The Woman at the Gate

Chapter 6: The Woman at the Gate

Kael set me down at the doors of the great hall. He didn’t let go of my hand.

“Stay beside me,” he said.

“My leg hurts.”

“Then you’ll sit.”

That was his answer to everything that morning. I didn’t have the energy to fight it.

News moved fast in Blackwood castle. By the time we walked in, the hall was already filling. Cooks came with flour on their aprons. Stable hands came with straw on their boots. Wolves from the training yard crowded in at the back, still breathing hard from drills. Nobody spoke above a whisper. Nobody left.

Kael took the high seat. I sat in the chair beside him, with my hands folded in my lap and my thigh burning under the green dress. Garrick stood at Kael’s right. Silas hovered near the wall, pale and sweating. Dorian Hale leaned against a pillar with his arms crossed, relaxed, the way a man stands when he’s been given a good seat for a show.

Jason came in last. Garrick’s hand was on his shoulder, but he shook it off. He stopped at the foot of the dais. He didn’t look at Kael. He looked at me, and I looked away first.

Then the side doors opened and two guards came in dragging a woman between them.

She was tall. Taller than most of the men holding her. Red hair, matted with dirt and dried blood, hung past her shoulders. Her left eye was swollen almost shut. Her lip was split open in two places. She wore a black coat that had been torn at the collar and the sleeve, and she wore no shoes. Her feet left red marks on the stone.

The guards stopped at the dais. They let go.

She didn’t fall. She walked the last three steps by herself, lowered herself to her knees in front of the high table, and put one hand over her stomach. It was flat. Completely flat. She kept her palm pressed there, carefully, like she was shielding it.

“Alpha Blackwood,” she said. Her voice was hoarse but it carried to every corner. “Luna. Wolves of this house. My name is Vesper.”

I knew that name.

Jason’s mistress. The woman he’d kept in the city after he left. The one who’d learned a secret I’d trusted to him alone, years ago, and sold it to someone who wanted to hurt me with it. I’d never seen her face. I’d only ever seen what she did.

“I came a long way,” Vesper said. “I came because I had nowhere else. I am carrying Jason Blackwood’s child.”

The sound that went through the room was low and long. It wasn’t shouting. It was a hundred people breathing in at the same time, and then a hundred people turning their heads. Someone near the back whispered heir. An old woman crossed herself. Someone else said bastard, and a woman hissed at him to be quiet. A kitchen boy dropped a tray.

Jason went white. I watched the color leave his face from the forehead down.

“That’s not possible,” he said.

“It’s possible,” Vesper said, almost gently.

“I haven’t touched you in four months.” He stepped forward, and the guards moved, but Kael lifted two fingers and they stopped. “Four months, Vesper. Not once. You know that. Tell them you know that.”

She turned her head slowly. Even with one eye swollen shut, she managed to look at him as if he was a child who’d made a mistake. Then she smiled. The cut on her lip opened and bled again.

“Then ask your uncle,” she said, “how a woman gets past his gates with a belly and a story.”

Nobody moved.

I didn’t understand it at first. Then I did. The south gate had wardens on it day and night. Nobody walked up to Blackwood castle bleeding without being stopped, turned back, or killed. Yet she’d made it all the way to the gate. She’d been let close enough to be heard. Close enough that the head of the household had run down a corridor to report her.

I turned my head and looked at Kael.

His face was perfectly still. He wasn’t surprised. He wasn’t angry. He was watching Vesper the way he’d watched me that morning, with complete attention, as if every breath she took was information.

He didn’t deny it.

I looked at my hands.

Four months. If Jason was telling the truth, that meant he’d been alone for four months, and he’d spent every one of them writing me nothing. If he was lying, it meant something else. I didn’t know which version I wanted to be true.

They were folded in my lap, steady, the nails clean. These were the hands that wrapped every gift I ever sent north. Soft paper, ribbon tied twice so it wouldn’t slip. Years of it. Birthdays, winters, a book I’d spent three months saving for. I’d tied each bow myself. I’d thought about who would open it.

One, I counted. Two. Three.

I breathed in for four and out for four. I’d learned it as a child, in a house where it wasn’t safe to cry out loud. It was the only thing that ever worked.

Kael’s hand slid across the arm of the chair and closed around my wrist. His thumb found the pulse under the skin and pressed. Not hard. Just enough that I could feel my own heartbeat pushing back against it, fast and ugly.

He wasn’t comforting me. He was keeping me where I was. He was keeping me in my chair and in my place, and he knew exactly how much pressure it took.

It worked. That frightened me almost as much as the rest.

Vesper’s eyes moved to me. For the first time she looked straight at my face, and something in hers changed. Not triumph. I’d expected triumph. It was closer to pity.

“He promised me too, Luna,” she said. “He’s very generous with promises.”

“Elara.” Jason’s voice cracked down the middle. He took another step and this time nobody stopped him. “It’s a lie. I swear it. I swear on my father’s name, I swear on anything. I have not been with her. I haven’t even spoken to her since the spring.”

“You’ve sworn things before,” I said.

My own voice surprised me. It was quiet and flat and it came from far away.

“Not this.” He shook his head. His eyes were wet. “Not this. Not this, Elara.”

“That’s what makes it worse.”

He flinched like I’d hit him. I hadn’t meant it as a blow. I’d meant it as the truth, and I think that was why it landed. If he was lying, he was a liar. If he wasn’t, then someone had planned this carefully enough to put a woman in front of me at the exact hour Jason was trying to win me back. Either way, nothing about this morning was an accident.

Dorian Hale cleared his throat politely. “If I may, Alpha. The woman needs a healer before she needs a trial.”

“Orrin is in the lower villages,” Garrick said, with a grunt. “Fever outbreak. He won’t be back until tomorrow night.”

“Then she waits.” Kael finally spoke. His voice was even. “East wing. Two guards on the door. She’ll have food, water, and a bed. No one speaks to her. No one enters without my word.”

“And the child?” Vesper’s hand pressed harder against her stomach. “If I lose it, Alpha, whose fault will that be?”

“Yours,” Kael said. “If you’ve lied.”

The guards lifted her to her feet. She didn’t resist. As they led her away, she looked back at Jason one more time, and I couldn’t read what was in her face. She wasn’t smiling anymore. If anything she looked scared.

The hall started to talk. The sound rose, a hundred voices all at once. Kael stood, pulling me up with him, and the noise stopped as if someone had cut it.

“Dismissed,” he said.

He didn’t release my wrist the whole way out.

* * *

His study was on the second floor, at the end of a corridor with no windows. Dark walls. A heavy desk. A fire already lit, though I hadn’t seen anyone come in. Shelves of books that looked like they’d been read, not just bought.

He closed the door and locked it.

I stood in the middle of the room with my arms wrapped around myself. I waited for him to say something about Jason. About the lie. About how he’d handle it. Instead he walked to a small table by the window, picked up a decanter, and poured himself a glass of something amber.

He didn’t drink it. He held it in his hand and looked at it.

“If you wish it,” he said, “Vesper won’t be a problem by morning.”

I thought I’d misheard him. “What?”

“She won’t be a problem.” He said it in the same tone he used for the weather. “She won’t be exiled. She won’t be jailed. She won’t be found.”

The fire popped. I stared at him.

“You mean you’d kill her.”

“I mean she wouldn’t be a problem.”

“Kael, she’s pregnant.”

“So she says.”

“She’s bleeding, she’s been beaten, she walked here barefoot—“

“Which is why she’d be easy to explain.” He put the glass down without a sound. “A woman in her condition, injured on the road. No one would question it. No one would look.”

I felt cold from my scalp to my feet. It wasn’t the words. It was how reasonable he made them. He wasn’t excited. He wasn’t angry. He’d thought about it already, probably the second Liora told him. He’d already worked out how it would be done.

“No,” I said.

“You only have to say her name.”

“I am saying it. Her name is a woman who needs a healer.”

He tilted his head. “That isn’t what I asked.”

“Nobody dies because of how I feel.”

“You misunderstand me.” He came around the table slowly. “I’m not asking about your feelings, Elara. I’m asking what you want removed. Your feelings have nothing to do with it.”

“You think that’s better?”

“I think it’s honest.”

“It’s monstrous.”

“Yes.” He said it without blinking. “That’s also honest.”

I stepped back. My heel hit the edge of the rug. For a second I thought about the door, about the lock, about how far I could get before he reached me. Then I thought about how he’d just said all of that standing still, not touching me, with his hands at his sides. It made me think he wasn’t threatening me. He was offering. He truly believed this was something he could give me, like a gift.

That was worse.

“Listen to me,” I said. My voice shook, and I forced it steady. “If you touch her, I’ll never forgive you. I mean it. Not one hair. We find out the truth first. The healer examines her, properly, before anything else happens. Before you decide anything. Before I decide anything.”

“The healer won’t be back until tomorrow night.”

“Then we wait until tomorrow night.”

“And if she’s lying?”

“Then she’s lying, and we deal with that. With a trial. In front of the pack.”

“And if she isn’t?”

I opened my mouth and nothing came out.

He watched me. Something moved across his face, quick and dark. I’d have said it was annoyance, but it wasn’t. It was nearer to admiration, which was somehow worse.

“You’re merciful,” he said softly. “That will be a problem.”

“For who?”

He didn’t answer that.

He lifted the glass again, still not drinking, and set it on the shelf out of my reach. Then he unlocked the door and held it open for me. A man who had just offered to make a woman vanish was holding a door like a gentleman.

“Orrin will examine her tomorrow night,” he said. “I’ll make sure it’s done properly. Go and rest. Your leg needs ice.”

“My leg needs an apology.”

His jaw moved. “You’ll have one when you stop laughing at the wrong table.”

I walked out before I said something I couldn’t take back.

The corridor outside was long and dim. Halfway down, I heard footsteps coming the other way. Two guards, and between them, Vesper, being taken from the hall to the east wing. They hadn’t been quick about it. She was walking slowly, one hand pressed to her side.

We passed in the narrow space between two doors. The guards didn’t say anything. Vesper didn’t look at me. But as she went by, the edge of her torn sleeve brushed mine, and her head turned just slightly, and her mouth moved.

Her whisper was so soft I almost thought I’d imagined it.

“Ask him who burns your letters, Luna. He reads everything.”

Then she was past me. The guards moved her on. I stood alone in the corridor with my hand on the wall. My legs didn’t feel steady. Down at the other end, a servant carrying a basket of linen saw my face and turned around without a word.

I didn’t know what she meant, and I hated that the words had already stuck. I didn’t have letters. I’d written Jason for years, and he’d stopped answering when he was fifteen. Everyone knew that. I’d kept writing anyway, long after it made sense. Long after I knew nobody was reading.

Nobody.

I told myself it was a trick. A woman in a corner, saying anything that might protect her. I told myself that all through dinner, which I ate from Liora’s tray with Kael watching every bite. I told myself that when Jason wasn’t at the table, and when no one mentioned his name. I told myself when Kael took me to bed, held me too tight, and fell asleep with his face in my hair.

I lay there in the dark and listened to him breathe.

I told myself until I slept.

* * *

I woke up cold.

The bed was empty. The sheets on his side were pushed back, and when I put my hand on them, there was no warmth. He’d been gone a while. The clock said ten to four.

Rule four. You sleep where I sleep.

He’d broken his own rule. I sat up and listened. The castle was dead quiet. Somewhere far off, a shutter tapped against stone. Nothing else.

I should have gone back to sleep. I know that. A smart woman would have pulled the blanket up and let him have his secrets.

Instead I put on a robe, opened the door, and stepped into the hallway. The wardens weren’t outside. Someone had sent them away. That should have scared me more than it did.

There was a thin line of yellow light at the far end of the corridor. It came from beneath a door I recognized.

His study.

I walked toward it in bare feet, keeping to the carpet so it wouldn’t make noise. My heart was loud enough that I was sure he’d hear. The closer I got, the clearer I heard something else. A voice. Low. Steady. Not talking to me. Not talking to anyone I could see.

The door wasn’t fully closed. It stood open about the width of two fingers. I pressed my shoulder against the wall beside it and looked through the gap.

He was sitting at his desk with his back half-turned. The lamp was on. In front of him lay something I couldn’t see properly, an open box, or a case, I couldn’t tell. His hand rested on the lid. He was speaking to the air, and his voice was a voice I’d never heard from him. Not the Alpha. Not the man who’d smelled my wri

sts that morning. It was soft. Almost reverent.

I held my breath.

“Forty-three,” Kael said. “I have counted every one.”