Chapter 7

Moira's POV

The snow had not stopped all night, and it did nothing to blur his face. He had been one of the wolves who came pouring through the keep gate on my wedding night. Now he filled the middle of the corridor with his shoulders and his planted feet, and it was plain enough that he meant to push me back into my room so that he would have something to carry back and account for.

I did not know his name, and it did not matter. I took his measure instead, and then I took one step forward.

"Move," I said, flatly.

He had not shifted an inch.

That was the end of my patience. I drove in against the inner side of his right shoulder, and he caught a fistful of my cloak and dragged me the better part of half the corridor, and the back of my head struck the stone so that a white light opened behind my eyes and then shut again.

He pressed one hand on my shoulder and reached with the other to take my wrist and put me down on the floor. I turned with the twist instead, pulled the dagger out of my sleeve, and opened a line along the outside of his forearm. The skin parted and the blood fell on the flagstones, and the cut would not close; its edges held a faint violet sheen.

The dagger was one I had prepared before I ever came. I had spent an hour steeping the fuller in wolfsbane sap and letting it dry, and then done it again, so that the blade carried a coat thick enough to leave a stain on the leather of my sleeve.

That cut was not meant to kill him. My position in this keep was ugly enough already, and one more body on the ledger would have finished me with everyone in it. The wolf did not see it that way.

He stood with his mouth open over the wound for a moment, and then he began to swear, low and fast. He pulled the short axe off his hip.

I knew there was no room left to dodge it, and the most I could manage was to turn my face aside by the width of a palm; the edge ran from the outside of my wrist to the elbow, through the wool of my sleeve and the linen under it, and the blood came up hot enough to steam in a corridor that cold.

Then it stopped. When I looked down, the wound was already closing, the edges drawing together as neatly as a seam being sewn, and the blood that had already fallen stayed on the stone. The wound that had made it was gone.

He stared at my forearm. His lip pulled back off his teeth, and what came over his face was not fear. It was interest.

"Huh," he said, soft, more to himself than to me. He took a step closer and looked at my wrist. "You heal fast."

He thought the cut had closed because I had closed it, some witch's trick, some piece of body-craft that let a woman take a blade and walk away clean. He did not know about the bond, and I did not correct him.

I put my back to the wall and got my weight off my heels, and because he was still looking down at my arm with the axe hanging loose at the end of his wrist, I took the half step he had given me and closed the distance before he could bring it up again.

I caught his belt with my free hand to keep him from turning, put the dagger into the meat of his left thigh, and twisted it once on the way out. He roared and dropped his weight onto the good leg, and his hand came off the axe haft and locked in my hair instead, and he used that grip to swing me off my feet and into the wall.

He was drawing the axe back for something final when the footsteps came, quick and heavy, and both of us heard them at once.

He pulled back half a step. I used that half step to find the floor with my feet and plant them, and I did not take the offer of the wall he thought he was giving me.

Soren came down the corridor fast, and the left sleeve of his coat was black to the elbow. He looked at the wolf. He looked at me. Then he crossed the corridor in four strides, took the wolf by the collar, and put him into the opposite wall hard enough that the stone dust came off it and the man's head left a smear.

"Alpha," the wolf said.

"Grimm." Soren set the name down. "I told you she was not to be touched."

I stood there with one hand pressed to my ribs and watched him work.

The corridor was quiet enough to hear the snow come under the stair door.

"Forty lashes," Soren let go and stepped back, and the wolf stayed where he had been put. "The whole pack in the hall to watch, and you will count them out loud, and if you lose the count we begin again. When that is done, the wound stays as it is. No salve, no binding, no healer. Let the poison work in you for a while, so that every wolf who looks at you knows why he is wearing it."

Grimm's face went slack.

"Your place in the guard is finished," Soren went on. "You do not stand near my wife again, or speak to her again, or look at her again. And if she had died under your hand, you would have been opened out on the snow in pieces, and I would have made the pack watch that as well, and I want you to hold that in your head the next time you decide to be brave on your own."

Grimm opened his mouth, decided against it, and went, his boots making a wet sound on the flagstones where my blood. The stair door shut behind him and the draft came under it, and the corridor held nothing but the two of us, one lantern, and blood beginning to dry on the stone.

Soren sat down against the pillar with one hand pressed under his ribs and looked up at me. The grey had not left his face, and he had to stop twice before he could carry a sentence to the end of itself.

"You insisted on seeing me tonight," he said.

"I did."

"To do what."

I came back to myself with a jolt, remembering what I had climbed the tower for, and I reached for the aether the way I had reached for it before, and got the same nothing I had got then. I looked at it a moment, and then I stopped asking politely.

"Give me your hand."

I put mine out and waited, and I did not lower it when the silence went on a beat longer than I liked, and I did not look away.

He looked at it the way a wolf looks at a trap he has not decided whether to step into. Then he laid his palm against mine, and in that same instant I was whole, and I knew at once how much of me had been missing.

No wonder my power had done nothing to anyone else in this keep. My power had been incomplete from the first day, and the reason was the bond between us. I had lodged half my soul with Soren, and he was carrying it, and the worst of it was that he did not know he was carrying it, which made him more dangerous than a man who did.

Then another thought came up, slowly and without any comfort in it. For days I had been looking for my sister and finding nothing. I had blamed the distance. I had blamed some working of the capital laid over her to keep her from being seen.

But what if it was neither of those things? What if I had not found Serafina because she had hidden herself, but because I no longer held everything I needed in order to look?

I did not know whether that was true. I could not afford to assume that it was not.

Damn Soren. Damn the wedding night, and damn the moment I was desperate enough to sign a contract I did not understand with a man who wanted me dead. I stood there with my jaw set.

I would have to find a way to break the bond and take my soul back.

I was still building the shape of it in my head when his voice came. "Move into the room beside mine. There is a bar, and a sentry on the stair, and nobody comes up it that I have not sent myself."

He had not let go of my hand, and neither had I let go of his. We looked at each other across the small space left between us, and the lantern swung, and the snow went on coming down beyond the shuttered window, and I turned the offer once more and found no better answer in it than the one I already had.

"All right," I said, and nodded.