Chapter 9

Moira's POV

The snow stopped in the small hours, and the wind scoured the yard down to bare stone, and the whole keep groaned at its seams like a ship frozen into the ice.

I sat on the edge of the west-tower bed with my palms pressed flat against my knees for warmth. My shoulders were still sour from standing through forty strokes, and my wrists were still cold. Neither of those was the thing actually bothering me.

I will grant him this much. I learned a fair amount from Soren, including how to shift the cost of a thing onto somebody else and how to hand a pack a common enemy so that it stands closer together afterward. None of it was worth what I had lost by not thinking.

We had touched hands twice today, and both times I had been too busy enjoying the feeling to remember that I had a sister on the other side of a frozen river. I had the reach to look for her, and I spent none of it on her.

I put both palms over my eyes. Then I let it go, because regret does not spend. I was moving into the room next to Soren's, and he would put a hand on me again if only to prove to himself that he still could, and next time I would be ready for it.

I was still working that through when the knock came: three blows, flat and steady.

Miller went to the door, and the woman on the other side of it filled the frame. She was wide through the shoulder and flat through the chest, grey at both temples, with a ring of keys on her belt that she made no effort to keep quiet. Behind her stood four more built to the same pattern, in the same leather, holding themselves the same way with their hands loose at their sides.

"I am Brunhilde," she said. "The Alpha's order. I take you to the new room."

I looked at the muscle running down her forearm and envied it before I got hold of myself. In the capital a woman built like that would have been laced into silk and taught to stand sideways, and she would still have been the most dangerous thing in the room.

"Give me a little time," I said.

She nodded, put her shoulder to the wall, and watched us pack. She did not offer to help and she did not leave. Good. I had an errand she was not going to like, and I preferred to do it without a witness.

I had not brought much. It went into the bundles in a quarter of an hour, and I did not tell her so. I had Miller take me down the passage to Lina's room instead. Nobody had been in to clean it. Lina still lay where she had fallen, the blood had gone into the boards and dried black, and the room smelled of tallow and old iron and something sweeter underneath that I did not care to name.

I stood in the doorway a while. My hands were steady, which surprised me more than the smell did. Lina had put my sister's name in her mouth to frighten me, and I cut her throat for it, and I would cut it again. That did not make her any less of a mess to walk through.

Then I made myself go through her. A comb, a spare shift, a purse with three coins in it, a sealed letter with a mark on the wax I did not know. The letter went inside my bodice.

The rest went into a pile, and I told Brunhilde's women to carry that up as well. Somebody in the capital is waiting on a report from Lina. He can wait a while longer, and he will not care for what he gets instead.

Brunhilde's nostrils flattened when I came out. She smelled Lina's room on me and said nothing about it, which I counted in her favor. Every wolf in this keep has an opinion about me. Brunhilde was the first one I had met who kept hers behind her teeth.

The corridor at the head of the west tower was narrow and cold, with three lamps hung too far apart to do each other any good, and every wolf in it got out of the way.

They did not stare. They did not bare a tooth at me the way they had in the yard. They went quiet and put their backs to the wall and left the middle of the passage open, and the ones nearest me stepped back farther than they needed to, as though the smell of me might come off on their sleeves. Two days ago not one of them would have moved at all.

One sentence out of Soren's mouth had done this. I understood his standing in this pack all over again, and something in me leaned toward it before I got hold of myself. I put the feeling down when the door came into sight. I have no use for impractical things.

The new room was smaller than the old one: bed on the right, hearth on the left, one shuttered window at the far end with the black rock of the north face dropping away beneath it. I measured it in three glances and set it down as adequate. Then my eye caught the corner where the light fell, and I stopped in the doorway.

The table was there. Planed oak, a folded slip of hide wedged under one leg to level it, and along it in a row as neat as a merchant's window.

A beam scale with two brass pans, a glass alembic throwing the lamplight back up the wall, a stone mortar with the pestle laid across the rim, a copper pot gone green at the seam. Bottles in three sizes, waxed stoppers, iron tools I could name and two I would have to test. Above it hung a rack of herb bundles, tied and ticketed in a careful hand.

I had asked for all of it this morning. It had been arranged before dark, which was faster than I had allowed for, and I looked at Brunhilde before I could think better of it, and then pulled my eyes away before she noticed.

I spent an hour with the gear. Nothing was missing. Nothing had been swapped for something cheaper. By the end of it my hands had stopped shaking, which they had been doing since the yard without asking permission. I turned my mind to what I would boil tomorrow.

I washed my face and hands in water cold enough to ache, and when I looked up Brunhilde was still standing there, and two hours had gone by.

"Is there something else?" I said.

Brunhilde had not interrupted me once in all that time. Most people talk to fill a silence. She stood in one for two hours and let me keep it, and that put her higher in my books than any oath she could have sworn.

"Sign for it," she said, and put a receipt into my hands.

I read it first. Nothing on it but what I had asked for and what she had brought. I signed, watched her go, and waved Miller off.

The room had filled while I was not looking, and everything stood along the wall in neat stacks, and I could not be bothered to touch any of it tonight. I put out the lamp and lay down in my clothes with the knife under the pillow and the handle turned out toward the room. Sleep came at me faster than it had any right to. I did not fight it.

I do not know how long it lasted. I only know that something pulled me up out of it, and it was not a sound and not the cold. It was the feeling of being watched. Heavy. Patient. The way it feels when a hand settles on your forehead and stays there without a word. I frowned in my half-sleep and told myself it was nothing, turned over, and opened my eyes.

Soren stood at the foot of the bed.

He had not lit a lamp. I could see him anyway, because his eyes were giving off light. Crimson, and not the shine a wet eye takes from a candle. It came from inside, like coals burned all the way through the ash and not finished yet.

My heart missed a beat.