9 #3
Thorne scooped his parchments from the table, cast me a final look loaded with banked resentment, and stepped out behind them, pulling the heavy oak doors shut in his wake.
Only Iven and I remained in the vast chamber lit by dying candles.
I sank into the walnut chair at the head of the table, dragging both hands down my face to wipe away the cold sweat clinging to my brow.
The silence settling over the chamber was heavy and thick, steeped in an exhaustion that chilled me to the bone.
My beast still clawed at the inside of my chest—a muffled, solitary howl reminding me with every second that the other half of my being was running alone through the snow, injured, burning with poison, and fleeing the one person in all the realm who would have put his life between her and the crossbows.
Iven approached the table, drew an amber glass vial from his case, and measured three drops of a bitter tincture into a cup of water before nudging it toward my hand.
“Drink it,” the physician said. “Your pulse is at one-twenty and your pupils are blown wide as if you’d inhaled nightshade dust. The resonance is scorching your nervous system.”
I took the cup and drained it in a single swallow. The taste of willow bark and wild mint numbed my tongue, subduing the wash of heat hammering my temples.
“Tell me the truth, Iven,” I whispered, staring into the bottom of the empty cup. “How long can a wolf survive in that condition?”
The physician removed his spectacles and polished them with the hem of his sleeve with maddening slowness.
“If she were an ordinary wolf, I’d tell you twelve hours,” he answered.
“Yet that creature is anything but ordinary, Darian. She held your gaze through three measures of the Winter Wheel while her glands were ready to rupture, and she navigated a locked passage and cleared a ten-foot palisade with a quarrel grazing her ribs. She possesses an iron will and an Omega lineage I haven’t encountered in thirty years of practice.
She won’t allow herself to die in a ditch. ”
“She has somewhere to go,” I said, looking up toward the map of Eryndor spread across the table.
Iven arched an eyebrow:
“You believe you know who she is?”
I rose, walked to the map, and set my forefinger on an expanse of rolling hills and plowland roughly ten miles east of the capital, along the left bank of the river.
“The doublet she wore was broad-reed wool,” I said, turning over every detail of the dance in my memory.
“Heavy cloth with a herringbone twill and walnut-husk dye that hasn’t been woven in Asteria since before the blight.
It’s the signature pattern of the freeholder estates across the eastern plateau.
And the trunk she forced in the lower chancery belonged to Lady Maevra Valen. ”
Iven’s eyes widened with sudden comprehension:
“House Valen. The widow who submitted the petition to present her Alpha daughter at the Gala.”
“The very one,” I went on, feeling the pieces of the puzzle click into place with ruthless logic.
“Two weeks ago, when we reviewed Celene Valen’s presentation request alongside the accompanying medical reports, we found the name of an unpresented kinswoman.
An alleged Beta orphan consuming low-grade suppressant extracts to treat an alleged nervous condition. ”
Iven started:
“Liora Valen.”
The name rang through the empty chamber like a silver bell struck in the fog.
Liora.
My wolf gave a deep whine, a sound of absolute recognition vibrating against my sternum.
I walked to the pointed lancet window of the chancery, swept aside the heavy woolen curtain, and stared toward the eastern horizon.
Far off beyond the citadel’s ramparts and the snow-dusted roofs of Asteria, the first gray light of dawn on Day Twenty-Four was beginning to tear through the winter sky’s darkness.
The snowfall had ceased, leaving behind a clean, quiet mantle of white blanketing the birch canopies and the farm tracks stretching east.
She was out there.
She was running through the snow with an open palm wound, poison in her veins, and a parchment clenched in her fangs, believing the entire might of my realm would be unleashed to hunt her down, cage her, and strip away what little remained hers.
*I will not hunt you,* I thought, leaning my forehead against the frosted pane while dawn winds whistled through the embrasures.
*I will search for you. I will clear the road of hounds and crossbows, disarm the councilors who would make a trophy of your blood, and when I find you, there will be neither shackles nor mandates of state between us. *
I turned back to Iven, my voice steady, my eyes fixed on the map:
“Ready your laboratory equipment, Iven. I need you to analyze every trace of that residue before the day is out. I want to know its components, which apothecary it came from, and how we can compound a neutralizer before we reach the Valen estate.”
The physician nodded solemnly:
“I will begin at once, Sovereign.”
I hitched my sword belt, shoved open the chancery doors, and walked into the corridor to meet the first day of a hunt where my only victory would be keeping her alive.