21. Marion
Marion
I didn't recognize the corridor I was walking in.
I walked the eastern wing once that afternoon, the back corridor twice.
The corridor I was in now was neither. It was older.
The stone at the walls was the kind that was quarried two hundred years before the rest of the keep, the gray gone deeper from the cold and the long centuries of lamp-soot, the iron sconces set further apart than they were in the wing where I left Cain asleep in the chair.
I passed three sentries without speaking and they didn't stop me.
They nodded the nod a sentry gave a woman whose place at the Alpha's hand the household had already decided was settled.
The word was moving through the keep. I didn't yet know myself by the word. I walked.
I went down a flight of stairs.
I didn't plan to. I came to the head of them passing a door I'd meant to leave behind, and my feet took the first step before my mind finished telling them not to.
The stairs went down two flights and ended at a landing with another stair, and I took that one.
The keep at the night-hour was quieter than the cottage had ever been.
The walls were old enough to know what they held. I'd walked into enough places like this to feel it through the stone — the cold under my hand, the air going still. They were telling me, at every step down, what they kept down here.
I didn't ask myself what I was doing. I listened, and walked.
Six floors below the ground I lost count of the turns.
I didn't know the keep had six floors below the ground.
I saw the stair coming up from the lower keep when we crossed the inner courtyard at noon, and I thought, Cellars?
The stair I was on now wasn't a cellar stair.
The stones underfoot were older than the ones at the upper walls, the iron sconces spaced further apart, the air down here steadier — not damp, not bad, just the cold still air of a wing the household had forgotten.
I passed a guard sleeping at a low door.
He didn't move. His head was against the wall and his hands were folded over a tankard. I understood the arrangement — he was a sentry the keep was told to set without being told why.
The lamp-oil burned thinner here. The corridor turned again.
Somewhere at the third turn, my body began to slow.
My hand on the wall began to shake. I didn't know what my body was telling me yet.
I knew only that I was the kind of woman who didn't argue with her own hand when it started to shake on a wall.
I came around the corner.
My knees were already going. I didn't let them. I kept walking.
The corridor opened onto a row of cells.
Six of them in a line, old, stone, with iron bars set into the stone and small high windows that didn't go to the outside. The first was empty. The second. The third. The fourth and the fifth, and at the sixth, the last cell, was a woman.
I stopped walking.
She was small and gray and thinner than she had any right to be. She sat on a low stone bench against the back wall of the cell with her back very straight and her hands folded in her lap.
I knew the set of the back before I knew the face.
I knew the fold of the hands before I knew her.
The hands folded in her lap at the cottage workbench every winter evening of my childhood.
The shoulders were the ones that braided my hair at nine.
The gray of the hair was new, and the face when it lifted to mine was older than it should have been by ten years.
The eyes were still hers.
My knees went out from under me as they hadn't in twenty-six years. I caught the corridor wall with my hand. The cold of the wall went up the bone of my arm to the shoulder and held me there.
Theodora.
The woman behind the bars didn't look surprised. She had the face of a woman who'd been waiting for this hour for eight years.
She reached one thin hand through the bars. The hand came through the iron. It was warm. It was alive. It was the hand that held mine at nine.
She said my real name.
She said it once. I hadn't heard it since the morning of my eighteenth birthday at the cottage kitchen door when she lifted the bag at her shoulder and kissed the top of my head.
"Mara."
My knees went the rest of the way down to the stone of the corridor floor.
I put my hand through the bars. Her warm hand closed around mine, her thumb finding the worn place on the back of my hand where the pestle had pressed the bone since I was a child — a place she'd mapped so long ago I'd forgotten anyone else knew it was there.
“Mother…” I got one sentence out. "What have they done to you?"
She didn't waste words. Eight years in a cell stripped her sentences down to bone.
"They've kept me, child. They haven't broken me. I was riding home from a journey six years ago, and the men met me on the road. They brought me here."
"Who?"
My voice was very small.
"The man at the Alpha's right shoulder. The one he calls brother. He kept me because I knew a boy he was looking for. He never asked me where. He waited."
My hand on the bars went still. Noah.
She looked at me for a long beat. She watched my face for the moment the pieces began to land. My hand on the bars went tighter.
She went on. Quietly. Her voice didn't change. She was using it now to tell me where Noah came from.
"A woman at this keep called for me six years ago through one of her peddler-women. Her name was Savannah. I knew her mother; I once helped her, when she was young. Savannah wrote that she was being poisoned, that her son was being hunted. I went to her. I named the poison. I named the hand."
"You went to… Savannah? Cain’s wife…"
"I went to Savannah. She didn't have long.
In her last private hours she put a dark boy of three into my arms and made me promise.
I rode him out of this keep before anyone in it knew she was gone.
I placed him in an orphanage I knew, with a ward I'd set on the back window.
The ward would wake the closest of mine in the woods.
I rode back to tell Savannah's own healer what poison she'd been given — not for Savannah's sake, she was gone, but for whatever human came next in this hall. "
She paused. "The men met me on the road."
I understood, very quietly, four things at once.
The boy was Noah. Theodora was Savannah's witch.
The orphanage at the edge of the village where I dropped off cooling medicine for the children the morning of the fire was the orphanage Theodora placed him in.
The ward she set on the back window was the ward that woke me on the road when the explosion came behind me — the ward that turned my body around.
I thought, for five years, that I turned my body around because I heard the explosion. I was wrong.
I looked at my mother's face. "It was you. You sent him to me."
"I set the ward, child. The boy came to you because the ward woke you." She squeezed my hand. "The boy stayed because you stayed."
My eyes filled. I didn't let the water come out of them. I had one more question. I asked it in the level voice an apprentice used at thirteen, once she decided to ask the witch the question she carried for a year.
"Why did you leave me… when I was eighteen?"
She closed her eyes.
When she opened them she gave me the answer she'd been holding for eight years.
"I looked for your real parents for fifteen years, child.
I found them. A village three weeks' ride south.
I went to bring them home to you. I arrived too late.
The plague came through the village that spring.
They were three weeks in the ground when I reached the gate.
I turned the horse and started back." She breathed in once.
"I was three days from the cottage when Savannah's messenger reached me.
I went to her first. I never made it home to you. "
I sat on the stone of the corridor floor with my hand through the bars and her hand in mine, and the eight-year wound at the back of my chest doing something it hadn't been allowed to do in eight years.
The wound wasn't a wound. It was a door I'd been standing on the wrong side of.
She rode out to bring me home the thing I'd been waiting my whole life for, and she arrived three weeks too late.
On the way back, a woman stopped her on the road — a woman whose son she hid in an orphanage where I, with no idea what I was doing, would walk in through a back window and pull him out.
My hands went to the cell door.
I didn't have a key. I didn't need a key — I had the leather pouch at my belt and the kitchen knife in my cloak pocket and I had, in my own bones, eight years of standing on the wrong side of a door.
The lock was iron and old, and the pouch had a thing in it that iron this old and brittle wouldn't survive.
Theodora's hand closed on mine through the bars. "No, child."
"Mother."
"No. Listen to me." Her hand was firm. "If he finds me out before you and the Alpha are ready, he'll lash out. At the keep. At the boy. At you. I've lived through eight years here. I can live through one more night."
My hands didn't move from the door. She watched my face do the rest of the thinking for me.
I'd been a witch's apprentice for twenty years and one of the things she taught me at twelve was that a witch didn't make a structural break in a household she didn't yet understand the architecture of, and the architecture of the keep above me was a thing I'd been filing pieces of for twelve hours and didn't yet have the whole shape of.
She was right. I knew she was right. My hands didn't move.
She squeezed my hand again.
"Listen to me, Mara. You're about to walk back up six floors and tell the Alpha what I've just told you, and the first thing he'll ask himself is whether he knew.
He didn't. He didn't know any of it. He lost his wife because he trusted the man on his right shoulder.
That's the truest thing I'll say to you tonight. "
She paused. She held my eye.
"And the brother loved him. That's the part that has cost him twelve years.
The man wasn't pretending, child. He decided.
He decided the year Cain's son was born that he couldn't follow Cain into the house Cain built.
He didn't say so. He kept serving. He stood at the grave.
He kept his hand warm at Cain's shoulder.
He told himself the whole time he was doing the work Cain would have done if Cain had had the stomach for it.
" She breathed in. "He's wrong, of course.
But he isn't lying. That's the thing that's made him so hard to see. "
I held her hand.
"Go to the Alpha, Mara. Tell him all of it. He'll believe you, child."
I looked at her face for a long beat. She'd been the only family I'd ever had, and the only one I'd have again.
She wasn't gone. She'd never been gone.
I lifted her hand and pressed my forehead to the back of it.
She put her other hand through the bars and laid it against my hair.
She let me have the beat I needed at the bars, and then her thumb went against the worn place on the back of my hand again, and I understood that she was telling me to go.
I let her hand go and stood.
"Mother."
"Child."
"Tomorrow."
"Tomorrow."
I stepped back from the bars.
I walked back the way I came. The corridor through the row of cells. Past the wing the household never entered. The corridor past the sleeping guard who didn't move. The stair up. The second stair. The third.
The corridor at the top of the stairs was empty.
It was the same corridor it was an hour ago. The same iron sconces, the same stone, the same long blue shadow at the edge of the lamp-light where the wing turned toward the eastern chambers. The corridor was the same. The woman walking it wasn't.
I told myself nothing. I didn't tell myself she was alive.
I didn't tell myself the brother cost her eight years.
I didn't tell myself the boy in the chamber came to me because she set a ward at an orphanage window, or that the wound at the back of my chest was never a wound at all, or that the man asleep in the chair was the one Theodora called the real victim.
The man I was about to wake. The man I was about to undo.
The corridor of the eastern wing opened ahead of me. The chamber door was at the end of it. Cain was on the other side of it asleep in the chair with his sword across his knees, and Noah was asleep on the couch by the window, and the wooden bird was on the writing table.
I stopped at the door. I put my hand against the wood.
I drew the bolt and went in.