Chapter 14

Asher’s POV

“Hold still, Alpha. This will sting.”

Simon Vane’s voice came from very far away, gentle and patient, the way it always did. I knew it the way I knew the creak of my own stairs. For three years that voice had said good morning and lift your arm and this will sting.

I was on the floor of my study. I didn’t remember getting there.

The rug was under my cheek. The fire was too hot and the room was too cold, both at once. My whole left side was a lake of burning tar. Ari was a weak, furious knot somewhere in the dark of my chest, snarling at nothing.

A hand moved my shirt aside. Cool air touched the wound.

Then I smelled it.

Lavender soap. Leather. Mint. And under all of it, faint and bitter, the bright cold bite of silver.

Ari went wild.

I tried to move. My arm twitched. That was all.

“Easy,” said Simon. “Easy. You’ve had a bad night. Let me do my work.”

A jar lid unscrewed with a soft rasp.

Then the door slammed open so hard it hit the wall.

“Good evening, Doctor,” said Noa.

Her voice was warm. Sweet. Completely calm. I had never in my life been so glad to hear anything.

I turned my head an inch on the rug. She stood in the doorway in a long white nightgown with a shawl thrown over it, her hair loose and the silver streak bright in the firelight. Her feet were bare. Micah loomed behind her, huge and silent.

“Luna.” Simon got to his feet. He had a small brown jar in one hand and a wooden spatula in the other. “You should be resting. I heard about the river.”

“I heard about the Alpha.” She came into the room. She didn’t hurry. She walked like a woman going to check on a cake. “I’ll sit with him now.”

“With respect, he needs medicine. Not company.”

“He needs both.” She stopped beside him and looked down at the jar. “What’s that?”

“A salve. My own recipe. It’s kept the wound from going septic for three years.”

“Has it.”

“It has.” Simon smiled at her kindly. “You’re very new to all this, my dear. I know the Hearth is a marvel. But a wound like this needs a doctor’s care.”

“Of course.” Noa smiled back. “May I smell it? I’m curious. I do a lot with herbs.”

There was the smallest pause.

“Certainly,” said Simon.

He held out the jar. She leaned over it and breathed in, delicately, the way you’d smell a rose. I watched her face. Nothing moved in it. Not a twitch. Not a blink.

“Lavender,” she said. “And comfrey. How lovely.”

Then her elbow knocked his wrist.

It looked like nothing. A clumsy woman in a nightgown in a hot room. The jar spun out of his fingers, turned over once in the air, and landed upside down in the fire.

The flames roared green for an instant. A smell like burnt pennies filled the room.

“Oh no,” said Noa. “Oh, Doctor, I’m so sorry. I’m so clumsy since the river.”

Simon didn’t move.

For one second, the kind old man was gone. I saw it from the floor, under the edge of his gray coat. His mouth went thin. His eyes, which were always tired and soft, went flat and still as a snake’s.

Then it passed.

“Accidents happen,” he said. “I’ll make more.”

“Please don’t trouble yourself tonight.” Noa was already kneeling at my side. “The Luna has the right to tend the Alpha in his sickness. It’s an old custom, isn’t it? Leah told me about it.”

“It is,” said Micah, from the door. His voice was like a wall. “Very old. Goodnight, Doctor.”

Simon looked at Micah. He looked at Noa. He looked down at me last, and I made myself look back at him, even though my eyes were burning.

“Goodnight, Alpha,” he said softly. “I’ll be back in the morning.”

He picked up his bag and went.

The door closed. Micah stood with his back against it. Noa let out a breath that shook her whole body.

“Micah,” she said, without looking up. “The lid. He left the lid on the desk. Don’t touch it with your fingers.”

Micah crossed the room, pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, and picked up the little brass lid from the corner of my desk. A smear of pale paste clung to the inside of it.

“Got it,” he said.

“Put it somewhere he’ll never look.”

“I know a place.”

He went out. Then it was only the two of us, and the fire, and the bitter smoke still curling off the logs.

~

“Hi,” Noa said.

She was very close. Her hand was on my forehead, cool and dry.

“You came,” I said. It came out cracked.

“Don’t talk.”

“I said you didn’t have to.”

“I know what you said. Stop talking.”

She put both hands on my side.

The heat came in slow. Not a flood. A thread. Then a stream. She began to hum, low and soft, and the burning tar in my side began, very slowly, to cool. The black spread that had climbed nearly to my armpit crept back down. My lungs opened. The fire stopped being too hot. The room stopped being too cold.

I watched her face the whole time.

She was counting. I could see it. Her lips moved under the hum. Her brow was tight.

Then, in the middle of a note, she stopped.

She lifted her hands. The gold faded off her skin. She sat back on her heels, breathing hard, but upright, with her eyes open and her color still in her cheeks.

“Half,” she said. “Term ten.”

The wound was still there. Smaller than it had been at sundown. Still black at one edge. Still raw.

“You stopped.”

“I said I would.” She wiped her forehead. “Gideon told me about Abigail.”

I closed my eyes. I knew the story. I’d known it since I was a boy. I had never once, until two days ago, thought it had anything to do with me.

“Good,” I said. “Good. Keep stopping.”

“Don’t tell me what to do.”

“I’m not. I’m begging.”

She was quiet for a moment. Then she pulled a cushion off the chair and put it under my head, and sat down on the rug beside me with her back against the leg of the desk and her knees pulled up under the nightgown.

“Tell me the rest,” she said.

“The rest?”

“Whatever else is in there. Whatever else you’ve been saving for after you fix it.” Her voice was tired, not angry. “All of it, Asher. Tonight. Or I really will leave at the end of the year.”

So I told her.

I told her the mercy amendment needed five votes out of seven on the council, and I had three. My grandfather. Old Councilor Hart. And Councilor Price, if her husband didn’t talk her out of it. I told her Reuben Vane had the other four in his pocket and I didn’t know with what. I told her Kezia had been the champion of Clearwater for six years and that the two wolves she’d killed had both refused to yield because they were too proud.

“I’m not proud,” said Noa.

“I know.”

“I’ll yield the second I’m losing.”

“I know you would. That’s not what scares me.”

“Then what does?”

I made myself look at her.

“That Vane doesn’t want you to yield,” I said. “He wants a thing from you on that night. I don’t know what. But he picked the full moon for a reason, and he picked Kezia for a reason, and if Kezia gets you down and you yield, I don’t believe for one second that he’ll let it end there.”

Noa didn’t say anything.

“And if it goes wrong,” I said, “I’m going into that ring.”

“You can’t. The challenge is between the two of us.”

“The law says an Alpha who breaks a Luna’s challenge forfeits his rank. The pack goes to the council until a new Alpha is chosen.”

“So you’d lose Ironwood.”

“Yes.”

“For me.”

“Yes.”

“You’d let Reuben Vane have your whole pack.”

“For one more day of you breathing? Yes. Without thinking about it.” My voice broke. I didn’t care. “That’s the last thing, Noa. That’s all of it. There’s nothing else in there.”

She looked at me for a long time in the firelight.

Then she reached out, slowly, and laid her hand flat on my chest, over my heart. She didn’t ask. I didn’t remind her. Her palm was warm.

“Then I’d better not lose,” she said.

~

She slept in the chair by the fire. I slept on the rug. Somewhere around four I woke and found that her hand had slipped down off the armrest and was resting in my hair. I didn’t move until dawn.

At six, she woke with a start, looked at her hand, and snatched it back into her lap. Her whole face went pink.

“That didn’t happen,” she said.

“Of course not.”

“I need to feed the starter.” She stood, pulling the shawl around her shoulders. “I didn’t do it last night. It gets sad.”

“Your jar gets sad.”

“Everything gets sad if you ignore it.” She pointed at me. “Stay on that rug.”

She went out. I lay on the rug and looked at the ceiling and felt, for the first time in three years, like the world might hold still long enough for me to stand on it.

It lasted eleven minutes.

Then I heard her feet in the hall. Running. Bare feet slapping the boards, fast and hard, and her breath coming in short sharp gasps.

The door flew open. She stood in it, white to the lips.

“It’s gone,” she said.

I pushed up onto one elbow. “What is?”

“My starter. Miriam’s jar. I fed it yesterday afternoon and left it on the windowsill, and I locked up before I went to the river. It’s not there. It’s not anywhere.” Her hands were shaking. “Asher, the kitchen door was locked. I’m the only one with the key.”

“Someone took it.”

“Miriam said that’s where my power sleeps.” Her voice cracked in half. “Somebody walked into my kitchen in the middle of the night and took it.”