The Arrow and the Thread

I have thought many times about the half second between my scream and what came after.

It was not long. A blink. A breath. But in that half second I saw everything with a terrible clarity. The crossbow bolt, a thin dark line against the silver glass. Four hundred faces turning upward, mouths open. Ezekiel, frozen with his hand raised in blessing. And Kael, who had heard my voice and turned toward me instead of toward the danger.

He should have looked up. Any trained warrior would have. Instead he looked at me, and for that tiny, ridiculous moment his face held something I had not expected to see on the Alpha King. Surprise. As if nobody had ever shouted his name like that before.

Then my body moved without asking me.

I drove my shoulder into his chest with every ounce of strength I had.

It was like hitting a wall. He barely shifted. But he was a wolf, with a wolf's reflexes, and he understood in the same instant what I had done. His arm snapped around my waist. We went down together in a tangle of silk and black wool, and the bolt struck the altar behind us with a crack like breaking bone.

Stone chips sprayed over my shoulders. The bolt stood quivering in the marble exactly where his heart had been.

"Down!" Kael roared, and his body covered mine.

The hall broke.

I had never heard four hundred people scream at once. It was a wall of sound. Benches scraped, glass shattered, someone shrieked a child's name. Warriors shifted mid-run, their clothes tearing, and the air filled with the heavy smell of fur and fear. Somewhere a woman was crying, thin and high, like a kettle.

Beneath the noise, closer, I heard Kael breathing. Fast and controlled. His heart thudded against my back. His arm was a bar across my ribs and his other hand was braced beside my head, his whole body curved around me like a shield.

"Are you hurt?" he said into my hair.

"No."

"Did it touch you?"

"No. Did it—"

"No." A pause. "You pushed me."

"I know."

"You pushed me out of the way."

"I was trying to save your life," I said, a little breathlessly, because his weight was crushing the air out of me. "You are welcome."

Something shook against my shoulder. It took me a moment to realise it was a very short, very rough laugh.

Then the weight was gone. He was on his feet, pulling me up beside him, and the king's face was no longer the face of a startled man. It was something colder and older. "Silver Guard," he said, and the voice carried across the whole chaotic hall. "The gallery. Now."

Black-armoured guards poured up the stairs like water. I counted a dozen. At their head ran a lean, broad-shouldered man with a scar through one eyebrow, a drawn sword and the bearing of a soldier who had been born in armour. Captain Rhys Calder, commander of the Silver Guard. I had memorised his name, too.

"Majesty," said another voice at my elbow. Dorian Ash, the king's Beta, had reached the altar with his sword drawn. He was tall, tanned, with a boyish face that had gone grim. "Come with me. The east door is clear."

"The council?"

"Protected. The lords are being escorted to the inner chambers."

"And the pack?"

"Panicking." He looked at me, then at his king. "Majesty, the bride—"

"Stays with me," said Kael. His hand was still wrapped around my wrist. I do not think he noticed.

I noticed.

They caught the archer in under a minute.

Rhys's men dragged him out from behind the pillar and across the gallery rail, and I saw that I had been wrong. Him was the wrong word. It was a girl, nineteen at most, wearing the grey wool of a kitchen servant. Her hair had come loose from its cap. She had a bruise on one cheekbone and she was not fighting.

That was what unsettled me. She was not fighting, or crying, or even looking afraid. She hung limp between two guards, her eyes unfocused, and her feet dragged over the marble as though they belonged to someone else.

They brought her down the stairs and threw her to her knees in front of the king.

"Name," Rhys snapped.

Silence.

"I asked your name."

"Captain," Kael said quietly. "Wait."

He had not looked at the girl. He was looking at me.

I realised I was staring, and the staring had been noticed.

But I could not stop. Because now that she was closer, now that the panic had thinned and the great hall had settled into an ugly, watchful hush, I could finally see her thread.

It came from the centre of her chest. A silver line, thick as a rope. A bond, I thought at first, the strongest bond I had ever seen between two people. Then I looked closer, and my stomach turned over.

It was wrong.

It was too bright, too straight, and it glowed with the flat, even light of lamp oil. It did not ripple. It did not pulse. When the girl's face twisted with terror, the thread did not flicker with it. It stayed perfectly, unnaturally still, like wire painted silver.

A forged bond.

And it was not a love bond. It was a leash.

I could see it more clearly than I had ever seen one. The thread passed out of her body and slid across the floor, past the guards' boots, through the hanging threads of other couples, and up into the benches where the nobles had been sitting. It was pulled taut, like a fishing line with a catch on the end.

I followed it with my eyes. Across the aisle. Between the pillars. Into the crowd of lords, ladies and visiting envoys who were being herded toward the inner door. And there, among a hundred other tangled colours, the line lost itself. I could not tell whose hand held it. Too many threads. Too many bodies.

"Where does it go?" I breathed, before I could stop myself.

"What?" Kael said.

"Nothing. I—" I swallowed. "Nothing."

His eyes narrowed. He heard the lie, I could see him hear it, and he filed it carefully away.

"Captain," he said. "Question her."

"With pleasure." Rhys drew a narrow, ugly knife from his belt. "I will have a name in a minute, Majesty."

The girl lifted her head at the sight of the blade, and for the first time she looked afraid.

Not of the knife. Of what was about to happen if the knife came any closer.

I saw the thread tighten.

It drew in around her chest with a fierce little snap, and her mouth opened soundlessly, and I realised in a flash of pure horror exactly what was going to happen. Whoever held the other end of that leash had seen the captain's blade. They were going to pull. They were going to stop her mouth the way they had stopped the messenger boy's.

"No!" I shouted.

I did not think. I never think, in the moment. I launched myself across the black marble, between the guard and the girl, and caught the captain's knife arm in both of my hands.

"Stop! Do not hurt her! She is not in control of herself!"

"My lady," Rhys said, in the controlled voice of a man being very patient, "step back. She just tried to kill the king."

"She did not choose it!"

"Elena." Kael was suddenly at my shoulder. His voice was low. "What do you know?"

I looked up at him. His eyes were hard, but there was no cruelty in them. Only the sharpest attention I had ever been under. He had seen me throw myself between a trained captain and an assassin, and he was asking himself why.

I had one chance to answer, and I could not tell him the truth.

"I think she was forced," I said. "Look at her. Her eyes. She is not afraid of the knife, she is afraid of something else. If you kill her now, you will never learn who sent her."

A long moment passed.

"Rhys," said Kael. "Put it away."

"Majesty—"

"Put it away."

The captain sheathed the knife, jaw tight. The girl sagged in the guards' grip. And I knelt in front of her, close enough to touch, and looked at the thread. It flexed against her ribs like a living thing.

"What is your name?" I asked, as gently as I could.

She did not answer. But her lips were moving. A tiny, silent shape. I leaned in until my ear was nearly at her mouth.

"Please," I whispered. "Tell me. Who did this to you?"

Her breath was warm and smelled of bitter almonds. She turned her face a fraction, so that her lips brushed my ear, and I felt her fingers fumble at my wrist, cold as clay.

"The queen," she breathed, "can see them."

I went rigid.

"They told us," she whispered. Her eyes had cleared, just for a second. They were brown. Young. Terrified. "They told us the queen would see. They said... if I failed... to make you... look."

"Look at what?" I whispered back. "At whom?"

She smiled. It was a small, terrible smile, and it hurt to see.

"Behind you," she said.

I turned.

Behind me was nothing but the king, the guards, and the shocked, silent crowd. Nobody was moving. Nobody was out of place. But when I turned back, the girl's jaw was clenched tight, her teeth set on something small and hard, and a faint, bitter smell of almonds filled the air.

"No!" I grabbed her shoulders. "Spit it out! Spit it out!"

Her eyes rolled up. Her body convulsed once. The silver thread in her chest snapped like a broken harp string, and it flew away across the hall, lashing through the air, searching for its master.

Then she was gone.

I stayed on my knees for a long moment, my hands full of coarse grey wool.

When I finally looked up, Kael was staring down at me. And in his eyes, behind the shock and the fury, was the beginning of a question he would not stop asking until he had the answer.

"She said something," he said quietly. "What was it?"

I thought of the girl's last words. The queen can see them.

Somewhere in this hall, someone was watching me, and they already knew exactly who I was.

"She said," I replied, and my voice did not shake, "that she was sorry."