Chapter 2

Moira's POV

The land I was born into keeps its order simple. I learned it the way I learned to read, taking the shape of the world from what my father would not say at his own table and from what my master would say only after the shop door had been barred for the night.

At the top stands the Church of the Light, which owns the souls, the roads, and most of the land, and which has stood there for three hundred years, ever since the crown went down on its knees at the high altar and never quite got up again. Every king since has knelt in the same place and known what it cost him.

Below the Church sits the king, with the memory of a throne his family had once held outright, and a court of men who have learned to whisper indoors. The two of them need each other and despise each other. What they have never once disagreed about is what must not be spoken of aloud.

Below the king stand his own people, who make up the greater part of the realm and are quite certain of their place in it. They go to the altar on the appointed days; they pay what they are told to pay; and they take it for granted that anything shaped unlike them, or walking with a smell they do not recognize, has no business on the road.

Below them stand the witches, and at that rung the ladder stops answering to reason.

What the common folk believe of witches is very much worse than anything witches have ever done. They say a witch once unmade an entire town, and that the survivors of it are still cursing the ruin of their birthplace to anyone who will stand and listen. They say witches are sly, that they coax children out of doorways, that they lie down with the dead.

Tales of that kind have no end, and they are told with a relish that has nothing to do with proof. The great houses tell an entirely different story.

A witch is only ever chosen, and only ever a woman. She may live her whole span and never be looked at, and then, in the hour she comes nearest to dying, the All-Mother may turn toward such a woman, and that turning is the whole of it. They are invested with an authority unlike any other, immense in its power, which no priest of the Light can replicate or call back.

The nobles fear what witches carry and want it at the same time. They know that a witch is never a race, never a lineage, never a rank with heraldry hung above the door. So they take her service and resent every hour of it, and they look at her across the room the way one looks at a girl from the scullery who has won a fortune at cards.

Last come the wolves, whose place is lower even than hers.

A witch still has a human face and a human mother, and however much she is denied in public, she can be brought into a church and given a name and a resting place in the ground. A wolf cannot. He is a beast in the eyes of the law, and beasts are not tried. A man who kills one in the road, in daylight, has done nothing that has to be reported to anyone.

Three generations ago the packs still held the warm valleys. Then the valleys were taken, quietly and without a war worth the name, and the survivors were driven north until the ground turned to black rock and frost.

There they broke apart into a hundred small tribes along the edge of the frozen country, each too weak to stand alone, and none of them willing to bow to a neighbor.

Among themselves, the Alpha's word ends every argument; a Luna keeps the shrine and the herbs and the young and answers to no one in matters of the moon; the Betas carry out what the Alpha has decided; and the Omegas do the rest. It is a hard law and a simple one.

Then Soren Valha began gathering the tribes back under one name, and the nearer he came to it, the less soundly the men in the south slept.

A single Alpha over all the wolves would be a thing the Church could not buy and the king could not use, and neither of them intended to wait and learn what it would do. The cheapest way to end it is a knife in the dark, and the cheapest way to carry a knife through the gate of a keep is a bride.

I am that bride. My master was once the kingdom's chief apothecary, and I was her named heir. I was never meant to become another man's castoff. But the world does not consult us. My master went out one morning and never came back, and everything I had went out with her.

I spent the better part of a season looking for her, through every place a woman goes when she does not want to be found, and I never found her.

I once went to my father for help, but he was a despicable coward. He not only gave me nothing but sold me to the King, who was searching for a suitable bride, with no regard for my wishes whatsoever.

I meant to refuse, and my father had an answer ready for every one I could have given. He brought Seraphina before me and made me stand there and watch my own sister carried off and shut away.

So I agreed to his terms, traveled a thousand miles north, and came ready to carry out the assassination. The outcome was obvious: I failed.

I had not expected Soren to come himself after I killed those two wolves. He dragged me off the bed and closed his hand around my throat, and I have not forgotten the feeling since.

I touched my neck and kept my eyes on the space between us, counting it the way I counted everything in this keep: doors and windows and the number of men who could reach me before I got to either.

I watched the physician come up from the lower hall with a lamp in one hand and a leather roll in the other. He had a mild face and a quiet manner that did not belong to any wolf in that hall. I watched him go straight to the Alpha, set the lamp on the table, and tell him to sit.

Soren did not sit, so the physician worked around him standing. He got the torn shirt off the shoulder.

"A clean cut, the length of a hand, no deeper than the flat of a thumb. A wolf of your blood would have it closed by morning without help from anybody. I will bind it all the same, because linen keeps the wool and the grit out of it, and a shoulder held still knits twice as fast as one that is not."

His hands worked steadily at it while he spoke, folding the linen, strapping it across the chest and up under the arm, pulling the knot tight at the front where the Alpha could reach it himself without help.

Then he glanced at me once, and it was the first time since the door opened that anyone in this room had looked at me directly.

"Does the lady want looking at?" he said.

I frowned. A hand on my shoulder would find a wound in the same place as the one he was binding across this room, and the shape of that would set half the keep working out that killing me was the cheapest way to kill the man I was tied to. He was a pack healer besides, and I was not about to let an enemy get his hands on my wounds.

I was about to refuse, and Soren got there first.

"She does not," Soren said.

I did not trust my own standing in this keep to outweigh his, and he was its acknowledged master in everything but name, so I let his decision stand. Unpleasant as it was.

"Then I will leave the matter alone," the physician said. He packed his roll, and on the way out he looked once at the two of us, and kept whatever he thought to himself, and left the room.

With the linen bound tight across his shoulder, Soren turned to the wolves who stood in the doorway.

"Put the knives down," he said.

They put them down.

Like a pack of dogs, I thought, and meant it unkindly; after everything the past hours had put in front of me, I had no goodwill left for any wolf alive.

Then he turned to me. "The tower is yours. The door will be locked from the outside. In the morning I will send two men to you, and you will keep them. You will be watched." He offered no word at all about the two dead men in the corridor.

I nodded. The locked door cost me nothing. I had been a prisoner since the morning my father told me to pack. The only thing that had changed was the name of the man holding the key.