The Alpha who Signed Her Death

Kaelan had not slept well on most nights, not properly, ever since the clearing.

He didn't sleep at all that night.

He was continually thinking, in vain, of a night two years prior to the fire, before any of those events had taken place, when he had still been a Beta getting used to the weight of a title, he had not yet inherited. Wren had climbed through the window of his rooms rather than go by the door, since, as she said, doors made things seem too formal. They stayed on the floor for hours discussing nothing in particular, such as whether the river flowed more quickly in spring or following the autumn rains, or whether pack law should demand a full trial for every accusation or only in the case of serious ones. Looking back on that conversation, it seemed to him as though the universe were rehearsing a joke it had not yet decided to tell him. She dozed off in the middle of a sentence with her head on his chest. He then thought to himself, with a clarity that still caught him unawares on the most difficult nights, that he could build an entire life around this — around her — and that it would be sufficient.

He had made a pyre instead. Most nights he made the effort not to think at the same time of the girl who climbed the window and the woman illuminated by the fire, since the distance between them was greater than his chest could bear without some part of him longing to break open.

He stayed in his study well after the emissary had been taken to her rooms in the west wing—the better rooms, set aside for envoys whose goodwill really made a difference—something which showed him just how much he needed this trade route, even though he hadn't yet fully acknowledged it himself; then he looked at the blank wall where his mother's portrait had previously been, before taking it down eighteen months ago since he could no longer bear the sight of her painted eyes watching him as he made decisions that she would have made in a faster and kinder way.

Elder Cassius was sitting opposite him, looking older than his actual age, with his hands folded in the careful manner of a man who was particularly careful about the words he was about to speak, a habit that Kaelan had come to recognize as a kind of weather.

The records in the vault are all right, Cassius said. I looked them over myself this afternoon before she came. There's nothing new, nothing at all that has anything to do with tonight's affairs.

So, what made you interrupt me during a negotiation to tell me that?

For a moment Cassius remained silent, looking at him in the way Kaelan had picked up over the course of three years as being the kind of careful, cautious expression a man uses when deciding how much truth a person can absorb in a single sitting and who, more often than not, decides to give only a portion of the truth.

"When I noticed her crossing the border," Cassius said at last, "before the sentries had sent word up the drive, some part of this house awoke that had been sleeping for a long time. I needed a reason to see her once more before I spoke to you and thus made you doubt not only your own instincts but mine as well."

Kaelan froze at the arm of his chair and said, "Certainly about what?"

I don't know yet. That was, as Kaelan had discovered, the most honest thing his uncle ever said, and it was always the thing that concerned him most. "She doesn't appear in any scent records kept by the Halloway family. As soon as the sentries reported her, I had sent a message to a contact in Halloway territory, before you had even received her. The colour of her eyes is one that I haven't seen on a wolf or a witch-touched human in sixty years of meeting both." He tilted his head, a habit of an old wolf's, observing the room as younger wolves would study faces. "And your wolf hasn't calmed down since she passed through that door. I could feel it in the hall; it has been pacing beneath your skin for two hours."

The fact that my wolf has settled has nothing whatsoever to do with anything. Sharper than he intended, he got up and went over to the cold fire, needing the movement. "I haven't had a good night's sleep in three years. My wolf hasn't settled since the night we—" He halted. He had long since stopped finishing that sentence. After three years he still couldn't manage to say her name out loud without something in his chest collapsing in on itself as if a building had slowly rotted from a rotten foundation.

Cassius, fortunately, didn't press the matter. He never did, and Kaelan, at times, thought bitterly to himself when he was alone with a glass of something that was too strong, that his uncle had granted him this one kindness in return for the much greater thing which Kaelan had never once been asked to account for—the speed of the trial. The fact that the evidence had been gathered and verified with certainty in under two days, when the pack law in principle permitted a full season for the review of a capital charge, showed just how smoothly the entire process had gone, especially when seen in the clear light of three years' hindsight. The witnesses had already been lined up before Kaelan had finished mourning his mother, and the blood evidence had been catalogued at a speed that ought to have worried him at the time but didn't, since grief had made him stupid and stupidity had in turn made him quick, and that quickness had made him complicit in something of which he still did not have a full understanding.

He had once asked Cassius about it, a year having passed, and was drunk and in a raw state on the anniversary, the fire pressing against his throat as if it were a hand. Cassius had merely replied that the old rite exists in order to protect the pack from things which slower justice cannot catch in time; it was the way in which he had said it—carefully and finally—as if a door had been shut on a room that Kaelan hadn't known was there—that made him understand he should never ask again.

He never had. At present, three years on, he felt ashamed of the ease with which that silence had secured him.

Don't you ever consider it? That question surprised Kaelan just as much as it did his uncle. Think about how fast it was—two days, Cassius. The amount of evidence that should have taken a whole season had been compressed into just two days for a capital sentence against a Luna, and not one of us challenged it. I didn't challenge it; I was too occupied with burying my mother to realise that the woman I'd formed a bond with was being tried and sentenced faster than pack law actually permits.

Cassius's face did not alter, yet the atmosphere in the room changed, becoming still in a way that had not been the case a moment earlier—that quiet which is typical when a man is deciding whether or not tonight is finally the time to answer a question he has been avoiding for three years. "The evidence was compelling," he remarked, after a pause which lasted a beat longer than was comfortable. "The blade. The blood. Witnesses who placed her near the garden that morning."

I never spoke to the witnesses either and I never looked at the evidence with my own eyes. I allowed you to conduct the trial completely since I had confidence in you and because sorrow made it easier for me to place the burden of the decision on someone else. Kaelan's voice lowered and took on a dangerous tone which he seldom let show in front of his family. I've had three years to think about this, Uncle—three years to ask myself why a case which ought to have taken a whole season was proven beyond doubt in just two days. I have never directly asked you because part of me was afraid of the answer. Tonight, with a stranger sleeping in my west wing who seems like a ghost I have buried, I am considerably less afraid of the answer than I used to be.

Cassius looked at him for a long time, and something flashed behind those old eyes that Kaelan could not understand—perhaps it was grief, or calculation, or an old fear finally being called to account. "Not tonight," he replied, in a quiet, almost gentle tone. "No matter what you're asking me, Kaelan, not tonight. Let me first get to the bottom of your emissary. Some discussions are better had at a time other than the middle of an evening that's already been difficult." Kaelan noticed it with a cold, sinking feeling that it was not a denial.

Instead, he said, "I want her kept under observation," turned away from the empty fireplace and forced his voice into the flat tone that he reserved for matters concerning the pack, merely to keep the old grief from interfering with his present confusion. "It should be done in a quiet manner since Toren Halloway is already on edge about this corridor and I don't want to give him a pretext for walking out over what he considers an insult to his envoy. But I want to find out everything there is to know about Selene Marrow before the rest of her delegation arrives."

"If there's nothing at all to know?" Cassius watched him. "Is she really just what she claims to be, that is, a talented envoy with unusual colouring and no noteworthy history, and is this merely an old man and his nephew playing leap-frog with shadows three years too late to make any difference?"

Kaelan remained completely quiet for a long time, looking at the dead fire and recalling how her wrist had felt under his hand—steady and careful—and beneath that, for a single, unguarded moment before she had got the hang of it, there had been a trembling, some current running beneath her skin which had responded to another current running beneath him, just as a bell struck in one room answers a bell struck at the same pitch in another.

"Then I'd have wasted certain resources on a suspicious mind," he said at last. "I can accept that. What I cannot accept," his jaw tightened and the old, familiar sense of guilt surged up beneath the words like a thing with teeth, slow and well-fed on three years of neglect," is the fact that I only realized too late that I had let something enter this house which I should have recognized at once. I've made that mistake before, Uncle. Or perhaps it was a different one; I still don't know exactly what it looked like, and it cost me all that was important to me in one night. I can only allow myself one mistake of that kind in a lifetime. I've already used it up."

After a pause that was long enough for Kaelan to look up, Cassius said slowly, "There's a story the old wolves used to tell, before your grandfather's time. It's about a Luna who burns and doesn't remain burned. When I was a pup, I heard it and regarded it as a cautionary tale concerning Alphas who treat their mates as property rather than as partners, and about what old magic does to right that mistake when it's been made seriously enough. I hadn't given the story any thought at all for decades until three days before your mother died, when she came to me troubled because of something she had found in the vault and hadn't yet named, and simply asked me whether I remembered how that story ended."

Kaelan froze. "And how does it end?"

I don't remember. For the first time all evening Kaelan wasn't sure if that was the truth or the most careful lie his uncle had ever told him. I said the same thing to your mother; two days later she was dead and five days after that you set alight the fire that I had helped you to build. I have spent three years telling myself that the murder and the trial were two separate things that happened to occur in an unfortunate season. Tonight, with that woman living under your roof and your wolf pacing about as it does, I find that I no longer entirely believe myself.

There was something incomprehensible behind the old man's eyes, and if Kaelan had been looking closely and not so absorbed in his own turbulent grief, it might have appeared almost like fear. Cassius then stood up and bowed his head in the slight, formal manner which signified that the conversation was ended, even if Kaelan had not wished it to be.

Alright, you say so, Alpha.' He stopped just short of the door, without quite turning around. 'I'll send someone to investigate her, in a discreet manner. And as for Kaelan, whatever your wolf is telling you right now, I'd be careful before you let yourself believe it; wolves have been known to want something so strongly that they'll convince themselves it's true.

He went away. Kaelan stayed all by himself in the study for a long time, hearing the house settle, the old wood making a ticking sound as it cooled, and then, even though he tried not to, since three years of hard-earned discipline clearly turned out to be completely useless against whatever it was, he walked down the entire length of the west wing corridor until he reached the door which was waiting for the Halloway emissary, and halted, without knocking, and remained there long enough to clearly and unmistakably feel, through the wood and stone and after three years of a bond that he had thought had died with her in that clearing, the presence of something on the other side that knew him.

He told himself that it was merely imagination, a trick caused by grief and exhaustion together with the stranger's odd eyes.

He had deceived himself in the past; indeed, he was becoming less able to believe it than better. A certain old and incurable part of him—the section which had for three years been rehearsing an apology with no one alive to listen—had already, silently and without his consent, made up its mind that, whatever this stranger might turn out to be, he intended to spend the rest of his life discovering the truth, even if that meant doing so on his knees.