IRENEDaniel does not answer at once. He sits among the broken rosemary with his hand pressed to his ribs, and I watch him choose where to begin, the way I have watched a hundred patients decide which symptom to confess first."Between," he says, "is a legal state before it is anything else."Ashford has not moved from the center of the path. His left arm hangs dead at his side, the fingers curled as though around a handle no one can see, and the sweet, rotten stink of the vial still lies over the garden like a stain on water. His chest rises too fast. Under my hand, which I have not taken from his back, the muscle is hard as a drawn cable and trembling."The treaty protects bonded subjects from extraction," Daniel goes on, hoarse. "A bonded woman belongs to her mate's territory, and the Lantern may not lay hands on her without declaring war on a pack. A severed bond leaves her unprotected. A completed one binds her so deep that no archive could argue she was ever free to take. So the
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