Chapter 9 — The Truth He Buried

He took me below the vaults, to a room with no glass and no door that opened from the outside.

"This is the only place in the house the Regent can't hear," Kael said. "Sit."

"I'll stand."

"Of course you will." He didn't sit either. "You want the truth. Here it is, and I won't soften it, because you'd hate me more for that than for the truth."

"Then say it."

"You're the last White Lycan." Flat. Final. "Your mother branded you as an infant to hide your wolf — that scar is a suppression seal, not an accident. The White line wasn't lost to a fire. It was slaughtered. Every silver-pelted wolf on the continent, in a single night, twenty-four years ago."

The room held still. So did I. The body that doesn't move can't be read.

"That's not possible," I said. "I'm wolfless. I've been wolfless my whole life. I had a fated mate and he rejected me in front of three hundred people because I had nothing in me for the Goddess to bond him to."

"You had a fated mate." Something moved across his face. "And he chose status over you, and the Goddess let him. A fated mark was never a sentence, Aurora — only a door the Goddess opens, a possibility she holds out. Yours to Damian was real. But a door is not a room, and when he refused to walk through it, she let it close, because you were always meant for something a bond that small could never have held. A wolf that's been chained from birth doesn't feel like a wolf. It feels like an absence. That absence is the disguise. It's the cleverest hiding place there is — they made you invisible by making you ashamed."

I thought of a bar, five years ago. A room full of wolves dropping their eyes to a king. And one girl who hadn't.

I couldn't feel what they felt, I'd told myself. I was beginning to wonder if I simply hadn't bent.

"And Luca?"

"Luca is worse." His voice dropped. "There's a prophecy. When White and Black are joined and the Silver child draws breath, wolfkind will be crowned anew — or burn to the last den. You're White. I'm Black — Royal, with a thread of something older. Our son is the Silver child. The three of us are the prophecy walking. That's why his blood is at war. He isn't sick. He's becoming the thing they killed thousands to prevent."

"Crown anew, or burn," I said. "Which?"

"The Council believes it's burn. Inevitably. That belief is the reason the White line died." His jaw locked. "I think they were lied to. I think someone cut the prophecy short. But I can't prove it — and the man who'd know would kill us both for asking."

I didn't cry. I pressed my thumb to the seam on my wrist and breathed.

"Who slaughtered them, Kael."

"That," he said, "is the question I've spent twenty-four years not being allowed to answer out loud."

"My mother," I said. "She's the one who branded me. You said so. A suppression seal, set by someone who loved me enough to make me ashamed." My voice held; I made it hold. "She died in the fire that took the White line. That's what I was told my whole life. Except the morning after the night I met you, my father stood on a porch and told me she didn't."

Kael's head came up. "Your father said your mother was alive?"

"He said it and then I left and never let myself believe it. Believing it meant going to look. And going to look meant walking back into the thing that killed her." I pressed the seam on my wrist. "There's a lullaby I've known since before memory. About a moonless sky. I never learned it. I can't explain knowing it. And tonight my son said it back to me in his sleep — a song no living person taught either of us."

For a long moment Kael didn't speak. When he did, his voice had gone careful, the way you step around something that might give way.

"If your mother set that brand, then your mother knew the rite," he said. "The one Crane says died with the White line. The one that's the only thing that can carry Luca through what's coming." He looked at me. "If she's alive, Aurora — she isn't just your mother. She's the only person left on this earth who knows how to save your son."

The room seemed to tilt. I'd spent five years refusing to open that drawer. He had just told me the drawer might hold Luca's life.

"Then she's the one thing I can't go looking for," I said, "as long as that man is watching me do it."

The Regent came at dusk, unannounced — the way only a man certain of his welcome arrives.

Cyrus Voss was smoother than I'd pictured. Silver at the temples, a suit cut like an apology no one asked for, a smile that had clearly never once failed him. He took my hand in both of his and held it a beat too long, his thumb passing over my wrist, over the scar, as if by accident.

"The famous clerk." Warm. Fatherly. "What a gift you've brought our king. A son. After everything that boy lost — a son." His eyes were wet and kind, and every hair on my body stood up.

"You're too generous, Lord Regent."

"Nonsense. We protect our own. Whatever it takes." He patted my hand. "Tell me, may I see him? The boy. I do so love children. I have one of my own, you know — Seraphina. I raised her after her mother passed. There's nothing a father won't do for the child in his keeping." His smile widened. "Nothing at all."

"He's sleeping," I said. "And too ill for visitors."

"A pity." He didn't push. Men like him never push; they wait, and let you feel the waiting. "I knew your people once, you know. A great tragedy, what became of them. A great, necessary tragedy. The world is sometimes cruel to be kind."

"And which were you," I asked, "cruel, or kind?"

For half a heartbeat the smile thinned — just enough to show me the thing underneath it. Then it returned, wider. "Clever girl. I see why he keeps you." He stepped back. "Rest well. Big days ahead."

Then he swept down the corridor with his aides, and Kael's hand found the small of my back, steering me the other way. I let him — for exactly four steps. Then I slipped into the dark service hall that ran parallel to the gallery, because I'd been a records clerk for five years, and I knew that powerful men speak freely the second they think the help can't hear.

The wall between the gallery and the service hall was thin. Old. I pressed my back to it and held my breath.

Cyrus's voice came through, stripped of its warmth now. Low. Bored. Speaking to an aide who would never repeat it.

"The boy changes everything. White and Black, joined, with a Silver child breathing under my own roof. Do you understand what that means? The prophecy I spent a fortune burying just walked through the front door in a hospital blanket."

A murmur I couldn't catch.

"No. We don't panic. We did it once. We can do it again." A pause — and his voice went almost gentle, almost nostalgic, and that was the worst sound I have ever heard a man make. "Twenty-four years ago I gave the order. The silver wolves burned. Every den. Every cradle. I told the Council it was mercy, and they believed me, because believing me was easier than the truth."

A pause. "Understand me. I did not burn the silver wolves to spare the world a prophecy. A prophecy that crowns a new king is only ever a prophecy that unseats an old one — and I have never once intended to be unseated. Mercy was the word I gave the Council. Power was the reason I gave myself. They have always been the same sentence in my mouth."

I dug my thumb into my wrist until it hurt.

"And if anyone ever learns I gave that order—" His voice. Close now. Right against the other side of the thin, thin wall. "—then I'll simply give it again. Starting with the mother."