The Silver-eyed Woman

The rest of the house was different, though the receiving hall wasn't.

It was the same rafters, black with soot. The same stone floor, worn down by the boots of many generations. At the far end there was the large fireplace, the one that Iris Voss used to keep going even in summer since she thought that a cold fire made a house seem as if it were waiting for something bad to happen; now it was lit, burning low and steadily. Selene had a brief and unpleasant sensation at seeing it and then suppressed it, just as she kept all the other things these days: deep, contained, and of use only as fuel.

As she was coming in, she came across a young man in the corridor, with dark hair and broad shoulders, in the manner that a wolf has when it has only just acquired its strength, moving quickly with the kind of stride that someone is late for work would have. Inside her chest there was a sudden tightness so severe that she almost halted altogether. Rhys—older, taller, with a scar across his jaw which hadn't been there three years before—was unmistakably and painfully her brother, closer to her in that one unguarded moment than he had ever been in the three years of careful distance that had passed. He didn't even glance at her. He was just another stranger passing through on business that had nothing to do with her. She forced herself to continue walking and that took more out of her than the whole journey from the border.

The steward opened the doors and announced her while she had still not had time to catch her breath.

Kaelan Voss was facing away from the door, had one hand on the mantel and was staring into a fire that kept failing to provide him with the answer he was seeking. When his name was called, he turned round, and for the first time in three years Selene saw the face which had once been the last thing she had seen as she was falling asleep and the first thing she had seen when she was waking up.

He was more severe now. Wolves do not age like humans do. Yet he had aged in some other way; the softness that had once been around his eyes was now gone and had been replaced by a flat, alert readiness, indicative of a man who had only recently and poorly learned just how much damage his own decisions could cause to the people under his care. Premature silver had appeared in his temples and reflected the firelight when he turned his head. The expression of his mouth, which had previously been quick to smile in private—even if it had remained as neutral as possible in public—had now become a flat line since the muscles responsible for smiling had weakened from lack of use.

That's all, a cold and satisfied voice said to her. I hope that each of those years has been terrible.

A different voice, softer in tone, told her something that she liked much less.

That's Emissary Marrow. I crossed the hall and gave the formal wrist-to-wrist greeting which is reserved for envoys of equal rank—a gesture that Luna Wren Ashcombe had performed hundreds of times when playing someone else, and never once when she was actually acting as herself. Alpha Toren speaks very highly of you, though he never said you'd be arriving early.

She extended her wrist. "Alpha Toren isn't aware of everything I do."

He closed his fingers around it, the fingers warm and calloused just as she had remembered; that act in itself was a small act of violence, before the thing which neither of them had expected occurred.

The bond, which had been inactive for three years under Moira's magic and had been buried so deeply that Selene had truly thought it dead, suddenly awoke, giving her a jolt that travelled from her wrist up her spine and settled behind her ribs, a sharp, unmistakable and catastrophically wrong sensation, a mixture of static, heat and recognition all at once, as if some part of her body had never forgotten his frequency and had merely been waiting all this time for permission to respond to it.

She never moved her face since the fire; in fact, it was the most difficult thing she had ever done, more so than the eleven months she had spent in Moira's cellar, since she had learned to get on with pain. Yet she had really, truly believed that she was immune to this. Whatever this might be.

Something in her clearly stated this, in a voice which sounded uncomfortably like her own. It wasn't the false name. It wasn't the lie told to Toren Halloway. It was simply this desire to remain in this hand a little longer than the greeting demands. You don't get to want that. You've already burned for him once.

Kaelan's grip tightened for just a heartbeat, confusion appearing in his eyes before it was overlaid by a mixture of fear and hope that became so entangled it was impossible to tell which was which; it was the expression of a man who was experiencing something utterly unexpected inside his own chest and who, by principle, would not give it a name.

He let go first.

"I'm sorry," he said, and a roughness had got into the edge of his voice. "You have a remarkable presence, Emissary; it's been a long time since anyone has disturbed me at my own hearth."

I'll regard that as a compliment. She was immensely proud of the way her voice came out, even though within her chest something that ought to have been dead three years was beating so strongly that she almost believed he could hear it through the fire.

She didn't think it was dead, almost panicking although nothing indicated that. Moira had said it had been severed.

The death-witch's dry and unpleasant voice, coming from somewhere at the back of her skull, corrected her by saying dormant, as if it were holding a grudge. You had heard what was easier to carry.

When she next saw Moira, she was going to have a very specific conversation with her.

The room was filled with that special quiet which occurs when a household holds its breath in anticipation of an important visitor, various members of the pack using excuses to go through the house while carrying out errands that could have been postponed, the server's hands trembling slightly beneath Kaelan's observation as she refilled the wine, and the soft background chatter of the evening filtering in past the open doors. Selene observed everything with the instinctive, analytical gaze of a woman who had once been in charge of the household, distinguishing between new faces and those that were painfully familiar.

Here's what he said: "Please," and with that he indicated the long table next to the fire, a table that had already been set with wine, bread, and a modest amount of late-season fruit, evidence of the careful hospitality a man displays when trying to make a good impression on a rival pack that he still hasn't got the means to alienate, despite what he may privately think of its envoy. "By all means, sit down and eat if you want to. You've had a long journey, so we can start tonight or wait until the rest of your delegation arrives."

"Tonight," she said, and took the seat he provided, settling herself precisely as Ivy had taught her to do—her back straight, her hands visible and relaxed, with a calm and slightly bored look, the sort of expression a woman must have had all her life who had never felt afraid of a room such as this. "I discover that I perform better when there's no audience. With fewer people putting on a show for one another and more honesty about what each person truly wants."

A smile perhaps appeared at his mouth but disappeared before she was certain it had. "Me too."

He was sitting opposite her, close enough for her to detect the smell of cedar and iron, and beneath that something that had remained truly unchanged over the three years, unlike her own body, which had never been permitted to stay the same. For a moment both of them kept quiet. The fire crackled. The wrist-greeting still vibrated faintly beneath her skin like a bell that had been struck but hadn't finished ringing.

Selfishly, she told herself not to look at his mouth and not to recall its purpose. You aren't permitted to desire the mouth of the man who watched you being burned.

Apologising, Kaelan looked at her with an intensity that she wanted to turn her gaze from but didn't. "You have the air of a person I ought to know. Have we met? I'm talking about before Halloway. There's something about you which I can't put into words, and I know the way that sounds."

All of Selene's muscles became as still as possible, deliberately so, exactly the stillness she had trained herself to achieve in situations where the questions approached the truth.

No, I don't think so," she replied, reaching for the wine in order to gain half a second to collect herself. "It would be difficult to forget having met the Alpha of the pack I have been sent to negotiate with. I should think so as well. He said it quietly, almost to himself, and looked back at the fire as if it could tell her something that it had never once told him. "That's the thing that concerns me."

Instead of filling the silence, she let it remain, a habit she had picked up unintentionally. The person who usually breaks the silence is the one who has something to hide. It was simple to feel at ease in the silence and merely to watch, noting the small movement of his jaw and the private argument going on behind his eyes which he wasn't sharing with her.

"Why don't we talk about the corridor," she said in a businesslike manner, "or would you prefer to continue asking me about my likeness to someone whom you won't name?"

There was a brief, rather amused reaction. "The corridor, then?" He leaned back now that they were on familiar ground, with clear numbers and boundaries and a mutual benefit, rather than whatever had been lying between them a moment before. "Alpha Toren wishes to have his trade caravans pass through the eastern ridge in order to save two days' journey when getting to the coastal markets. I'll allow it on the condition that the caravans travel without arms and under Voss's escort through the sensitive area near the old boundary stones. My pack has taken three years to rebuild trust with our northern neighbours. I won't risk that trust for the sake of saving just two days' travel to a pack about whom I have no special reason to be trusting."

Alpha Toren had expected precisely that. She explained to him that she and Ivy had devoted two whole evenings to preparing for this objection. "He will agree to give Voss a right of access to inspect any caravan crossing the ridge without prior notice at your choice for the first full year. It involves him in nothing that he wasn't already willing to grant; it costs you only the minor inconvenience of from time to time being suspicious of us, a situation you are already in, and this is all given to you free of charge."

It made him break out in a genuine laugh, a short one that disappeared almost as soon as it had come, a laugh of the kind she had remembered from a life she wasn't supposed to remember. It settled somewhere below her ribs like a nerve that had been touched. "You talk as if you've been at a more important table than a trade corridor."

She said that she had had a good teacher, and in that respect, it was entirely true and accepted the ambiguity as it was. She then asked if he would prefer that the terms should be drawn up formally or whether he would like to continue pressing the inspection clause for a bit longer; since she didn't care which option was chosen, she added that she had come to enjoy arguing with him more than she had originally intended to.

Be careful, Emissary," and yet something almost warm seeped into the words. "It's a risky matter to tell the Alpha that you're meant to be negotiating against him."

She had never been especially careful, and that caused a sudden flash of recognition to cross his face which was so unguarded that it startled her more than the wrist-greeting had, and before either of them could name it.

At the edge of the hall a steward cleared his throat, in that delicate way that a man does when he's interrupting something he doesn't fully understand but feels that it's important. "Alpha," he said, "Elder Cassius wants to have a word before this continues. He says it's urgent."

Kaelan tightened his jaw, a brief irritation appearing before it was quickly suppressed, for it was a habit of his to never let his family see him disturbed. "Say that it can wait until—"

"The steward went on, apologetically and clearly resenting the idea of acting as a messenger, 'it is about the records of the Ashcombe vault and they cannot wait.'"

There was a change in Kaelan's expression—not exactly one of alarm, rather the recollection of an old injury he had thought was completely cured, to find that it wasn't. He looked at Selene, and for that one unguarded moment she saw, despite the three years of strict Alpha training, the echo of a man who used to say her name as if it was the only word he fully trusted.

Excuse the interruption," he said, and was up already. "The past doesn't really care that I have guests this night."

You can't possibly know it, Selene thought and smiled in a pleasant and unreadable way. Yet at that moment all her instincts were urging her to find out precisely what was contained in those vault records and why, after all this time, Elder Cassius Voss—the man who had once held the torch himself three years and four months ago in an open space not more than half a mile from this hall—still looked as if the fire from that time had not completely burned him down.

She watched him leave, keeping his back straight and taking each step deliberately, obviously attempting to clear the room so that whatever was behind his eyes wouldn't show on his face in front of a guest. The steward stayed a little longer and gave a half-apologetic bow. "I'm sorry for the interruption, Emissary. Should I take you to your rooms or would you prefer to wait for the Alpha?"

I'll wait. Although when she watched the way Cassius had slumped when he had gone, she believed that whatever it was that had drawn Kaelan away this evening wouldn't be settled soon and that it worried her much more than either of the two men in that room had yet realised. She settled back into her chair, refilled her glass without really intending to drink it, and let her gaze move slowly over the hall, the fireplace, the beams, the worn stone floor, noting all the small changes that three years had brought about in a room which she had once known better than her own hands, a coldness that even she was surprised by telling her that she had come a long way to be sitting in this chair and that she had no intention of leaving it until the debt owed to her had been fully repaid.

And not for a single moment, she told herself as she looked at the doorway through which he had disappeared, did she want him back; for wanting him back is the way of ending up on a second pyre, and there won't be a witch waiting under this one.