Chapter Thirteen
Sana
Darius departed two days after the feast, recalled to Council session, with gifts and embraces and a promise to return for the Blood Moon ceremony that he delivered while holding both my hands and looking so sincerely moved that I nearly applauded.
"You'll forgive an old romantic," he said at his stirrup. "I came as a skeptic, cousins. I leave converted. What I witnessed in that meadow no fraud could stage."
He swung up, gathered his reins, smiled down at us with the autumn sun behind him. "Though I confess, the scholar in me would still love to know what changed your mind, Nightsteel. Between the rejection and the reversal. Every wonder has a hinge. I never did find yours."
He shrugged, charmingly. "Perhaps at the ceremony. The Blood Moon reveals all things, they say. Until then."
We watched the Jademoor banners go down the south road, and Zaden's hand found the small of my back, no audience, no drill, just weather settling in where it lived now.
"He didn't convert," Zaden said.
"No," I said. "He found something. He left happy. Skeptics don't leave happy, they leave hungry. He's carrying something south and I can't see its shape."
But the days that followed made vigilance hard, because the days that followed were the happiest of my life, and I say that as a woman who counts her happiness honestly, having buried so much of it.
We had three weeks to the Blood Moon, and we spent them learning what we were when nobody was drilling.
Zaden moved his things from the room down the hall, which took one trip because the man owned nine objects, and Odell met him on the stairs mid move, took in the armful of his belongings and the direction of travel, and said "Hmf" with such satisfaction that he reported it to me as a formal blessing.
We walked the Springline together in the rain.
He took me to the den twice a week openly now, on the treaty schedule, my healer's baskets riding official on the patrol logs, and Will taught me a card game he had invented, whose rules changed whenever he was losing, and I have never been so thoroughly cheated in my life and never minded less.
"You have to lose with more grace," Will told me. "Zaden loses better than you. When I cheat him he just does the eyebrow."
"He's had practice losing to small tyrants," I said. "He runs a council."
"What's it like being married to him?" Will asked. "Jay says he never smiles. I've seen him smile twice, but they were both at you, so they might not count for the general question."
The general question. I looked across the den, where the never smiling Alpha of Nightsteel was sitting on a too small stool letting one of the twins, the shy one, Ava, listen to his heartbeat through Freya's wooden horn as part of a game where she was the healer and he was dying of an ailment she had diagnosed as "too much frowning. "
He caught me watching. He did the eyebrow.
"It's like a wall with a garden behind it," I said, "and the gate left open."
"That's not a real answer," Will said.
"It's the realest one I've got," I said. "Play your cards, tyrant, and this time the rules hold for the whole hand or the enemy Luna stops bringing honey cakes."
At home, the evenings were ours. We kept the war council, because we were still us, the maps and the treaty drafts and the abdication law spread over the table, but now he worked with one hand and kept the other woven through mine, and I learned that he hummed when he read, tunelessly, an Nightsteel mountain song mangled past recognition, and that he did not know he did it, and that when I told him he did it he denied it with such offended dignity that I let him keep the delusion as a wedding gift.
Zaden took me to dine at Nightsteel in the second of those three weeks, my first time inside his hall as something other than an invader with a treaty, and I prepared for it the way generals prepare for terrain.
"Corvin will sit on your left," Zaden briefed me, on the ride over.
"He's earned the seat and he'll use it. He has opposed everything I've done for ten years, he opposed the contract, he opposed the treaty, and he has let it be known that he intends to oppose you, on principle, the principle being that I haven't lost an argument since my father died and it isn't healthy.
Don't charm him. He's inoculated. Sixty years of merchants have tried. "
"What works on him?" I asked.
"Nothing works on him," Zaden said. "That's his entire value. Arrive honest or leave educated."
The hall was warmer than I remembered it, which may have been the fires and may have been the circumstances, and the antlers were exactly as brooding as advertised, and Ivan met us at the doors with a bow so elaborate that two passing wolves stopped to watch it land.
"Luna," he said. "Welcome back. I want you to know the rock has become a site of historical interest. Lucan takes visitors past it on patrol and embellishes. In his current version you brought your own teapot."
"I'll autograph it for him," I said.
"He'd weep," Ivan said. "Don't tempt me."
Corvin was old and broad and gnarled as a stump, and he waited through the soup with the patience of a man who had buried faster talkers, and then he set down his spoon, squared it to the table edge, which nearly undid me, and began the audit.
"The treaty water draws," he said. "Schedule shows four jars the fortnight, drawn regular. Healer's allotment shows herbs and tinctures running treble what any healer needs. I keep the books, girl. I've kept them fifty years. I know what a hidden expense looks like wearing a hat."
He looked at me, flat and shrewd. "I haven't asked him, because he'd tell me, and then it would be official, and official things leak. I'm asking you, because you're Clawfore, and Clawfore's signature is on the allotment. What is my Alpha buying that can't be written down?"
The table had gone quiet around us. Zaden, across the candles, did not rescue me, which I understood, slowly, was itself the rescue, because the old man was not auditing the water. He was auditing me.
Arrive honest or leave educated.
"He's buying time," I said, "for something that was dying without it, and I won't tell you what, here, at a table, because it's his to tell and there are reasons it isn't written down that are better than any reason I've ever had for a secret, and I've had hundreds.
But I'll tell you what I signed and why.
I signed the allotment because the day I learned what the draws were for, I stopped being able to imagine refusing, and if that's bad bookkeeping, Master Corvin, then I submit that some accounts only balance in a currency your ledgers don't carry, and that you've known that for fifty years, or you'd have asked him directly the first week. "
The old man looked at me for a long moment.
Down the table, nobody breathed.
"Hmf," he said, which I would later learn he had picked up from Odell at a border meeting forty years prior, the two of them being ancient adversaries and, by every sign I have since gathered, something more complicated that neither will discuss.
"She'll do," he said, to the table at large, and picked his spoon back up, and that was the whole of my confirmation by the Nightsteel council, three syllables over soup.
Afterward, in the cold of the yard, Zaden handed me up to my horse and stood a moment with his hand on the bridle.
"He hasn't said she'll do about anyone since my mother," he said. "I thought you should have that. He'd deny it under torture."
"Your pack is strange and I love it," I said. "You're all walls with gardens. It's an architectural epidemic."
"And yours is all gardens with walls in them somewhere," he said, "which is worse, because we keep finding them by walking into them.
Ivan hit one in Odell last week. He tried flattery on her shawl and she reviewed his entire character in front of the pups.
He's writing his counterattack now. We expect casualties. "
He swung up onto his own horse, and the torchlight caught him, and for a moment I simply looked, because I was allowed now, mouth then eyes, exactly as taught, no drill required.
"What?" he asked.
"Nothing," I said. "Taking inventory."
"And?" he asked.
"Some accounts," I said, "only balance in a currency the ledgers don't carry."
He did the eyebrow, and we rode home through the dark of the Springline, side by side down the middle of a road our grandfathers had bled to draw, and the moon came up over the land.
The hook under my ribs lay quiet the whole way, line slack, the way a rope lies when both ends are finally in the same harbor.
The law itself we turned over a hundred ways.
Mated Alphas may not hold adjacent packs.
The reasoning was old and sound, two packs under one bond become one power, and the Council's whole balance rests on no single power growing too great.
Abdication was the prescribed cure. One of us steps down, the bond keeps its love and loses its teeth.
"I'll do it," Zaden said, one night, quietly, into my hair.
We were past midnight, the maps abandoned.
"Stand down from Nightsteel. Ivan's ready, he's been effectively co Alpha for years, the pack would follow him through fire if the fire apologized first. I come here as your mate, no title. It solves it clean."
I sat up and looked at him, this man who had rebuilt a burned pack with his hands from age nineteen, offering it across a pillow like loose coin.
"And the den?" I said. "Freya answers to whom?
The water schedule, the smugglers' debts still unwinding, Corvin and his ledgers, the treasury you've been quietly bleeding for two years.
Ivan is loyalty and steel, but the den arrangement is held together with your authority and string, you've said so yourself.
You abdicate and the first hard winter, some new Council inspector pulls one thread, and Will's water becomes a scandal instead of a secret. No."
"Then you stand down," he said, "and Clawfore needs an Alpha within the year and we are back at the beginning, with Nylah writing letters and Darius weighing your wolves like grain. I know. I've run it that direction too. It doesn't solve."
He pulled me back down, and we lay in the dark with the trap closed around our happiness, ticking. "There has to be a third road, Sana. The law can't be older than every answer."
"Then we need older law," I said, half asleep, not knowing I had just said the most important sentence of my life. "Ask Odell. Nothing in this valley is older than Odell."