecture they were born to, skin coming up over the shoulders, the shirt at my back hanging in pieces.
I stood in the middle of the great hall in a torn shirt and a wound at my side and the silver-grey body of my beta, my brother, at my feet.
I looked at the body.
The silver-grey wolf at my feet had carried my cup. Had held my son at his blessing. Had embraced me in the courtyard the morning we rode in. Twelve years. I stood over him and let that be true for exactly as long as I could afford to.
Then I didn't look at the body again.
I looked at Marion.
She was three paces in front of me with the empty vial in her hand and Noah behind her hip. The vial broke at the rim where it hit Gregor's snout, and a thin red line ran across the meat of her palm where the glass cut her on the throw. She didn't look at the cut. She looked at me.
I crossed the three paces.
I didn't claim her in front of the pack. I didn't lead her. I stopped at one pace. I set my forehead against hers.
I breathed.
She put her hand on the side of my face. Her hand was warm. The blood from her palm went into the dark stubble at my jaw, and I didn't move my face out from under her hand. We stood like that for a long pause in the hall we were just given.
The hall behind her was very quiet.
Then, from the back of the hall, Julius said it.
"Will Swiftwater stand with its Alpha?!"
The pack knelt at once.
Every wolf at the walls of the hall — the older warriors who were looking at the floor at the start of Gregor's speech, the wolves who were quietly agreeing with him, the wolves who watched a man hold his human form against their beta's wolf for the length of a minute.
The steward. The lore-keeper. The cooks at the kitchen doorway.
The younger warriors at the back near the doors. The household.
The Stoneveil-Ashfen riders at the doors inclined their heads.
I didn't let go of Marion's face, nor did I look at the pack.
I looked at her.
The great hall held its kneeling for a long pause.
Then, slowly, the kneeling broke into the movements of a pack picking itself up off the floor.
Julius and three of his men crossed to where Gregor lay.
They lifted him without ceremony and carried him out the side door, the silver-grey of his coat dark against the wool of their cloaks.
Two of the older warriors crossed to the council bench we broke and lifted the wood between them and carried it out the other side.
The lore-keeper crossed the floor to Theodora at the side door.
He didn't speak. He offered her his arm. She took it.
Marion lifted her head from mine.
She looked once at her palm where the glass cut her, looked once at me, and reached down with her unbloodied hand for the dark hand of the boy behind her hip.
Noah came out from behind her. He looked once at the floor where Gregor was and once at me, and he held his mother's hand on one side and lifted his other hand toward me, and I took it.
We walked out of the great hall side by side.
Noah between us.
The corridor was very quiet.
The morning was very long. The light through the high slit windows moved a hand's-breadth across the stone and the household behind us was beginning the small mechanical work of a keep that lost its beta and gained its Alpha back.
I didn't look behind me. The pack would do its own work. The pack decided.
I walked the corridor with Marion to my left and Noah between us, and I understood, between one step and the next, that the hall behind me stopped being the only hall I'd ever ruled.
I was, before the day was out, about to make it the last.