Chapter 10: A Story That Doesn't Add Up

Alaric POV

I've spent six years learning how to read a room before anybody in it decides to lie to me. Voss Pack was easy work. Every single person in that house had a version of the same story ready before I even asked for one.

Except her.

I watched Wren for most of that afternoon without meaning to make a habit of it. She wasn't hard to find. She was the only person in the entire estate not performing for me.

Calla found reasons to walk past wherever I happened to be standing, laughing a little too bright at whatever anyone said near me, angling herself into every conversation like she'd been practicing it in a mirror. Damian hovered close enough to look attentive without looking desperate. Even the guards straightened up half a step whenever I passed.

Wren just kept working.

I found her in the courtyard hauling firewood into a stack, sleeves pushed up, not once glancing toward the house to see if anyone important was watching her do it. Nobody had asked her to do that job. She just picked it up because it needed doing, same as everything else I'd seen her do since I arrived.

"You don't have to do that," I said, closer than I meant to get without announcing myself first.

She didn't startle. Just set down the log in her arms and looked at me, calm, unimpressed by the fact that I was a king standing in a courtyard talking to her like a normal person.

"I know I don't have to," she said. "Gives me something to do with my hands."

"Most people in your position would rather be inside. Resting. Making sure the King notices how well they're recovering."

"Is that what people usually do?"

"In my experience." I almost smiled. "Constantly."

"Sounds exhausting." She picked the log back up, unbothered, and set it on the stack. "I've got enough going on without adding a performance to it."

That was the whole conversation. She didn't ask me a single question about myself, didn't fish for sympathy, didn't try to correct whatever version of her story she assumed I already heard. She just went back to stacking wood like I wasn't standing there at all.

I found that more interesting than anything Calla had said to me in three days.

Later, I found Margery in the kitchens, an old wolf, gray through the muzzle even in human form, the kind of servant who clearly outlasted three generations of whatever family employed her and had the tired, unbothered manner to prove it.

"Your Majesty." She dipped her head, not stopping her work rolling dough. "Something you need?"

"Just a question, if you don't mind." I leaned against the doorframe, keeping my tone light, like it barely mattered. "Wren. How long ago did she join this household?"

Margery didn't even pause. "Oh, she's been here most of her life, sir. Came to the family young."

"Rosalind mentioned she was around two when she was adopted." I watched Margery's face carefully as I said it, but I kept my own voice easy, unconcerned. "That sound right to you?"

Margery frowned, hands still working the dough, and something in her expression shifted to confusion.

"Two?" She shook her head slowly. "No, sir. Wren wasn't near two. She was a baby, tiny thing, barely a few weeks old when Lady Rosalind brought her home. I remember because I was the one who had to find swaddling cloth in the middle of the night, and we didn't have anything soft enough in the house yet."

"You're certain of that."

"Of course I'm certain." She almost laughed, like the question itself was strange. "You don't forget something like that. The whole house was in an uproar for weeks getting ready for an infant nobody expected."

"When was this? What season?"

"Spring." She said it without hesitation, still rolling dough, completely unaware of what she just handed me. "Bad spring, that one. Border raids all through it. Lady Rosalind wouldn't say where she found her, exactly, just that the child needed a home and she wasn't about to leave her out there."

I kept my face perfectly still. It's a skill you learn fast, sitting through council meetings where showing the wrong reaction at the wrong moment can cost you leverage you'll need later.

"Thank you, Margery." My voice came out steadier than I expected. "That's all I needed."

She nodded and went back to her dough without another thought, already moving on to what came next in her day.

I walked out of that kitchen and didn't stop walking until I was alone in the hall outside my guest chambers, the door shut behind me, before I let myself actually think about what she just said.

A baby. Weeks old. Found during a bad spring of border raids.

Eighteen years ago, my mother spent three months barely leaving her chambers after my sister disappeared during a raid on our eastern border post. I was ten. I still remember the sound she made when the guards came back without her. I remember my father standing in the war room for two straight days, refusing to sleep, convinced somebody had simply misplaced an infant instead of accepting what everyone else already knew.

I never accepted it either, if I'm honest. Not really. I just learned to stop saying it out loud.

Rosalind had told me, casually, over dinner two nights ago, that Wren joined the family around age two. A small, forgettable detail in a longer conversation about pack history. I hadn't thought twice about it at the time.

Two years old would put her arrival roughly four years after my sister vanished. No overlap. No reason for alarm. Just a normal adoption story, nothing worth a second look.

A newborn, found during a spring full of border raids, would put her arrival at almost exactly the same season my sister was taken.

Two very different stories. Only one of them could be true.

I sat down slowly, staring at nothing, running the timeline over and over in my head like it might rearrange itself into something less complicated if I just looked at it long enough.

It didn't.

Somebody in that house had told me a story that didn't match what actually happened. Maybe an honest mistake. Rosalind could've simply misremembered the year, four years being an easy thing to blur after enough time passed.

Or maybe it wasn't a mistake at all.

I thought about Wren stacking firewood in that courtyard, uninterested in impressing me, carrying herself like someone who stopped expecting good things to happen a long time ago. I thought about the silence Marta had described in that healer's report, a wolf gone quiet for two straight years, no flickers, no fading in and out, just gone.

And I thought about my mother, still keeping a nursery she never let anyone touch, eighteen years after losing a daughter nobody ever found a body for.

I didn't have proof of anything yet. Just a servant's honest memory that happened to contradict a family's story, and a feeling in my chest I hadn't let myself feel in a very long time.

Hope, mixed with something a lot closer to dread.

Anything this turned out to be, I wasn't leaving this estate until I knew for certain.