Chapter 3

Moira's POV

Accepting that I was a prisoner did not trouble me much. I watched Soren calmly as he gathered his people and went out in a long, noisy procession, and I listened to the boots go down the corridor until the sound passed the turn of the stair.

The lock fell, and the noise of it rolled around the stone walls of the west tower and took a long while to die.

The west tower was the oldest part of the keep. It had been kept for housing guests, and guests were rare enough this far north that nobody had given it a thought since, until now, when it had been given to a human bride.

The room was broad, and a row of narrow windows sat high under the stone, so high that from where I stood they showed me nothing but a slice of flat white sky. Three old wolf pelts hung behind the washstand, the fur rubbed bald at the shoulders and the glass eyes catching the light.

Set against the carriage that had carried me over the border, this room was luxury itself. Set against the house I had grown up in, it was a bare stone box.

My father never had any feeling for me or for my sister, but he had never stinted us where money was concerned, and we had been kept to the standard of the finest ladies at court, all of it so that we might be sold at a good price in the end.

I had worked that out when I was young, and I had gone looking for a patron of my own, which is how I came to my master. But in the end I had come to this fate anyway.

Something heavy and gray settled into my chest. I forced myself to rally, and once the maids had finished with the room I sent them away, giving them a small reason: that I was tired.

The fact that I was a witch was not something to put in front of other eyes, least of all the eyes of the women the palace had set here to watch me.

A secret like that does not stay where it is put. Once it got into the wrong mouth, it would travel, and it would not stop at me. It would find my sister long before it found me, and whatever they did with it then, I would be too far away to do anything about it.

I sat on the edge of the bed watching them go across the corridor into the small room kept for the servants, and then I began to feel out the shape of what I had been given.

I closed my eyes and let the facts settle.

I was alive. I had a power I did not yet understand, a bond that sent my wounds to him, and a man who could not kill me without dying himself. Tonight's victory began and ended there, but it was enough to stand on.

The wolves hated me for the two dead I had left behind. The Church and the king still thought they had sent a weapon north and were waiting for news. My father still held Seraphina, and I was three weeks of frozen road away from her with nothing to send and no one to send it through.

What I needed, in the order I needed it. First, learn what this bond could do. Then learn what it cost. After that, make myself necessary to Soren. Not a burden he was stuck with. Something worth keeping alive on its own terms.

A man who took my every wound, whether he chose to or not, was no reluctant ally. He was leverage. I had not decided how to use it.

When I had enough ground under me to move, I would go south and bring my sister home.

The candle on the table had burned down to a finger's width. I watched it for a moment and then lay back on the narrow bed without taking off my dress. The exhaustion I had been holding back came up all at once, and I did not fight it. Thinking badly was worse than not thinking at all.

I let the darkness take me.

When I woke, the room was gray. I got to my feet, and the movement came easier than it had any right to. Becoming a witch had left me no stronger than I had been before, but it had made my body tougher and my life a good deal safer.

I went to the washstand and stood in front of the small green mirror, turning my wrists this way and that, when three sets of footsteps sounded in the corridor and the middle pair came on with unhurried ease. The door opened.

The housekeeper stood beyond the threshold with two others behind her, one holding a tray and the other a copper kettle, and the steam of the food stood in a small white cloud in the cold air.

"Resting still, at this hour," she said. "I had thought you would have missed the meal by now."

Her voice was even enough to pass any inspection, and behind her the two servants laid the table without a word: stewed hare, pickled mushrooms, coarse black bread, and a thick broth of boiled bones. In this bitter border country it was hospitality of the highest order.

I looked at the tray, and then I sat down and took up the wooden spoon, for I was genuinely hungry. The first mouthful tasted of what it was: the rankness of animal fat, the salt, the plainness of the cooking. At the second mouthful, a very light numbness rose under the root of my tongue.

I knew that numbness well, for my master had taught me such things in patient detail, and what lay at the bottom of the bowl was a poison of a rather uncommon kind.

Soren had given the order only yesterday that I was not to be harmed, and today someone had put poison in my bowl. Was his word worth nothing in his own house, or was someone working against him in the dark?

I turned the question over while my hand kept moving, and the more I thought, the more briskly it moved. It was not that I had any taste for suffering. I wanted to take the gamble.

Some mad fire had nearly set me alight, and I meant to wager my life on the one thing I did not yet know: whether a poison that had not come from Soren's hand, one that did its damage from the inside, would be carried to him just the same.

I had wagered right.

I looked at the door.

It was kicked open, the iron bar gouging a white scar in the stone wall, and the candlestick shuddered, its flame staggering.

Soren stood in the doorway with black blood not yet dried at the corner of his mouth, his eyes fixed on me, and there was only one thing in them: a murderous intent long stored up, pressed down again and again by that thread and rising again and again, until at last it had carried him here.

Looking at him, I felt the small ugly satisfaction of a gamble that had paid off, and under it something cooler, which I did not examine.

I did not stand, and I did not reach for anything, because I believed that whatever he had come up the stairs to do to me, he would be doing first to himself. I looked at him.

"You came," I said.