CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX OLDER THAN ALDRICH
I nside the poison, Marion heard a howl that did not belong to Clan McFarland.
It was wrong.
Not in the way Aldrich’s silver was wrong, cold and clever and made by hands that had never loved what they cut.
This was older. Deeper. It rose from the black heart beneath the execution stone and moved through her bones like a memory that had been waiting centuries for someone foolish enough to touch it.
Marion tried to pull away.
The poison held.
Her hands, or paws, or whatever shape they had become, sank deeper against the roots. Silver gold light flared around her wrists, but the darkness beneath it did not retreat. It opened.
And Marion fell into it.
Snow vanished.
The Grove vanished.
Euan’s hand vanished from hers.
“No,” she gasped.
Then she stood on a shoreline she had never seen.
Black water crashed against rocks under a red sky. Wind tore at banners she did not recognize. They were not McFarland colors. Not any Highland clan she knew. Dark cloth, ragged at the edges, marked with the shape of a wolf skull wearing a broken crown.
The same mark she had seen in the poison.
A crowned wolf skull.
Men dragged wolves across the shore in chains.
Not all wolves. Some were human. Some half shifted, trapped between skin and fur, screaming as silver collars burned their throats. Their accents were strange, the words sharp and foreign to her ears, but pain needed no translation.
A woman knelt in the mud, silver hair plastered to her face.
Marion’s breath caught.
Silver hair.
Not hers. Not Morna’s old gray. True silver, white as moonlight, streaked through dark curls. The woman held her hands over a young wolf boy whose chest had been opened by a silver blade. Gold light pulsed beneath her palms.
“She was like me,” Marion whispered.
No one heard.
A man in black armor struck the woman across the face. She fell, then rose again, because apparently women with healing light were cursed to possess more stubbornness than sense in every age.
The boy’s eyes opened.
For one brief second, hope burned in the shoreline mud.
Then another man stepped from the crowd.
He was not Aldrich.
He was broader, older, with iron gray hair and a priest’s collar at his throat. But his eyes were familiar. Not in color. In emptiness.
He looked at the silver haired woman as if her miracle offended him.
He lifted a bowl.
Blood filled it.
Wolf blood.
Betrayed blood.
Marion knew that without being told.
The priest poured crushed silver ash into the bowl. Then herbs. Wolf’s bane. Something black and oily that smoked when it touched the blood.
The woman screamed.
The boy she had healed began choking.
The priest smiled.
Marion tried to move toward them, but she had no body there. No hands to strike with. No teeth to tear. Only sight. Only grief.
The shoreline twisted.
Now there was a stone chamber. Torches. Chains. The crowned skull mark burned into a wooden table. Pages covered in careful writing. Diagrams of throats, hearts, bones, wolf bodies, human bodies. Women’s hands drawn in ink. Bite marks catalogued. Bloodlines mapped.
The original wound.
Not Aldrich’s laboratory.
An older one.
Older cruelty wearing a different coat.
Marion’s stomach turned.
A voice spoke near her ear.
“Do you see it?”
She snapped back into the Grove so violently she nearly vomited.
Euan’s hand was still locked around hers.
He was pale, shaking, on his knees opposite her, but there. Alive. His fingers tightened the moment her eyes found his.
“Marion.”
She sucked in air.
The Grove returned in broken pieces. Poisoned roots. Wolves on the ground. Morna crouched nearby, blood on her sleeve and terror in her eyes. Aldrich standing beyond the silver veins, his face lit with a satisfaction that made Marion want to claw it off.
“You saw it,” he said.
Marion’s voice scraped her throat. “You did not make this.”
Aldrich’s mouth curved.
Not enough to be a smile. Enough to be confession.
“I refined it.”
“You inherited it.”
“Knowledge is rarely born clean.”
“Cruelty is not knowledge.”
“Cruelty is often the cost of acquiring it.”
Marion stared at him, stunned despite knowing exactly what he was.
Some part of her had still thought him a man of this war, this Crown, this terrible present.
But the poison under her hands carried dead centuries.
Other shores. Other wolves. Other women with light in their palms and no one left to sing their names properly.
“You found an old murder,” she said. “And called it science.”
Aldrich’s eyes sharpened. “I found evidence that the wolf problem has never been contained to these mountains.”
Euan’s grip on her hand tightened.
His voice was low, hoarse. “What did you see?”
Marion swallowed.
If she told him everything, the pain of it might weaken him. If she kept it from him, she would become one more person deciding what truth he could survive.
She was done with that.
“Another clan,” she said. “Across water, I think. A crowned wolf skull on their banners. A woman like me. They used betrayed blood to turn her healing against what she loved.”
Euan went very still.
“A crowned skull?” Aodh said behind them.
Marion could not look at him. The poison still pushed at her, and she had to keep her hands on the roots. If she moved wrong, it would surge again.
Morna’s face had gone gray. “The royal line.”
Rhona whispered something in Gaelic that sounded like a prayer.
Euan’s eyes flicked to Morna. “Extinct.”
“So we thought,” Morna said.
Aldrich’s soft laugh interrupted. “Extinction is such a confident word for people with poor record keeping.”
Niall made a broken sound where Fergus held him. “You said this was about McFarland blood.”
Aldrich did not even glance at him. “You were useful because you believed the world ended at the edge of your own pride.”
Niall sagged.
Marion should have felt satisfaction.
She felt tired instead.
The poison beneath her hands pulsed again, trying to drag her back toward the shoreline, the red sky, the woman screaming in mud. Marion gritted her teeth.
Euan felt it instantly. His thumb pressed hard into her palm.
“Stay here.”
“I am trying.”
“Try harder.”
She almost laughed. “That is my line.”
His mouth moved faintly. “I borrowed it.”
The bond warmed for one fragile second, and that warmth became a thread she could hold. The poison hated it. It pushed harder, showing her again the crowned skull, the priest, the boy choking, the woman’s blood mixed with silver until her light turned black at the edges.
Marion shook her head.
“No.”
Aldrich stepped closer, ignoring the warning growls around him. “Do not reject what you are seeing. That formula survived because it worked. Imperfectly, yes. Brutally, certainly. But it proved silver could be taught to remember blood.”
“You speak as if the dead should be grateful for your footnotes.”
“They are dead. Gratitude is irrelevant.”
Euan snarled.
Marion looked at Aldrich through the glow rising around her. “That is why you will lose.”
His brows lifted.
“You think the dead are silent because they cannot speak to you.” Her hands pressed harder into the root.
Pain shot up both arms. “But the ground remembers them. Blood remembers them. Songs remember them. Women hide them in recipes for sheep rot because men like you think only official records matter.”
Morna gave a sharp, wet laugh. “Aye, lass.”
Aldrich’s expression tightened.
Good.
Marion drew in another breath and reached into the poison again, but this time she did not let it drag her.
She went by choice. She found the crowned skull mark.
The betrayed blood. The silver ash. The old woman’s scream.
The boy’s stolen breath. Aldrich’s refinements layered over it like neat handwriting on a corpse.
She took hold of the whole ugly knot.
The poison bucked.
Every root in the Grove flared black silver.
Wolves cried out.
Euan bent over their joined hands, jaw clenched against his own pain. “Marion.”
“I have it.”
“What?”
“The beginning.”
“Can you burn it?”
“I think so.”
“That is not the answer I wanted.”
“It is the one we have.”
His eyes met hers. Terrified. Trusting. Furious. Hers.
“Then burn it,” he said.
Aldrich heard.
His face changed.
Not panic. Not yet. But something close enough to make Marion’s wolf lift its head in satisfaction.
“No,” he said softly. “You do not understand what you are handling.”
Marion smiled through the pain. “You keep saying that to women.”
He lifted his cane. “Kill the chief.”
The words cut clean through the Grove.
Three soldiers moved at once.
One raised a crossbow toward Euan.
Another drew a silver blade and rushed the poisoned circle.
The third, standing near the great canister, pulled a narrow vial from his coat, its contents black as pitch and threaded with red light.
Euan tried to rise.
The poison under him surged, pinning him to one knee.
Marion’s grip tightened around his hand. “No.”
“I cannot sit here while they come at you.”
“You are not sitting. You are anchoring.”
“I can do both.”
“Show off.”
The first crossbow fired.
Aodh swung the execution axe and knocked the bolt aside with a clang that rang through the poisoned trees. The impact sent him stumbling, but he stayed on his feet.
“Old,” he growled, “not decorative.”
Tavish, bloodied and limping, launched himself at the soldier with the blade and took them both into the snow. “That one is mine!”
“Tavish!” Morna shouted. “Stop collecting injuries!”
“I am not collecting them. They keep finding me.”
Georgie, behind Lorna, gave a frightened little laugh that sounded dangerously close to a sob.
Marion wanted to look at her.
She did not dare.
The third soldier reached the canister and lifted the black vial high.
Aldrich’s eyes gleamed. “If the root memory destabilizes, the Grove will finish what the axe began.”
Morna’s face went white. “He means to overload it.”
Euan’s voice went cold. “With me inside the bond.”
Marion understood then.
If Aldrich could not keep the poison, he would turn it inward. Into Euan. Into her. Into the roots. Into every wolf still linked to the Grove. The ancient site would become a grave that killed its own children.
No.
Absolutely not.
Marion pulled on the bond with everything she had.
Euan gasped as her light rushed through him, not healing this time, but anchoring. She took his strength. He gave it before she could ask. She took the wolf in him, the alpha line, the stubborn heartbeat she had followed across snow. He gave that too.
Not lessened.
Shared.
The silver gold light burst brighter.
The soldier smashed the vial against the canister.
Black flame erupted.
Aldrich smiled.
Then Marion opened the original wound and poured herself into it.
The crowned skull mark screamed.
The old shoreline vanished in white fire.
The black flame turned silver.
Then gold.
Then clean.
For one breath, the entire Grove was filled with the sound of wolves howling from somewhere no living body could reach.
Aldrich stumbled back.
Marion looked at him, shaking, bleeding light from both hands.
“You did not perfect the poison,” she said. “You only taught it new names.”
His face went hard.
A shadow moved behind him.
Not wolf.
Not soldier.
Duncan.
Bloody, desperate, wild eyed and holding the small silver blade he had taken from the snow.
Marion saw him too late.
So did Euan.
Duncan was not looking at Marion now.
He was looking at Euan.
“If this is all his fault,” Duncan said, voice shaking, “then let it end with him.”
And he lunged for Euan’s heart.