A Name that isn't Hers

With her back pressed against the wall on the other side of the door, Selene Marrow placed one hand out over her sternum as if she could actually hold her heart in place and heard Kaelan Voss stand in the corridor for eleven long seconds without knocking.

She counted them; ever since then she had always counted — one of the very few habits that had enabled her to avoid doing something stupid, a discipline which Ivy had implanted in her during the most difficult of the early months, when grief and anger had made her reckless and Moira's restored body had still not learnt to conceal what she felt.

He doesn't know, she told herself for the hundredth time since the wrist-greeting. He doesn't. Moira had reconstructed everything — the smell, the appearance, the bones, right down to the marrow. That's why she gave me the name. Bonds can't survive such a complete undoing. What's happening here is simply proximity, muscle memory, an old instinct with nothing genuine left beneath it. It signifies nothing.

She nearly came to believe it. In three years, she had become very good at nearly believing anything she needed to.

Yet a smaller and more dangerous voice within him might know, for even if his wolf remembers while his mind has not — you can't have that back. To want him to remember you is to want the very thing that would consume you more rapidly than any fire; there is no situation in which it would be safe for you to love him again or for him to do so. That is exactly what 'forbidden' means, Wren — not that it is wrong, that it is capable of killing people.

His footsteps eventually moved away in a slow manner and she was able to take a deep breath for the first time since the wrist-greeting. She went to the narrow window which looked over the area that had once been the training yard now, even in the dark, it was illuminated by the drive-torches so that the new sparring rings could be seen, having been marked in fresh timber. In this second archery range there had been only one, as proof of a patrol which had been drilled thoroughly under a leader who no longer trusted anyone, including himself, to be caught unprepared twice.

The cold, satisfied part of her thought so. Let him spend the rest of his life preparing for a danger that has already succeeded in getting past him and which is now sleeping in his own guest wing tonight.

It gave her a start, a real and rather undignified one, all three years of composure vanishing at once — only for her to realise the pattern: two short and one long, an old signal from a previous life which Ivy had apparently continued to use, a little link neither of them had ever talked about but both had quietly come to need.

When she opened the door, she saw Ivy Marrow — although they weren't really related, she was just another of Moira's debtors who, just as much as Wren had, needed a fictitious family — leaning in the frame, arms crossed, with the look of someone who had overheard something interesting through the walls and was eager to talk about it.

"You're pale," Ivy said as she opened the door, closing it with a soft click and at once dropping the casual tone when they were alone. "Paler than normal, and since the general colour scheme Moira chose for you, that's actually quite a remark."

"I'm fine."

You're lying to a professional liar," she said, sitting down in the one chair in the room, leaning back in it and looking at Selene with a sharp, judging expression that she had perfected over the years, enabling both of them to stay alive and unseen in a dozen different territories. "Tell me what happened – everything – start with the greeting, because I noticed a change in you the moment, I saw your face reappear down that corridor an hour ago."

Selene said all this—the wrist-greeting, the jolt of the bond, sharp and unmistakable and wrong; the eleven seconds that she spent outside the door; and the vault records cutting in during the meeting before she had picked up anything useful about what Cassius thought was worth pulling an Alpha away from his own negotiation for.

When Ivy had finished, she remained completely silent for a long time—for her, this silence was a kind of alarm, since it meant the absence of her normal running comments and showed that she was actually thinking rather than going through the motions. "Moira told you that the bond had been severed."

She told me a great many things.

"Moira," Ivy said, sitting up straight and taking care to select her words, "has never, over the three years, told either of us a plain lie. I need to make that clear since it's important. There have been many things which were in fact true but terribly misleading—whole conversations have been constructed so that we would hear what we wanted rather than the truth—but never a plain lie. Anyway, that doesn't amount to comfort; I'm not trying to comfort you. What I'm saying is that if she had specifically used the word 'severed' and it's not the case, then that's not a mistake. That's something she deliberately chose, knowing full well what it would make you believe."

Selene moved slowly to sit on the edge of the bed, the pain beneath her ribs, the same pain that had begun when Kaelan's fingers had closed around her wrist — settling down into something more intense and approaching fear than she was willing to admit even to Ivy, someone who, after three years of sharing secrets, had gained the right to know most of what Selene actually felt.

Why on earth would she do that? She stared at her own hands, almost to herself. Could she not rebuild all the rest — her face, her smell, her name, the way she walks  and yet leave the one thing which could enable her to be recognised in a single unguarded moment in front of the one man in this area whom it would be most disastrous to be recognised by?

I have no idea," Ivy said, leaning in even more and lowering her voice from habit even though nobody else could hear "but Moira never does anything by accident; over the three years that I've known her I've never seen her be careless. Whatever the real nature of your debt is, whatever it really is that she's using you for under the story she told you about a life being owed as compensation for a life saved, I don't believe the bond continuing is a mistake; I think she wanted him to sense you approaching. I just don't know why yet, or what will happen when he does.

The words settled upon Selene like a cold wave. For the first time since she had crossed the border, the carefully constructed nature of her revenge—the plan, the list, the five names arranged in order of guilt with Kaelan's at the top, the ink pressed down so hard that it had nearly torn the page. It did not seem like something she had controlled but rather as if it had been imposed upon her. It was as if a piece had been placed in position on a board of which she could not see the entire extent by a hand which she had only trusted because it had pulled her out of the fire.

"There's one more thing," Selene said slowly as she thought it over. "Cassius interrupted the meeting about the vault records and it was no ordinary interruption—Kaelan looked as though it really mattered to him. And when he asked me if we had met before—" she forced herself to complete the sentence. He didn't ask in the way that someone would when filling a silence. He asked as if he already suspected the answer and was rather desperately hoping to be told that he was wrong.

She continued, while Ivy was still going to answer. Cassius had told the steward that it was the records in the vault, not general pack business, an affair which could not wait until morning. Iris kept her records in that vault. There were the pack laws, the old customs, and decades of correspondence. Cassius felt it necessary to look at it that very night when I had arrived, even though he hadn't yet seen my face up close—

Before he saw you Ivy suspected something, she added, as ever a step ahead of the rest. It was therefore not your face that had caused the suspicion. Something else must have done it—the border crossing perhaps, or a ward, or some kind of resonance in the land which an old wolf such as Cassius would feel before anyone else did.

"Moira never mentioned wards."

Ivy said that Moira never brings up any point which she has to; this leads us back to the same unpleasant question, namely, what does she really want from all this apart from the account she gave you of balancing an old debt? Since I don't believe that you going over that border and taking the pack apart from the inside is something that happened by accident to her, I think it's part of her plan—her plan—and that she wears your grief like a coat.

Ivy's expression became more determined and every trace of lightness had disappeared. "Do you think he knows?"

I believe that with his mind he knows nothing yet—though some part of him, the wolfish part, the one which doesn't mind what Moira did to my face or to my name or to the sound of my voice, already remembers precisely who I am. And I think that I am going to have considerably less time than I had originally intended before that part of him overcomes the argument it is having with the rest of him.

Ivy was once more silent, and this time when she spoke her voice had completely lost its sharpness, becoming gentle in the manner that Selene had come to be cautious about, since Ivy only ever showed gentleness when she thought that Selene most needed to hear something harsh and would therefore not have otherwise dealt with it.

"That's exactly what I want to know," Selene said, turning away from the window and redirecting the conversation to something practical and within her own control, since she didn't want to stay near the fire after dealing with the things she couldn't feel. "Shall I retreat? Put on a show of illness, put off action until the rest of the delegation has arrived, and thus have more people between myself and his notice?"

"No," Ivy said slowly as she thought it over. "If you now pull back it will seem odd to a man who's already suspicious—Cassius watching you so closely, Kaelan standing outside your door for eleven seconds, none of that comes across as coincidental to people who know how to read a room like these two obviously do. We should go forward, yes, but in a careful manner. Go forward anyway. Whatever Moira's real plan is, we won't find out by running before we've even begun."

"And Kaelan?"

Ivy stayed quiet for a moment. "I believe you already realise that the answer to that question is more complicated than either of us is inclined to admit. You should at least be honest with yourself about that, even though you may not be ready to be honest with him. And as for Selene—if it does win, whatever is causing the disturbance beneath his ribs at the moment, should he work out who you are before you've finished—have you actually made up your mind about what will happen then? To the plan or to him?"

Selene said nothing; she continued to look at the dark edge of the trees, at the spot roughly where the pyre had once been, and remained silent since the true answer — that a traitorous and unkillable part of her had not made up her mind at all and had been unable to do so ever since his fingers, warm and familiar, had closed around her wrist and something that ought to have died in that clearing three years ago had instead opened its eyes — was one she wasn't ready to voice out loud, not even to the one living person who already knew all the terrible things she had become as a result of planning this.

Ivy remained a little longer, going over in her mind the practical aspects of the coming week—what Selene should and should not reveal, how to deal with Cassius's certain tendency to ask questions without giving him any grounds to confirm things—and then, after midnight, got up, gave Selene's shoulder a single sharp squeeze, which was the nearest either of them ever came to showing open affection, and then quietly moved herself out into the corridor.

Sitting all by herself by the window, Selene looked for a long time as the drive-torches burned down and then flickered out one after another until the whole household had finally gone to sleep. She recalled Rhys, who was somewhere in the house now and three years older, having grown into a man rather than the boy she remembered holding back his tears in a crowd which he couldn't manage to get out of. She also thought about Delphine, whose face she had not yet seen this evening and whose name was at the top of her list, only behind Kaelan's, and pondered what expression hers would make when they finally were in the same room. She thought most of all and with the greatest reluctance about the eleven seconds that Kaelan had stood outside her door without knocking, and about the specific and dreadful tenderness of not knowing whether she had wanted him to.

Below her there was a study having a cold fireplace and in which on the wall was a blank space where a mother's portrait had previously hung; in that room Kaelan Voss was sitting all by himself with the name Selene Marrow written on a piece of paper and next to it, in his own hand and underlined twice so heavily that it had nearly torn the page, a single word for which he had no evidence and that he could not bring himself to cross out.

Wren.