Chapter Three: Nothing Here Belongs to You

The Records House sat at the far end of the village, a squat stone building with no sign and iron shutters. Nobody visited it. Pack wolves liked to believe that the past was something you could simply outrun.

Ottoline Quist unlocked three separate doors before we reached her desk. Brynja trailed behind with her hammer through her belt, refusing to be sent home. I wasn't going to argue. I'd have fought a bear for the company.

"Sit," Quist said. "Don't touch anything yet."

She laid a folded document in front of me. The wax seal was the color of dried blood, pressed with a crescent moon I recognized from somewhere deep, somewhere before language. It was the same shape as the gold thread under my collarbone.

"Your mother's mother," said Quist, "was Ysolt of Silverlune. The last of the Moon Line. When the old crown fell, the surviving royals scattered or were hunted down. Ysolt hid. She married a nobody, raised a daughter under a false name, and when that daughter died in childbirth, she hid you, too."

My throat locked. "My mother was a healer's widow. That's what I was told."

"By whom?"

I opened my mouth. Closed it.

"Quite," said Quist, and turned a page.

The next hour did something to me. I can't explain it better than that. Piece by piece, in cramped legal script, the woman I thought I was came apart, and a different one stepped out. Greywater Hold, four thousand acres of marsh and ruined fortress along the northern coast, deeded to Ysolt's heir by name. A controlling share of the harbor salt works. Three bank accounts in a province nobody in Hollowmere ever visited. And a vault, a real one, cut into the stone beneath Greywater, sealed with royal wards that would open for exactly one person.

"The vault will answer to your blood," Quist said. "Not to a signature, a Pack, or a marriage. I've never opened it. I was only paid to keep it."

"Why didn't she tell me?" My voice cracked on it. "I was right here. Twenty-six years."

"She tried. She wrote to you every year." Quist's face softened by a hair. "The letters were intercepted."

Brynja swore low and thoroughly.

I stared at the dates until the ink blurred.

"Every deed here," Quist went on, "was filed before your mating bond existed. This matters, because it will be tested within the hour."

She was right.

At noon, the doors of the Records House banged open, and the Pack Council came in like a storm front. Dravik first, his burned palm wrapped in white linen. Orsolya, wearing her best shawl and her sharpest face. Three Elders. And last of all, hands folded, soft shoes whispering on the flagstones, Elder Merrow.

"Keeper Quist," Dravik said. "I'm told you've been hiding assets belonging to my household."

"Your household?" Quist didn't look up from her inkwell.

"Sorrel was bonded to the Alpha. The law of the Pack is old, and clear." He was reciting, like a boy who'd memorized one line for a test. "Everything a mate holds belongs to the Alpha. Half, at minimum, in the event of separation."

"There was no bonding," I said.

"A ceremony was held."

"A ceremony was started. I rejected you before the marks were exchanged." I folded my hands in my lap so nobody would see them shake. "Under the Third Statute, a rejection at the stones dissolves all claim between the parties. You can look it up. Elder Merrow wrote the commentary."

Merrow smiled his pleasant smile. "Child, your emotions..."

"Elder." Quist's voice was quiet. It cut straight through his. "Let the record speak."

She slid the deeds across the table. Every Elder leaned in. I watched their eyes go from the first page to the seal, then to the date, then to the sum at the bottom.

Nobody said anything for a long moment. Somebody coughed.

"The salt works," Orsolya whispered. For the first time since I'd known her, her ledger face had slipped, and underneath it was naked hunger. "That's... that's half the harbor income. That's..."

"Titled to Sorrel Vaneth as heir to the Silverlune line," said Quist, "twenty-six years ago, by sealed deed, and recorded here, in a vault, under Council seal. Not tied to any mate. Not tied to any Pack." She tapped the date. "Nothing in this file belongs to the Hollowmere Alpha. It never did."

Dravik had gone very still.

"Silverlune," one of the Elders breathed. "There is no Silverlune. The line was extinct."

"The line," Quist said dryly, "was inconvenient."

I watched Dravik work it out. It took him almost a full minute. His eyes slid over the deeds, over Orsolya's shaking hands, over me. I watched him realize what he'd had by the throat for six years, quiet and patient and useful, and how he had trained it to carry his boots.

"You knew," he said. His voice was a rasp. "You've known the whole time."

"No." I stood up. I was a head shorter than he was, and for the first time in my life it did not matter. "You told me I had nothing, Dravik. I believed you. That was your mistake, not mine."

The Elders conferred. It took less than ten minutes. The deeds were valid. The rejection was lawful. The claim was denied.

Dravik walked out without another word. Orsolya followed, muttering figures. Behind them the other Elders filed out one by one, avoiding my eyes the way you avoid a grave.

Only Merrow remained, studying the open file with that same gentle patience I'd trusted for twenty years.

His eyes stopped on the bottom of the last page, on the line of witnesses to Ysolt's original will. I hadn't read it. I read it now.

Three names. The first two were long dead.

The third, in careful, rounded script, was Merrow Thane.

He looked up. Met my gaze. And smiled, just slightly, the way a man smiles when he realizes the game has changed and he's decided not to be afraid.