Chapter 3 The King's Seal

Mercy POV

Wade's lips are blue when I get back.

Boone is kneeling on the trailer floor, holding the little brown bottle upside down over Wade's mouth. Nothing comes out. It's empty.

"I made him take it," Boone says, without looking up. "All of it. Two hours ago."

"And?"

He doesn't answer. He doesn't have to. Wade's chest is jerking up and down like something inside him is trying to climb out. The blue towel is red now.

I drop to my knees on the other side of the bed. My ribs remind me they're cracked. I tell them to shut up.

"Dad. Dad, look at me."

His eyes open. They swim around the room and land on me, and he smiles. It's a terrible smile. It has blood in the teeth.

"You went," he whispers.

"I went."

"Did they see you?"

I think about Lydia's face in the closet door. I think about gold and silver eyes in the snow.

"No," I say.

Boone looks at me across the bed. He knows when I'm lying. He's known since I was six and lied about eating his birthday cake. He lets it go anyway.

"The cheap stuff won't hold him," Boone says. "Kip's tincture is mostly whiskey and hope. What he needs is silverbane. The real kind. Pure."

"Where do we get that?"

"We don't. Only the Crown healers carry it." He pauses. "And the Crown just rolled into the valley with forty trucks."

We look at each other.

"No," Boone says.

"I didn't say anything."

"You said it with your whole face. Mercy, those are the King's people. They hang rogues for stealing fence wire."

"Then I won't steal fence wire."

Wade's hand finds my wrist. His grip is weak now, nothing like last night. "Stay," he whispers. "Just sit. Be my girl one more hour."

My girl.

Last night he told me I was never his. Now he wants me to sit here and pretend I am.

I want to. I want to so much that I almost sit down. My knees even start to bend.

Then I stand up straight and pull my wrist gently out of his fingers.

"I'll be your girl when you can still say it next week," I tell him. "Hold on till noon."

Boone grabs my sleeve at the door. "And if he doesn't?"

"Then you sit with him."

"He asked for you."

"I heard him."

I leave anyway. It's the second time in one night that I've walked away from someone who wanted me to stay. I don't let myself count it.

The firewood truck belongs to old Mr. Pruett, who lives two miles down the road and never locks anything. I leave him a note on his porch. Sorry. Bringing it back. — M. It's still dark when I take the truck, but by the time I get to the Lycan camp, the sky is turning gray.

They've set up on the Lost Horse meadow, right below the Redfern line. Big black tents. Trucks parked in neat rows. Guards at the road with rifles across their chests.

I roll down the window and hold up a split log like it's a ticket.

"Firewood," I say. "Cook ordered two cords."

The guard frowns. "Nobody told me about firewood."

"Nobody ever tells the guy at the gate anything. You want to explain to the cook why breakfast is cold?"

He thinks about it for about two seconds. Then he waves me through.

I park by the cook tent and grab an armful of wood. Nobody looks at a girl carrying logs. Nobody ever has. Rogue kids learn that fast. If your arms are full, you're furniture.

The biggest tent sits in the middle of the camp. Two guards stand outside, but they're fighting over a thermos and arguing about football. I walk around the back, set my logs down, and slide under the canvas.

Inside, it's warm and dim and smells like cedar.

And something else.

I stop. It's a smell from last night. Snow and woodsmoke and something under it, darker, like a storm about to break. My head turns toward it all by itself. A long black coat is hanging on a hook by the desk.

I make myself look away.

Medicine chests are stacked against one wall, each one marked with a silver cross. I pop the first one open. Bandages. Bottles. And there, in a padded row, tiny glass vials of something clear and shining.

Silverbane. Pure.

I take three. I tuck them into the inside pocket of my coat, next to the yellow tag.

I should go now. Right now.

But there's a desk in the middle of the tent, and on the desk there's a stack of papers. Heavy cream paper with black ink. Royal orders. And the word on top of the third one in the pile stops my feet like a wall.

HOLLOW CREEK.

I pull it out with two fingers.

By order of the Crown, all rogue wolves residing at Hollow Creek, Ravalli County, are to be removed by force. The date is six years ago. February eleventh.

February eleventh.

I was sixteen. It was the night Dottie walked out into the snow and didn't come back. They found her two days later by the creek. Wade told me the King's wolves did it. I didn't believe him. I thought he just needed someone to blame.

At the bottom of the order, there's a seal pressed into black wax. A crown with a wolf's head inside it.

I've seen that crown before. Six hours ago. On a ring, on the hand of a man who pinned me to the snow and then lied to his own soldiers to let me go.

Outside the tent, two people walk past. Their shadows slide across the canvas.

"Can you believe we drove all this way for a wedding?" a woman says.

A man laughs. "Not a wedding yet. A claiming. He has to name the Redfern girl before the Blood Moon, or the whole thing falls apart."

"Lydia, right? The blonde one?"

"That's her. Harlan's only daughter. The Accord says the King takes a Redfern daughter, and Harlan's only got the one."

"Poor thing. I hear the King doesn't smile."

"He smiled once. In 2019. Somebody wrote it down."

They laugh and walk on.

The paper is shaking in my hand. I look down at it and realize that I'm the one shaking it.

Harlan's only got the one.

He has two. One of them is standing in the King's tent with stolen medicine in her coat, holding the order that killed the only mother she ever had.

I fold the purge order in half. Then in half again. I shove it into my coat, right against the tag, so the two of them press together over my heart. I'm going to make someone answer for this paper. I don't know who yet.

I turn toward the back of the tent.

Something creaks behind me. Leather. A chair.

I freeze.

Somebody has been sitting in the dark corner by the stove this whole time. Watching me open his medicine chest. Watching me read his orders. Watching me steal.

His voice is low, and I know it. I know it from the snow.

"That's twice in one night," the King says, "that you've broken into a place you don't belong."