Chapter 7

Briony's POV

I woke up to voices already arguing two rooms away, low enough that they thought they were being quiet about it, and I was awake enough to know exactly who was in the room before I even sat up.

"An old remedy." Bettina's voice was flat, like she was trying the words out for size. "That's what we're telling people."

"Which remedy?" Kieran didn't sound convinced either.

"Doesn't matter which. Something rare. Something nobody in this pack's ever seen used before, so nobody can call me a liar for not having it lying around." A pause. "It's the only story that doesn't put a target on her back."

I pushed the door open before I decided to. "You're rewriting what happened to me and I'm not even in the room for it?"

Bettina didn't flinch, which told me she expected this. "You're in the room now."

"After you already picked the lie." I crossed my arms. "What happens when Faro wants to thank the healer who saved him and Bettina says it was some dusty root instead of me?"

"Then he thanks the wrong person, and you stay breathing." Kieran said it without looking up from the table, like it was obvious. "That's the trade. I'd take it every time."

"It's not your trade to make."

"It's my pack to protect."

"I'm part of your pack too, or did that stop being true the second it got inconvenient?" My voice came out sharper than I meant it, but I didn't take it back.

Bettina stepped between us before it turned into something worse. "Nobody's saying you don't matter, girl. We're saying the fewer people who know what you are, the fewer people who can sell that information for a price. You saw what happened at that door last night just as I did."

That shut me up faster than anything Kieran could've said. She was right.

"Fine." I sat down hard in the nearest chair. "But I'm not standing there smiling while you hand my miracle to a root that doesn't exist."

"You don't have to smile." Kieran finally looked at me. "You just have to stay quiet."

"Wonderful. My favorite thing to do."

The pack meeting happened an hour later in the main hall, and I stood at the back of it exactly where I was told to, watching Bettina spin her story out loud to a room full of people who'd been calling me the spare a week ago and were now looking at Faro like he'd been touched by something holy.

"An ash-root tincture," Bettina said, steady as anything, not a single crack in it. "Rare. I've only ever read about it. Took me half the night digging through old records to remember the mixture."

"Never heard of it," someone muttered.

"That's because it hasn't been used in this pack in three generations." Bettina didn't even blink. "Lucky for Faro I keep good records."

A few people nodded like that. Most of them didn't care how he lived, just that he had. Faro himself sat wrapped in a blanket near the front, grinning like a boy who'd gotten away with something, no idea at all that the truth had been carved out from under him and replaced with a lie built to protect somebody else.

I stared at the floor and let it happen.

Afterward, once the hall cleared out, Faro caught my arm on his way past. "Hey. Thanks for sitting with me through the worst of it. I know it wasn't your job."

"It was exactly my job." I forced something like a smile. "Glad you're okay, Faro."

He wandered off happily, thanking a root instead of me, and I stood there feeling smaller than I had in weeks, not because anyone had insulted me this time, but because nobody had said anything at all.

Kieran kept me in the healing house the rest of the day, officially because Bettina needed the extra hands, unofficially because he didn't want me anywhere near a pack that might start asking questions if they saw me too closely tied to Faro's recovery. I didn't argue. Arguing hadn't gotten me anywhere yet.

By afternoon Bettina sent me to the herb stores at the back of the building to restock what we burned through the night before willowbark, crushed root, the charcoal paste that hadn't been enough on its own. It was quiet back there, shelves stacked floor to ceiling, the kind of quiet that usually helped me think.

I was elbow-deep in a jar of dried yarrow when the door creaked shut behind me.

"Busy little healer." Petra's voice, unhurried, almost pleasant.

I turned fast. She was leaning against the closed door, arms crossed, that same smile she'd worn in the courtyard the day of the ceremony, the one that never quite reached her eyes.

"You're supposed to be on patrol rotation," I said.

"I'm supposed to do a lot of things." She pushed off the door and wandered further in, running one finger along the shelf like she was inspecting my work. "Funny story going around today. Ash-root tincture. Never seen it work that fast on a silver wound before. Never seen it work at all, actually. Nobody has."

My stomach dropped, but I kept my face still. "Bettina's dealt in rare remedies longer than either of us has been alive."

"Sure she has." Petra stopped a foot away, close enough that I could smell the cold morning air still clinging to her jacket. "Except I was standing in that doorway last night, sweetheart. Before Kieran or anybody else chased me off. I saw your hand. I saw what it did to that wound." Her smile widened just slightly. "Root didn't do that."

"I don't know what you think you saw."

"I know exactly what I saw." She tilted her head, studying me the way you study something you were deciding whether to sell or keep. "The real question is what it's worth to you that I keep quiet about it.”