1 #2
“Master Barel returns at dawn. I want the office cleaned and the account ledgers set out for his review. You will also prepare the blue room for his clerk.”
“The north wall in that room has damp.”
“You’ll see to it.”
“I can’t mend a wall before dawn,” I protested.
“Then make sure he doesn’t look at it,” she cut in, her tone sharp.
Celene let out a low laugh. I didn’t answer. Maevra had learned long ago that an impossible task was most effective when delivered as a sensible command.
“And the suppressant,” I said.
The silence that followed had an edge.
Maevra set her cup down in its saucer. She hadn’t touched it; the tea remained full.
“What about it?”
“The capsule is empty.”
“That isn’t possible. I gave you enough for the week.”
“You gave me six doses for nine days.”
Celene tilted her head.
“Perhaps you took extra.”
“No.”
“Perhaps you simply don’t remember doing so,” Maevra added. “Your mother always exaggerated your symptoms. She was a woman of excessive sensibilities.”
I curled one hand beneath my apron and dug my nails into my palm. The band began to burn again.
“I need a dose today.”
“You need to learn that need is no excuse to shirk your duties.” Maevra pulled open the table drawer and produced a small glass vial, cloudy liquid filling it halfway. “I’ll give you one when the office is finished.”
She had no right. A daily dose was not a favor to be dispensed at will. But the estate records listed me as a sickly Beta. A Beta possessed no legal standing to demand medicines intended for a designation she pretended not to bear.
“The morning wash—”
“You’re done speaking,” Maevra said.
The afternoon dragged its hours across the floorboards.
I cleaned the office while Barel walked the boundary line with Maevra and Celene.
I couldn’t make out their voices from inside, but I caught their silhouettes through the fogged glass: the blue cloak, the black hat, the cream coat Celene wore.
They paused near the ditch. Wherever Maevra pointed, Barel wrote.
I dusted the shelves one by one. Account ledgers lined the west wall; breeding treatises, territorial laws, and an untouched collection of verse filled the shelves along the south.
Elayne’s portrait hung beside the hearth, its silver frame tarnished by smoke.
My mother looked toward some point beyond the canvas.
That gaze had always unsettled me. It made her look as though she’d already slipped away.
When the parlor clock chimed four, I laid my rag on the desk and slid the bolt shut. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking, even when I buried them in my apron pockets.
The portrait was heavier than I remembered. I lifted the bottom corner just enough. The frame scraped plaster. I slipped my index finger behind the molding until I found the recess.
I pressed.
The panel gave way with a muffled click.
The air that spilled out smelled of trapped wood and aged parchment. Inside was a narrow compartment, no larger than a breadbox. Empty—save for a faint, pale line in the dust where something long and flat had once rested.
The will.
I stood there, arm outstretched, unable to decide what was worse: that Maevra had found it, or that she’d left nothing behind. Elayne had hidden my way out right here, but I was six years too late.
A cart groaned outside. I lowered the portrait and shoved the rag beneath the desk just as the latch lifted.
Maevra walked in without knocking. Mud ringed the hem of her skirts, and her face wore the easy calm of someone who had secured precisely what she’d set out to take.
“How industrious.” She glanced at the desk, then at my pushed-up sleeves. “Did you find anything of interest?”
“Dust.”
“Dust is usually all one finds when searching where one doesn’t belong.”
I didn’t give her the satisfaction of stepping back.
Even so, my body retreated inward. I caught Maevra’s scent before her footsteps—the dryness of rosemary, the sharp edge of her Alpha presence brushing the hollow of my throat.
My own scent answered with a sudden surge of salt and damp earth.
The collar failed to contain it completely.
Maevra drew the cloudy vial from her pocket and held it up between two fingers.
“Is this what troubles you?”
I nodded.
“Tomorrow, Barel will bring the deed for the eastern parcel. If you cooperate, perhaps we can discuss your arrangement once it’s signed.”
“My mother promised it to me.”
The words were out before I could pull them back.
Celene appeared behind her, leaning against the doorframe.
“Your mother promised a great many things when she was ill.”
“She wasn’t ill.”
“She died, Liora.”
“That doesn’t make her illness real.”
“Are you implying something?”
A venomous little smile curved Celene’s lips, and I cursed myself for taking the bait. I held my tongue rather than seal my fate over the whims of a haughty girl.
Maevra tightened her fingers around the bottle. The glass creaked against the leather of her gloves.
“Your mother stopped understanding what this household required. I have kept the roof overhead, paid the wages, and provided your medicine. You own neither the parcel, nor this office, nor the right to question a decision that keeps us all from starving in the road.”
Not all of us. Maevra had purchased Celene’s new carriage out of the winter grain stores, and she planned to finance her presentation in Asteria with my mother’s plum orchard. The rest was a story she delivered in a placid tone, because stories told that way sounded like signed agreements.
“Give me the dose,” I said.
“When you stop behaving like a child.”
My throat flared with heat. The room listed slightly toward the fireplace. I gritted my teeth and caught the edge of the desk with one hand. I couldn’t let the wolf push forward now. Not with Maevra two paces away. Not with Celene blocking the door.
“Fine. I can bear it a little longer.”
The double meaning slipped past them unnoticed.
Maevra smiled—not with her mouth, but with the certainty that I would still be here tomorrow to sweep up the ashes of her sale.
“See that you do. The blue room is waiting.”
She slipped the vial back into her pocket and walked out. Celene trailed after her, but paused at the threshold to look back at me.
“If you get worse, let us know. I wouldn’t want Barel thinking we keep a diseased servant in the house.”
The door swung open, and the chill from the hallway drifted into the office.
I waited until their footsteps faded down the stairs. Then I tilted the portrait once more. The compartment remained empty. I traced the line of dust with my fingertips, searching for a splinter, a broken seal—anything to prove Maevra couldn’t part with the land as easily as she pretended.
All I found was a tiny flake of blue sealing wax caught in the back corner.
I pressed it into my palm and clicked the panel shut.
It wasn’t proof. Not yet. But Maevra had taken the will from its hiding place, and that meant she couldn’t burn it without risking something she needed.
The band burned against my nape once more. Outside in the yard, the kitchen bell clanged for supper. I wrapped the cloth around my wrist to hide the angry red welt left by the lye and slipped out of the office before my body could decide for me.
The blue room sat at the far end of the upper hall, beside the guest chambers Maevra reserved for visitors with coin.
The damp patch spread across a corner of the ceiling like an ill-drawn map.
I propped the casement open just enough to air out the smell of mildew and changed the bedding with clumsy fingers.
Every time I lifted an arm, the muscles across my back pulled taut in protest. The wolf wasn’t a voice.
It was a weight beneath my ribs, crowding into space that couldn’t hold it.
Oria appeared just as I was wrestling a pillow into a clean case.
She eased the door shut behind her. Drawing the half-tablet from her pocket, she held it out once more.
“Take it. Mother is with Barel; she won’t give you another dose today.”
I looked down at the crumbly pill. The chalky, broken edge showed it had been exposed to the air for a long time. It might do nothing. It might make me sicker. Even so, the scent of my own skin was beginning to rise above the ash and the soap.
“If she notices it’s missing—”
“I’ll take the blame. I’ll say I dropped it down the well.”
“I don’t want you lying for me.”
Oria looked at me with a mournful patience that had no business belonging to someone her age.
“Then don’t force me to stand by and watch.”
I took the pill.
A finger of cold water remained in the washbasin.
I crushed the chalky half between my fingers and drank down the cloudy draft.
My tongue went numb almost immediately; then came the taste of rusted iron and charred root.
I leaned against the bedpost until the floor stopped tilting.
The burn at my nape didn’t vanish, but it dulled enough that I could draw breath without feeling every hammer of my pulse in my temples.
Oria said nothing. She picked a stray thread from the floorboards and wound it around her thumb.
“Thank you,” I murmured.
“You don’t owe me anything.”
I wanted to believe her. I tucked the flake of blue wax into the inner seam of my sleeve, a place Maevra never searched because she expected to find anything of value in my pockets.
At dawn, Barel would return with a deed to sell the eastern parcel.
I would have half a dose in my veins, a speck of wax, and the certainty that the will remained somewhere within these walls.
It wasn’t much.
It was what I had.