Chapter 17 — The Gate

I did not answer Maren that morning. I could not.

It was another hour before my hands stopped shaking enough to hold a cup of the bitter, herb-dark tea she pressed on me without asking, and another hour after that before I trusted my voice to hold steady. Maren did not press me during that waiting. She simply sat across the small table, sharpening a second blade she did not need to sharpen, giving me the particular gift of a silence that demanded nothing.

"My mother," I said finally. "She was warning me. About a gate."

Maren's face, already pale, went a shade paler. "What gate?"

"I don't know. She didn't say — or she did, and I lost it, the way you lose the edges of a dream." I turned the iron ring over in my fingers, careful now, the way you handle something that has already proven it can hurt you. "She said once it opens, it doesn't close again. Not fully. Not ever. And that whatever's on the other side remembers how long it's been waiting."

"That's not a child's warning," Maren said slowly, setting down her own blade entirely now, as though the conversation had earned her full attention. "That's an oath. The old oath-wardens spoke like that, in the founding days, before the packs settled their borders and forgot half of what they used to know." She shook her head, as if to clear it of whatever old memory the words had stirred loose. "I'm no scholar, girl. I was a soldier. But I know an oath when I hear the shape of one repeated back to me."

"What oath?"

"That, I can't tell you. I never learned it whole. Only pieces, the way everyone in this house learned pieces of your mother, before your father decided the house would forget her instead." Maren's jaw tightened, old grief surfacing in the scar along her temple like a line drawn in old ink. "If you want the whole of it, you'll need someone who studies the old founding treaties. Someone who was already old when your mother was young."

I thought, unwillingly, of a kind, weathered face across a candlelit table. He seemed to think it might interest me, Kael had said, of my father's remark about old boundary treaties. Should it?

"Lord Vane," I said.

Maren's expression shuttered instantly, wary in a way I had not seen from her before, her whole posture going tense as though I had named a danger rather than a possible source of help.

"I'd be careful there."

"Why? He's respected. Kind, from everything I've seen of him."

"Kind men aren't always safe men," Maren said. "And a man who's spent forty years collecting every scrap of old lore in the north doesn't do it for love of dusty books. He does it because he wants something those books can give him." She held my gaze, hard and steady, the full weight of her soldier's instinct behind it. "I'm not telling you Vane is your enemy. I'm telling you that the man who knows most about your mother's oath is very likely the same man who'll want most badly to see it broken. Remember that, whichever way you decide to use him."

I remembered, instead, tea in a glasshouse and a voice telling me gently that cruelty was not the same as strength, and felt the small, warm certainty I had carried about Edric Vane since I woke into this second life crack, just slightly, along an edge I had never thought to examine before this morning.

"You think he'd use what I tell him against me."

"I think," Maren said carefully, "that a man who has waited this long for something rarely waits politely once he believes it's finally within his reach. I'm not asking you to distrust him outright. I'm asking you to be careful what you hand him, and to notice, carefully, what he does with whatever small pieces you let slip."

I put the iron ring away, wrapped in its oiled cloth, and did not touch it again for a long while. Some costs, I was beginning to understand, were not worth paying twice in one week — not the cost of the vision itself, and not, perhaps, the cost of trusting too freely a man whose kindness I had never once thought to question until this exact, uncomfortable morning.

"What will you do?" Maren asked, watching me with the particular steadiness of someone who had already guessed the answer and wanted only to see if I would say it aloud.

"I don't know yet," I admitted. "I can't simply avoid him. He's too close to my father, too woven into the fabric of this house's politics, to pretend I've lost interest in old treaties the moment his name enters the conversation. But I think, from now on, I'll listen more than I ask. Let him believe I'm simply a curious girl with an idle fascination for history, rather than someone circling a specific, dangerous question."

"That's wiser than I expected from you," Maren said, something like approval crossing her weathered face. "Most people your age want to run straight at the danger, certain their courage alone will carry them through it."

"I did that once," I said quietly, thinking of a knife and snow and a courage that had changed nothing at all. "I don't intend to make the same mistake twice."

Maren studied me a moment longer, and whatever she saw in my face seemed to satisfy her, because she nodded once, sharp and decisive, and rose to put the kettle back on the fire, the practical business of the morning reasserting itself around the unanswered weight of everything we had just discussed.

"One more thing," she said, her back still to me as she worked. "Whatever you learn from Vane, or about him, you bring it to me first. Not your father. Not even your young Alpha, however much he's clearly begun to matter to you." She glanced back over her shoulder, something fierce and protective in her scarred face. "I buried enough of your mother's secrets once already, out of fear and poor judgment both. I don't intend to make that mistake with her daughter."

"I promise," I said, and meant it, grateful beyond words for an ally who asked for nothing in return beyond the simple right to help carry what I could no longer carry entirely alone.