Chapter 4

Moira's POV

The door closed behind Soren, and the iron hinge struck the stone wall with a dull thud that rolled a long way down the corridor. He did not come nearer at once. He stood one step inside the doorway and looked at me the way a person looks at something that has crawled out from under the floorboards of their own house.

"You wicked witch," he said.

"Say the whole of it," I said. "Surely you did not climb three flights of stairs only to spit out those three words."

"Answer me straight. Do you know what was in it?"

"I knew. I smelled it after the tray reached the table."

Soren's face went red to the ears. "You knew it, and you drank it slow, and you never opened your mouth once. I sat at my own table in front of my own men and coughed black blood into my own cup. Did my blood tell you what you wanted to know?"

With every sentence he spoke, his chest rose and fell harder, and his voice came out heavy, as though squeezed from between his bones; and in it lay the humiliation the tether held down, and beneath that a murderous intent that had found no way out.

"But is this not your own doing?" I raised my head to answer him.

"Your own people carried that food up those stairs. I ate what was set in front of me, and there was nothing wrong with that. What you ought to be turning over is why any man in this keep would dare to put poison in my bowl in broad daylight, one day after you stood in front of your pack and said you would protect me. Great Alpha, is your hold on your own men truly this poor?"

"I will find out who dared," he said, his voice low and hard. "Don't do that again."

I was about to argue with him a little more when something inside me went hollow. Tears slid down my cheeks before I felt them come. My fingers gripped the edge of the table. Something that belonged to another body, from a place far to the south, poured through me and left me cold.

Soren froze. The murderous look on his face stiffened where it was, and something else surfaced in his eyes: suspicion, and a hesitation he might not have noticed in himself.

He took half a step back, put his hand on the sword at his waist, and looked at me for a long time without a word.

He probably thought I was putting on a show for him, or that I was working another spell on him. Let him think it. I have been misread by better minds than his, and I have never found it worth the trouble of correcting them.

"Whatever it is you are doing," he said at last, "stop it."

I did not answer him, because in that moment I truly had no mind to tangle with him.

"Get out," I said. He stood where he was, so I said it a second time, and the words came out thin and cracked, far wearier than I had meant them to be. "We are finished for tonight."

He looked at me for another moment. "People do not cry for nothing. Name it, and I will decide whether the price suits me."

"I want nothing from you. Not tonight, not in this house, not with your hand on that sword." I looked at him across the table.

"Then do it where I cannot see it." He put his back against the doorframe. "I will not have it said in this keep that the Alpha of the Frost Moon stood in a tower and made a human woman weep. They can say I broke your neck. That, at least, would be true to my name."

"You speak as if I chose this," I said.

"Did you not?"

"Get out of my room." My patience was gone entirely. I did not look at him. I grabbed the nearest cup off the table and threw it.

The sound I expected never came. I raised my head, puzzled, and found that Soren was already gone and that the cup I had hurled lay on the floor, whole and unbroken.

I did not go to pick it up. I had something more important to do. In that room, empty of everyone but me, I closed my eyes slowly.

Between sisters born of the same womb there are things that cannot be explained. It is not a spell. When she hurts, I hurt. When I suffer, so does she.

I stopped believing in permanence a long time ago, stopped believing that anything in this world holds its shape long enough to be worth trusting. But not this. Never this. This one place I had never let myself touch, because it was the softest thing left in me, and she was the only person in this world I had ever allowed myself to keep.

"Seli. Seraphina." I screamed in my head, desperate for the woman on the other end to hear my voice. "Are you all right? What have they done to you?"

The only answer was my own breathing and the occasional soft pop from the brazier. I called again, breaking her name into pieces, calling it the way I used to when she wandered off in the woods as a child. I called until my throat tightened. Not a single echo came back from that other end.

What do I do? What do I do? I pressed my hands over my face, palms pressed hard against my eye sockets. What I would not have given to grow wings and fly to her. I could not even leave this tower room. Distance used to be nothing but a number to me. Now it was the only thing standing between us, the one thing I could not tear open no matter how hard I tried.

What use was this witch's power, in the end? I had tried to replicate that night's miracle. Her wounds could be mine. Her death could be mine, and she would live. But it would not hold. I simply could not do it, no matter what. I was nearly driven mad by my own helplessness.

Just then, a knock came. Three raps, unhurried and measured. I did not intend to answer, figuring they would tire of knocking and leave. The lock turned instead. The door swung open.

Lina and Miller entered one behind the other. It was clear they had never planned to wait for an invitation.

"Why did you not make your move just now, Lady Witch?" Lina studied me, her eyes half calculation, half contempt. Miller stood a half-step behind her, head bowed, silent.