20. Marion
Marion
The chamber was high-ceilinged and stone-walled, nothing like the cottage.
It had iron sconces at long intervals along the walls, beeswax candles in them, and the smell of old wool and older smoke.
A bed against the long wall — high, broad, and the cover folded back.
A chair beside the bed I hadn't sat in. A writing table I hadn't written at.
A small couch by the window where the afternoon light was coming in across the stone in long pale bars, and Noah on the couch with the lore book open against his knees, reading the way he read at our own kitchen table for five years.
Cain was called away ten minutes after he bolted the door behind us.
The steward came for him with the light and careful knock, for his formal welcoming ritual.
The ritual was a council-chamber thing — a long table, the older warriors, the wine of the inner cellar, and the household required it of an Alpha, he said.
His hand stayed on the bolt a beat too long before he turned away. I didn't hold it against him.
He stopped at the door before he left. "I'll send Julius."
"All right."
"Marion."
"Mm?"
"Don't open the door for anyone but Julius."
He looked at Noah on the couch and at me at the writing table, and he looked at the bolt of the chamber door.
"I won't," I said.
He left.
I crossed to the writing table and set my bag on it. I didn't unpack. I wasn't yet ready to do anything in this chamber that would put down a root.
I saw the doorway in the corridor where the healer came out with the tea. Not a part of me missed who she was. Gregor's sister. A woman of the keep — slightly like me, fair, with the pretty smile of a woman a household pointed at when an Alpha was widowed. A woman an Alpha was supposed to choose.
I let the thought arrive, and I let it go.
Cain didn't choose her. He pitched a tent at my gate in the rain instead.
I knew that. I also knew that green-bitter note she put in my tea.
I crossed to Noah on the couch and sat down beside him, putting my hand on his hair. "Read me a page."
He found his spot and started in, his finger tracking under each word. I let the sound of his voice fill the room, let it be the only thing I had to follow for a while.
The first knock came an hour in.
It was the ceremonial knock — one rap, not three, given at an Alpha's chamber when the wolf came on a household errand. Since the door was bolted, all they could do was look through the curtain of a window near the door.
First was a woman older than me by a generation, square at the shoulder, dressed in the dark wool of the eastern quarter with the silver sigil pinned at her collarbone. She didn't smile. Her eyes went past me to the couch where Noah was sitting up with the lore book closed against his chest.
She looked at him for a long beat.
"He has his mother's eyes."
She didn't look at me. She turned on her heel and moved along.
I crossed to the door and checked the bolt. Just to be sure.
Noah lowered the lore book to his lap, his gray eyes on the door. I sat down beside him and put my arm around his shoulder. "Don't look at the door. Read the next page aloud."
He did as I said.
The second knock came twenty minutes later.
The third, twenty after that. By the fourth I stopped pretending I wasn't counting them.
A young warrior who didn't speak at all and bowed once to the boy and not to me before he left.
A pair of older wolves in council cloaks stood in the doorway window, didn't cross, and looked at me as if they were measuring me.
A woman with a basin and a cloth who said she came to help the lady wash for supper, and whose eyes went to my bag on the writing table.
I thanked her. I didn't let her in. I said the lady would wash herself.
The household was told the chamber was open for inspection of the half-blood heir, and the household was performing the inspection it was told to perform, and I was, in the architecture of the chamber, a piece of furniture the inspection had to walk around.
I sat on the couch with my hand on Noah's shoulder.
The Alpha's hall wasn't a home. The bed wasn't mine. We were strangers here.
Julius came in the late afternoon.
He gave the door three raps — not the ceremonial one, the three of a man asking permission — and he waited. I drew the bolt and opened the door.
He was alone, with a basket over his forearm and the lid tied down with a length of leather cord. The cord had a clay seal at the knot in the shape of a pressed stag — Julius's own household. Not the keep's.
He stepped inside without crossing the threshold further than the door required. He didn't bow. He nodded once, acknowledging me as an equal. He crossed to the writing table and set the basket down beside my bag.
He turned to me. "My lady."
"Commander," I said.
"Trust the food I bring." He held my eye. "Trust nothing else in this keep that has not first been on my table. Forgive the bluntness. I do not have the room in me for grace today."
He didn't soften any of the five sentences.
"Thank you, commander."
"My lady."
He bowed once, and he turned and pulled the door shut behind him. I drew the bolt behind him.
I untied the cord and opened the basket.
Bread. Hard cheese in cloth. Six brown eggs nested in dry straw.
A clay jar of butter with the same stag seal at the lid.
A second clay jar — the seal broken once and resealed — held a soft pale spread of curd, and the faint green of crushed herbs I knew the name of.
Three apples. A linen bundle of dried meat.
I gave Noah the bread and the cheese and one of the eggs. He ate the egg raw like a wolf. I ate one of the apples.
Three adults in two months were kind to me without ceremony. Cain at the gate the afternoon he knelt on my porch. The quartermaster at Cain's elbow this noon. Julius this afternoon. The keep was a hostile structure and it contained good men.
I let myself register the count. It steadied me. It was the weapon I didn't yet know the purpose of. I knew only that I had it.
After supper, I crossed the chamber to the back door and opened it onto the corridor to the water-room at the end of the wing.
Cain said not to open the chamber door for anyone but Julius. The back door was a different door — it went to a corridor inside the eastern wing, not to the rest of the keep, and the corridor at this hour was empty. I had a basin in my hand.
The water-room was at the end of the wing. I filled the basin from the spigot and came back. Twenty paces, and the corridor bent at the junction where the wing met the older stone of the keep. I turned the corner without thinking — and saw the doorway.
The doorway was three paces in.
It belonged to a chamber I didn't know the use of — a steward's chamber, perhaps, or a place the household kept linens, a room that didn’t belong to anyone in particular.
The door was open. Vera was inside the room, Gregor with her.
They were standing too close. Their voices were below the level the corridor would carry, and I couldn't hear the words.
I didn't move.
I held the basin against my hip and made my breath slow and quiet.
I watched the doorway for the length of three breaths.
Vera was at the inside of the room with her back to the door.
Gregor was at her right, close enough that the line of his shoulder was inside the line of hers, and his voice was low and careful and his hand was at her elbow.
A brother put a hand at a sister's elbow at a hundred household corners in a day. But a brother didn't put it there in the way Gregor was putting it there — not pressure, not affection, but the hold of a man telling an accomplice, very quietly, what came next.
I stepped back from the doorway without making a sound.
I walked the corridor back at the pace of a woman with a basin and no other purpose in the keep. My hands were steady. I noticed that about them.
I drew the bolt behind me. Noah was asleep on the couch.
Cain came back an hour after full dark.
He stopped at the threshold and looked at me on the edge of the bed and at Noah.
"You should sleep, Marion."
"I'll try."
"I'll take the chair."
"All right."
He set his sword across his knees in the chair beside the bed, his head against the back of it, and closed his eyes. The wolf in him was very near the surface and very still. He fell asleep faster than a man should have, and I understood that today had asked everything of him a body had to give.
I let him sleep.
The keep breathed at the rafters, slow and indifferent, the steady in-and-out of an old animal that didn't yet know I was inside it.
The chamber wasn't the cottage. The bed wasn't my bed.
The corridor outside the door had three things filed in it — the cup on the cobblestones, the look the old woman gave my son, the doorway with Vera and Gregor in it.
Somewhere six floors below me was the foundation of the keep.
I saw the stair down to it when we crossed the inner courtyard, and I hadn't walked it yet.
I got up.
I didn't wake Cain. I put my cloak on over my shift and my shoes on at the side of the bed. I crossed the chamber. I looked at my son asleep on the couch, at the man asleep in the chair, at the basin of water on the writing table. I told myself I was going to walk the corridor and tire my body out.
Once outside, I crossed the corridor and turned, not toward the water-room, but toward the older part of the keep where the corridor had a doorway with Vera and Gregor in it and somewhere past it a stair down to whatever the keep held at its foundation.
I told myself I wasn't hunting.
I was.
I didn't yet know what for.