22. Cain
Cain
I came out of sleep with her hand on my shoulder and my hand already on the hilt of the sword across my knees.
I slept in the chair as a wolf keeping count of the door and the window so the man could close his eyes. I opened my eyes.
She was already dressed.
Wool dress, cloak over the chair, her braid down her shoulder and her face the color of the candle burnt down to half on the writing table. She didn't speak at first. She set her hand on the line of my jaw and held it there. The hand was very steady. I read her face.
"Marion."
"Cain."
She didn't soften the telling.
She told me everything in the order she received it. The corridor she didn't recognize, the stair down, the second stair, the guard sleeping at the low door. The row of cells. The witch in the sixth.
The witch was Theodora.
The witch didn't walk out of her cottage.
The witch was brought in by the hand at my right shoulder.
The witch rode out to bring Marion's blood parents home, found them three weeks dead of plague, turned the horse, was met on the road by a messenger of my dead wife.
She went to Savannah. Named the poison in her tea.
Named the hand pouring it. Took a three-year-old boy out of my keep before anyone in the household knew the mother was gone.
Placed the boy in the orphanage Marion carried tinctures to.
On her ride back to tell my wife's healer what the poison was, so the next human who entered my hall might be spared, she was intercepted on the western road by Gregor's men.
Marion told me last what the witch said about the man who cost me my wife and my son.
He loved you. That is the part that has cost you.
I listened.
I didn't interrupt. I didn't look for the door in the corridor that let the brother off the hook. There wasn't a door. There hadn't been a door since the river bank, and I'd been walking around the place where the door used to be like a man circling a hearth that went out.
She finished. She didn't ask what I was going to do. She watched my face.
I watched hers.
The wolf inside me, a thing held quiet through nights of denial and a courtyard embrace, made a sound under the bone.
Not a roar. The sound a wolf made when a sentence it had been trying to say for years finally found a throat.
I didn't let it come out of mine. I covered her hand where it sat against my jaw and held it there.
"Mara," I said. "Your real name?"
She didn't startle. She knew I'd be the next person to say it.
"She called me that down there."
"Of course…"
"I've been Marion all my adult life."
"You're Marion to me. I'll say the other name when you tell me to."
She closed her eyes for one beat. When she opened them, something in her face had settled — not resolved, just set. She took her hand off my jaw and crossed to the writing table, and I rose out of the chair and followed her.
She didn't speak again that night, and I didn't ask her to. Whatever she'd seen in my face, she'd decided to leave it there.
The leather packet had been against my ribs since Julius pressed it into my hand outside the council chamber. I carried it under my cloak through the rest of the evening and into the chair beside her bed. I read it once with a lamp. I folded it back into the leather and didn't wake her.
I didn't know how to bring it into the room where she was sleeping.
I knew now.
I laid the packet on the writing table beside the wonky wooden bird and opened it. Marion stood at the table beside me with her hands flat on the boards on either side of the page, palms down.
This was my proof. The one I'd been asking for. Now it was simply a courteous piece of information about something I already knew.
Julius's hand. Precise, level. The two captains I already heard about by name.
The steward Gregor placed in the western quarter.
The fourth wolf I didn't, an older quiet one who was at the southern edge of Brackenhold's wood in the same week the captains were on the western border.
Coin tracked through three hands and back to the keep.
Two of the rogue wolves who ran from the cottage were picked up on the eastern road by Julius's men and named the coin and the hand under questioning.
The dates. The witnesses. The names.
I laid it out for her without anything in my pocket.
She read.
Her finger went down the column of dates and stopped. She didn't look up. Her finger went on.
"It was him."
"Yes."
"At the river."
"Yes."
"At the cottage."
"Yes."
She shut her eyes a moment. When she opened them, she looked at me. The face she wore was the face I'd seen on warriors at council tables when the long calculation in front of them finally collapsed into a single piece of arithmetic.
I said the line I'd been holding in my mouth.
"The rot has been in my right hand for twelve years. I am the one who let it."
I let it sit between us in the chamber. She didn't soften it, didn't tell me it wasn't my fault or that I couldn't have known, didn't give me the absolution the witch sent me through her.
She was the woman whose son was hunted in her own kitchen and whose mother was kept beneath my hall, and the absolution wasn't hers to give. I didn't ask her for it.
I said the harder thing.
"It isn't what I thought it was, Marion.
It isn't ambition. He hasn't been waiting for the seat.
He's been waiting for me to become the brother he could follow again.
Deep down he decided, the year Noah was born, that I broke the line by binding to a human.
He never said so. He went on standing at my shoulder.
He told himself the whole time he was protecting the pack from something I refused to protect it from.
He still does. He'll come for the boy and for you because, in his own framework, what he's doing is the love he owes me. "
I drew a breath. I didn't want to say the last sentence aloud. I said it anyway.
"The brother was real until I gave him a reason to decide I wasn't."
She held my eye across the table.
"Then we go to the hall and you let him say so. Out loud. To the pack. Once he's said it, the pack won't stand with him."
I nodded once. I crossed to where I hung my sword belt over the chair. I buckled it.
She crossed to her bag.
She knelt, pulled out the leather pouch she carried into the woods and slid one of the two green vials into it.
She held the second one in her hand for a pause — the clear glass of the blinding agent — and pushed it up under the cuff of her left sleeve, let the wool close on it, tested the sleeve with a flick of her wrist. The vial held.
I stopped at the chamber door.
She straightened, lifted her cloak off the chair-back, and settled it on her shoulders.
"You don't have to walk in there with anything in your hand," I said.
"I'm not going to be the woman in the hall who didn't."
I nodded once. I opened the door.
Brennan was outside. One of Julius's men, square-shouldered, awake. He came off the wall at the sight of me.
"My Alpha."
"Wake Julius."
"He's awake. He's been awake."
"Tell him I want him and the four men we marked, at the dungeon stair, inside ten minutes. Send the second rider to the federation post. I want the contingent at our gate at the second hour past dawn, holding the doors against any rider Gregor sends out."
"My Alpha." He nodded and went down the corridor at a soft run.
I stood at the threshold a moment longer. Noah was asleep on the couch with the lore book against his ribs. The wooden bird was on the writing table beside Julius's packet.
Marion came up at my elbow. She didn't speak.
I closed the door behind us. Brennan's man took up his post against it, and we crossed the eastern wing toward the stair.
Julius met us at the dungeon stair.
He was already there with the four men, all of them in dark wool with no insignia. He nodded once to me and once to Marion, and he led us down.
The stair went the way Marion said it would. Two flights. A landing. Another stair. The stone got older the lower we went. The lamp-oil burned thinner. I knew the architecture of it now. I hadn't, before tonight.
But the corridor at the bottom was empty.
The guard at the low door wasn't there at all. A stool against the wall, a tankard tipped on its side, a ring on the stone where the boots ground out the last of a watch. I did the count without meaning to.
Julius did it at the same beat. He didn't speak. He drew his sword.
We went down the row.
The first cell was empty. The second. The third. Marion's hand at the inside of my elbow tightened. The fourth and the fifth. The sixth.
But it was empty too.
I stopped at the bars.
The bench against the back wall was bare. The folded blanket Marion described — the gray wool one — was on the bench. I crossed the cell. I laid the back of my hand against the wool.
Warm.
The lock on the cell door was turned. I lifted it. The mechanism was iron and old, the teeth clean. The key wasn't forced, it was used, and the key was cut by the household for a hand that lived in this keep.
I straightened.
Marion was at the door of the cell with her hand on the bars. She didn't speak. She wasn't going to break in front of Julius. She'd break later, in a room she chose, against a wall she chose, on her own time. The witch in her was steady on the corridor floor.
I crossed back to her.
"He moved her in the night."
"He knew."
"He's known since the courtyard. He's known that I knew, too."
She looked at me. She didn't ask whether the witch was dead. Gregor wouldn't risk killing her yet. Theodora was the only piece of testimony that named his sister's tea by name, and the testimony was worth more in his own hand at a council table than in a body in a ditch.
"He'll seat himself," Marion said. "He'll call his own council. Before you can move on him."
"He already might have."
"Then we move now."
I turned to Julius. He'd already given the second runner the order. The contingent at the federation post was coming up the road. I sent Julius's third man back up the stairs — Brennan to the chamber, Brennan's man to stay at Noah's door, the boy not to be moved until I sent for him.
We climbed.
We came up out of the stairs at sunrise.
The corridor opened onto the older wing of the keep where the chapel and the council vestry stood. The stone went gray as the sun came in at the high slit windows.
I planned to find Theodora and bring her up before the keep rose.
I planned to lay her on the long table in the council chamber under a clean cloak, and let the witch the keep was told was a rumor give her testimony to the older warriors before Gregor knew his arithmetic broke.
The plan assumed two things — that he wouldn't move before the keep rose, and that the brother, even cornered, would keep a beta's courtesies toward his Alpha.
It assumed wrong on both. The brother wasn't the brother.
He was at the cell door before me. He chose, in the night, to fight in the open.
I turned to Marion at the head of the corridor and put my hand at the small of her back.
"Stay on my shoulder."
"I will."
I looked at Julius. He nodded once.
We started toward the great hall.
Then, the sound of the horn came down.
It rang around the corridor at us before we took ten paces.
Long and low. The deep call a beta sounded in his Alpha's hall when the beta was opening a council the Alpha didn't call.
It was carried under the stone. The torch flames in the iron sconces above us answered it.
Julius's hand went to the hilt of his sword without lifting it.
The four men behind us drew their cloaks back from the shoulder.
Marion didn't stop walking. The hand under my palm at the small of her back didn't shake.
The horn sounded a second time.
Gregor gathered the pack.