Chapter 14 — The Warning

Three days later, someone tried to kill me.

I had gone into the eastern woods at dusk, alone, against every rule I had ever written for myself, because Maren had finally agreed to show me the boundary marker where my mother had once bled, and Maren would only teach after dark, when the household was occupied with supper and no one would ask questions about where the second Vale daughter had gone. The path wound along the old game trail behind the orchard wall, familiar enough that I had stopped watching my feet, which was, I understood later, exactly the mistake that nearly killed me.

The first arrow took a chip of bark from the tree beside my head.

I did not think. I dropped, the way Maren had drilled into me a hundred times over a hundred bruising falls, and rolled off the trail into the undergrowth before the second arrow found the space where I had been standing. My heart slammed against my ribs so hard it hurt, each beat loud enough in my own ears to drown out whatever sound might have warned me of the next shot. I heard movement in the trees ahead — one man, maybe two, circling wide to cut off the trail back toward the house.

I ran the other way.

I do not remember most of it clearly. I remember branches tearing at my skirt, the taste of blood where I had bitten my own tongue, the terrible, animal certainty that I was about to die a second time, alone, in the dark, without even the dignity of an audience to witness it this time. I remember stumbling into a small clearing and finding it was not empty.

Kael was there.

I never learned, that night or for a long while after, exactly why he had been riding the eastern boundary at dusk, alone, on a night he had no announced business at Vale at all. I would ask him eventually. I would not entirely believe his answer. In that moment I only knew that a shadow detached itself from the treeline, silver eyes catching what little light remained, and I nearly screamed before I recognized the shape of him, relief and terror arriving in the same breath.

"Down," Kael said, and I obeyed before I had decided to, dropping flat as he moved past me, already shifting, already changing, the black wolf that emerged from where the man had stood a heartbeat before larger and darker than any wolf I had ever seen up close, close enough that I felt the displaced air of his passing against my cheek.

I heard, rather than saw, what happened next. A man's shout, cut short. A second man's footsteps, retreating fast and then faster, crashing away through the undergrowth. A long, terrible silence that stretched on far longer than I could properly measure, lying pressed into the cold damp earth with my hands over my head.

Kael returned to me on two feet, breathing hard, blood on his hands that was not his own.

"One got away," he said, crouching in front of me, his voice tight with something I did not have a name for. "The other won't be answering questions. I'm sorry — I wanted one alive."

"I'm not," I said, and found, distantly, that I meant it, some cold and unfamiliar part of me entirely unbothered by what that admission said about who I was becoming.

His hands moved over me, quick and clinical, checking for wounds with the brisk efficiency of a man trained to assess damage before he allowed himself to feel anything about it. I let him. My whole body was shaking too hard to protest, shaking in a way that had nothing to do with the cold.

"You're not hurt," he said finally, and something in his voice cracked, just slightly, at the edges, betraying more than his composed face allowed. "You're not hurt."

"No."

"What were you doing out here alone?"

"Walking."

"At dusk. On the eastern trail. Where two men were waiting for you." His hands had gone still on my shoulders, gripping just hard enough that I felt the tremor still running through his own fingers. "Liora. What were you doing."

It was the first time he had used my given name without the courtesy title attached to it, and some part of me noticed that even through the fear, even through the ringing in my ears, some small, foolish corner of my heart taking note of it as though it mattered more than the arrows that had nearly found me.

"I don't know who they were," I said, which was true, and did not answer his question, which he noticed immediately.

"That's not what I asked."

"It's the only part I can answer."

His jaw tightened. For a moment I thought he would push, and something in me braced for it, because I had no idea what I would say if he did, what lie I could offer that would survive the particular intensity of his attention. Instead he exhaled, slow and controlled, and pulled me up onto unsteady feet, keeping one hand at my elbow as though he did not entirely trust me to remain standing without it.

"I'm taking you home," he said. "And then I'm finding out who sent them."

"You don't need to—"

"I do." The words came out low, almost rough. "Two men with hunting bows do not lie in wait on a private trail at dusk by accident. Someone paid for this. Someone wanted you dead, tonight, in these woods, in a way that could be blamed on bandits." He looked at me, and the fear I had glimpsed once before, in another life, in the snow, was there again now, plain and unguarded, stripped of every careful mask he usually wore. "I am not leaving that unanswered."

I thought of Seraphine's voice in the orchard. Nothing happens to her. I thought of a line she claimed to have set herself, fierce enough to argue over, and wondered, with a cold and creeping dread settling deep into my chest, whether tonight was the moment someone else had decided that line no longer applied.