Chapter 6

Moira's POV

The tallow in the brazier was down to half a finger's depth. The fat rocked in the iron pan. The smoke had gone a dirty yellow-black. It stank of burnt tallow, and under that stank was blood. Under the blood was rosewater, seeping from the storeroom door. The three of them climbed toward the beams together in one column.

I stood at the foot of the bed. I set my right foot back half a step and settled my weight. Then I reached for the thing inside me. I had moved it exactly once. That was the wedding night. Since then I could not find where it started.

The Church of the Holy Light has one word for everything it refuses to write into its books. I was not going to use their word for the thing inside my own body. So I gave it a name in my own head instead. Aether.

It sits low behind the breastbone, close and heavy. It does not run anywhere. It is a breath drawn halfway and never let go. I pulled a thread of it loose. I pushed it out past my skin. I reached for Miller.

It failed. It failed in a way I had not expected. It did not strike anything and come back. It simply never left. I was reaching for something set plainly in front of me. My fingers passed straight through it.

I was not discouraged. Luck in this life is dealt out unevenly. Mine gets hoarded in places that do not deserve it. The wedding night had already given me more than my share. I closed the distance and stepped up in front of her. I tried again, and my skirt brushed her fingers. She did not lift her head. The result was the same.

Did it need touch? I thought of that night. Soren's hand clamped on my throat, hard enough that it was flesh on flesh and bone on bone. The last half of my breath was still in me.

I crouched. I set my palm on the crown of her head. Her whole body jerked once. She shied half an inch to the side. Then she held still.

Her hair was dry and coarse against my hand. The scalp beneath it was warm. The thing in my palm did not move. It stayed flat against my own skin. It would not go one inch further. She felt nothing.

I could lift it. I could send it. Every time it broke at the same place. Distance was not the difficulty. Contact was not the difficulty. The difficulty was on the other side. The one time it had worked, the other side had been a wolf.

I did not like where that led. It answers only to what is not human. Then every bit of it is worth less than half a copper in the capital. In a church cellar it is worth less than nothing. A power that works only on the other kind is a knife you can turn on no one but your own. I had no own. I needed another wolf to test.

Thinking about a thing gets nothing done. Guessing beside a brazier is work for fools. I pulled Miller to her feet. I made a show of walking her out, loud enough for the corridor to hear.

She was obedient enough. She was clumsy with fear. She knocked her knee against the floor again and said nothing about it. She wiped her hand on her skirt. She went for the door bolt, and her fingers slipped on the stone. I watched her work it free. I did not help her.

The door cracked open. The cold came in. The breathing of the wolf-guard outside came suddenly close. I put my left hand on Miller's shoulder and pretended to steady her. I sent my right arm past her, out from behind her shoulder. It was almost against the fur at his collar.

Once: heat in the heel of my hand, cold at the tips of my fingers. Twice: heat so sharp it dug into the flesh, and a dull ache started under the nails. Three times, and I pushed until there was nothing left to push with. It stopped at my own skin again. The back of my hand came up in gooseflesh.

The wolf-guard shifted his spear to his other hand. He glanced in past Miller. His nose worked. His brow drew down, because she was in his line of sight. He put his boot to the half-open door and kicked it shut.

At least he had noticed nothing. To him all that effort probably looked like a human woman who would not let go of her maid.

So what was missing? I let it go. I stopped wrestling with the wolf-guard. I watched Miller duck through the gap. She started down the corridor. Her steps grew fainter. The echo off the stairwell swallowed them whole.

I stood in the doorway a while. The brazier was nearly out. I walked the three failures back through my head by its light. Three roads, every one of them broken at the same point. If the fault had been on the other side, one of them should have gone wrong differently.

The fault was not on the other side. What was missing had been there that one night. It had never come back since. The thing I bound that night was not just anyone. It was Soren.

What I had done to him, I knew only as an outcome. I did not know it as a process. What happened on his end of it, I had no idea. The problem was in that connection.

I did not like the conclusion. There was one man in this keep I had to speak to. He was the one man I least wanted to open my mouth to. Asking him would put half of the only thing I could do into his hands. But if I did not ask, I would spend the night carrying a lock. The key would be in somebody else's pocket. I would be waiting for the day someone put a hand on the back of my neck.

I needed to see him.

"I need to see Soren."

"Wait to be announced."

"No. I need to see him now."

I could not afford to wait to be announced. How many hands would an announcement pass through? Which of them would bury it? I could not calculate either. If he would not hear me, I would never learn what I was holding.

The two wolf-guards held their posts. They held their opinion too. I raised my hand and set the short blade from my sleeve against my own jaw. "His life and mine are the same life. I stop breathing, he stops breathing. So move. Or go downstairs and explain to him yourselves why you stood here and watched my heart stop."

The two of them exchanged a look. It was the kind of thing that passes between men without a word in it. The one on the left gave up half a step. His jaw clamped shut. The one on the right was still deciding. I was already walking out from between them.

At the twelfth step, a shape rose out of the dark ahead of me. It was a full head taller than I was. It was wrapped in wolfskin. One hand rested on the short axe at its belt. Its breathing was slow and deep.

"Halt."