Chapter 8

Moira's POV

I knew half my soul was sitting in him. I knew it the way I knew which of my ribs was broken: no verification required; pain was enough. So I did not waste time pretending I had another way out.

"This room was your idea," I said. "I agreed to it. Now tell me what you intend to pay for it."

He lifted his chin and gave me nothing, not one word. His hand stayed closed around my arm, and the heat of it came through the cloth slowly, warmer than anything else in that room, which I did not like at all.

"My sister is under the palace in the Holy Sun capital. Seraphina Calvaine." I said the name the way I would have quoted a price, with no room for sentiment. "I want word of her. Alive or dead, which level they keep her on, whose belt the key hangs from. I am not asking you to go and pull her out. I want the particulars of her condition."

"You are bargaining with me over something that was already mine," he said. "I gave you this room. You are tied to me."

"The room is yours. The woman who has to live in it is me," I said. "You gave it because you need me asleep where your hand can reach. That is your need, not a favor."

He settled his weight further against the post, one hand pressed flat to his side, knuckles white under the grime.

"I lose men in the capital every year," he said. "You want me to lose another batch for a woman I have never laid eyes on."

"The people who put me in this keep and the people who have my sister locked in a cellar are the same people," I said.

"They sewed wolfsbane into my dowry and wrote a document they called peace between north and south. To them you are a plague and I am a tool. When a tool loses its edge they do not come and collect it. They grind a new one. Your men did not die in the capital because the capital eats wolves. They died because your wolves smelled of the north before they ever smelled anyone else."

He did not answer. I knew that silence. It was not an absence of words; it was arithmetic. My father did his sums the same way, except he turned his cup three times on the table while he worked, as if the noise could cover what he was thinking.

"My name is Calvaine," I said. "A woman married off to the north should write home and report that she is alive, and complain that her dowry did not include enough maids. The reply will carry a few sentences. That is worth more than two wolves pressed against a palace wall for a month."

My father would not move a finger for me, but he was the kind who turned a blind eye when it suited him, and a blind eye was all I needed. The man who threw me to the wolves is now the only rope in my hand. It is funny in a way that does not make me laugh.

"Your letter goes through me first."

"Fine. When the reply comes, I will be in the room when the seal is broken," I said. "If you read it first and read me a passage of your choosing, that is not a trade I make."

He watched me for a moment. The bruise under his eye sat heavier in the lamplight, and the fire was doing his face no favors. It made the blood on his cheek look dirtier than it was.

"What else?" he said at last.

I did not pretend to hesitate. "A worktable and a set of scales. A proper kit for boiling things down, the usual herbs, and the tools that go with them."

"Medicine." His nostrils moved when he said it.

"Medicine." I did not explain. He could smell a lie the way I could smell a bottle gone off, and he was smelling for one now. Let him. There was no lie there.

The last of my stock had come sewn into the dowry, and it was down to the dregs in the bottles. Getting pinned against a wall by a Beta and buying my breath with a shallow cut was what happened when the accounting was bad.

Once the stock was replaced I meant to find an excuse to walk out of that gate and measure the ground with my own feet, because the capital was a frozen river away, and gossip passed through ten mouths before it reached this keep, and by then nobody could tell what the first mouth had said.

He was quiet for a moment, and then he gave in. "I will tell Brunhilde. She keeps the north storeroom. If you need something, you may go to her yourself. Is there anything else?"

"Of course." The sulk on his face had lifted my mood a little. "See to the body in my room, if you would."

His expression sharpened at once, and I added, unhurried, "It is not a wolf."

Something in his face eased. He nodded, gave me word, and left. I did not follow him. I did not want to go back into that room with its smell of blood, so I walked the keep instead, taking my time, and along the way I noticed a good many wolves moving in the same direction, which interested me enough to follow them into the yard.

The yard filled with wolves, snow coming up as slush under their boots. Nobody spoke, and when they saw me they looked away in distaste and parted to let me through.

I went in along that path and saw Grimm strung up on a post, a tall wolf beside him holding a long whip, and Soren at the head of it. He watched me come, and what he did with his chin was an invitation. "Up here."

I went without hesitating and stood at his shoulder under the covered walk. Once I was in place, Soren gave the order, and the punishment began.

The tall wolf shook the lash out of its coil and brought it down across Grimm's back, and he did not spare his arm. Each stroke opened the skin in a long wet line that welled, broke, and ran, so that before long the yard could smell what was happening even through the snow.

Grimm took the first few in silence, jaw locked hard enough that the muscle jumped along it, and then the sound began coming out of him without permission, rising from something low and closed to a noise he could not get his teeth around, then falling away again stroke by stroke until it was thin and short and barely carried.

The pack never made a sound through any of it. They watched him with their faces shut and their eyes fixed, and every so often one of those glances slid off Grimm and came to rest on me instead, and when I lifted my head to find the man it belonged to there was nothing but a dark mass of heads and shoulders and no way on earth to tell which of them had been marking me.

The satisfaction of watching an enemy suffer went out of me between one breath and the next, and what took its place was a hard, flat dislike of Soren. I understood his design now, the whole of it.

He had used Grimm's defiance to build his authority, and then he had shifted the price of it onto me, turning what had been a quarrel between him and the pack into a quarrel between me and the pack. It made the pack one thing and left me standing alone with nothing behind me.

And now that I had worked it through, even if I had not come over on my own, he would have invited me to watch the punishment anyway.

A man evil by nature, this Soren, I thought with distaste. I hate being used, whatever else it looked like from the outside. I watched the rest of the forty out with my hands in my sleeves, and I did not look away once.

I had thought Grimm would go down against the post, but apparently a wolf's body holds longer than I had accounted for, and he lasted it out.

The lash came back around the handle and the tall wolf stepped away, breathing hard through his nose. In the quiet the only sounds left were the wind in the covered walk and Grimm's breath going in and out of him wetly. They cut his wrists down. He did not fall. He got one hand onto the post and stayed on his feet.

Soren came down off the step and walked into the middle of the yard, and the wolves drew back from him the way water draws back from a dropped stone. He did not raise his voice.

"My will is the will of the pack," he said. Then he turned his head and looked up to where I stood. "Moira. Come down."

I gave him a long flat look for that, and for a moment I did consider staying exactly where I was and letting wolves watch him wait. The thought had a real appeal to it. I came down anyway, because I have never had the leisure for tantrums.

He caught my left hand as I reached the bottom step and lifted it, and under the heat of his grip came a surge of satisfaction. I narrowed my eyes and let it come. Somewhere above the noise in my own head I heard his voice, low and steady and pitched to carry.

"You will treat Moira as you would treat me. My human bride."

A stir went through the pack, and then nothing, not one voice raised against it. It did not reach me until I was back in my room, with the door shut and my hands still cold: they had given in, and they had given in that fast.