Chapter 2: The Buyer

Lyra didn't stop shaking until she reached the old mill outside the city walls, three hours after she left the palace grounds behind.

The mill hadn't turned in years. Its wheel sat frozen in a dry creek bed, half rotted, and the man waiting inside it always chose it for exactly that reason. No one came looking for anything abandoned. Dust hung in the lantern light like something suspended in water, and the whole place smelled of old grain and mildew, a smell Lyra had come to associate with getting paid.

"You're late," Rurik said, without looking up from the lantern he was adjusting.

"I'm alive," Lyra said. "Consider that an improvement on the plan."

That got his attention. Rurik was a thin man with a permanently unimpressed face, the kind of face that made it easy to forget he had once been someone's Beta before he decided loyalty paid worse than information did.

"What happened?"

"I got caught."

His hand stilled on the lantern. "By who?"

Lyra pulled the sealed document from her sleeve and set it on the flour-dusted table between them before she answered, mostly so she'd have something to look at besides his face.

"The Alpha King."

Rurik went very still. "And you're standing here telling me about it."

"He let me go."

"He doesn't do that."

"I was there. He did."

Rurik studied her the way he studied everything, like a man counting coins that might be counterfeit. "Why would the most feared Alpha in the Seven Territories let a thief walk out of his own palace?"

Lyra hadn't stopped asking herself the same question the entire ride here. She still didn't have an answer that made sense.

"He said his ability doesn't work right on me."

"His ability."

"He hears lies. Everyone knows that. I lied to him twice and he heard both of them, but he said something underneath the lies didn't sound the way it should." She shook her head. "I don't know what that means. I don't want to know what that means. I just want to get paid and disappear somewhere he'll never think to look."

She rubbed her arms, though the mill wasn't cold. It was something else settling into her skin, something she didn't have a name for yet, and she didn't like not having a name for things.

Rurik picked up the document and turned it over in his hands, studying the wax seal without breaking it. That alone told Lyra something was wrong. Rurik always broke the seal. He liked to know exactly what he was selling before he named a price for it.

"You didn't read it," he said.

"You told me not to."

"I'm asking if you did anyway."

"No." That one was true, and she watched him listen for the shape of it, the way people who worked with liars for a living always listened, out of habit more than suspicion.

Rurik set the document down again, farther from himself than before, as if it had grown heavier in his hands.

"Who hired you for this?" Lyra asked. "You never told me his name."

"Because I don't know it. I was told to find a woman skilled enough to get in and out of the royal study without being seen. I was told what the reward would be. I wasn't told anything else, and I didn't ask, because in this business the people who ask questions are usually the people who end up floating in a river."

"That's comforting."

"It's honest, which is more than I can say for most of what's happened in the last hour." Rurik finally looked directly at her. "Tell me again, slowly. What exactly did he say to you before he let you go?"

"That his ability didn't work properly on me. That something underneath my lies didn't sound right to him." Lyra crossed her arms. "He didn't sound angry about it. He sounded curious. Like I was a lock he intended to pick eventually."

"The Alpha King catches a thief with a sealed royal document in her hand, and instead of throwing her in a cell, he lets her walk. Does that sound like a king protecting a secret to you?"

Lyra felt something cold move through her chest. "Or it sounds like a king who wanted to see where I'd go next."

"Which means one of two things," Rurik said slowly. "Either he's following you right now."

"Or?"

"Or someone arranged for the two of you to meet, and neither of us knows who, or why, and I am currently holding a document that might get me killed just for having touched it."

Lyra's hand went instinctively to the small knife hidden in her boot. Old habit. Not that a knife would do much against whoever was clever enough to set a trap this well built.

"Give me the payment," she said. "I'll take the risk of him following me. I'm not taking the risk of standing in this mill a second longer than I have to."

Rurik didn't move toward the strongbox under the floorboards. Instead he pushed the sealed document back across the table toward her.

"Take it with you."

"That's not the deal."

"The deal changed the moment the Alpha King let you live," Rurik said. "I don't want it in my mill. I don't want my name anywhere near it. You want your payment, you deliver it yourself, to whoever answers if you knock on the right door in Silverpine three nights from now. I'll give you the address. That's the last thing I'm doing for you."

"You're abandoning me."

"I'm surviving," Rurik said. "You should try it. You're usually better at it than this."

Lyra stared at the document sitting between them, wax seal unbroken, its contents a mystery to everyone who had touched it so far, and felt the shape of the trap closing slowly around her, one piece at a time.

She took it. She had no other choice.

Outside the mill, the moon had risen high and pale over the dry creek bed, and somewhere beyond the tree line, farther than Lyra could have known, a wolf far larger than any natural animal moved silently through the dark, following a scent it had first caught in a stone corridor three hours earlier.

Adrian had told his guards he was hunting.

He hadn't told them what.

He only knew that for the first time in his life, a lie had sounded like something worth chasing all the way to the end of it, whatever that end turned out to be. He told himself it was curiosity, the same clean interest he brought to any unsolved problem in his territory, and he almost believed it. Almost was a word he had never needed before tonight, and he didn't yet know what to do with it.