Rejected While Pregnant Returned As The Silver Queen

Chapter 10

Chapter 10 — Not Paying Alone

"Seal the ground," said the Silver Queen. "No wolf leaves."

Her voice cut through the screaming like wire through snow. Gates boomed shut. Royal guards moved in silver lines, and the panicking crowd, given walls, stopped being a stampede and became a witness again.

The man in the brown cloak never made it three rows.

Half the fourth row landed on him at once — farmers, a smith, an old she-wolf swinging her walking stick like a war club — and by the time Orin's guards dug him out and forced his jaw open, it was already too late. Something small and glass had been waiting in a hollow tooth for exactly this moment. He convulsed once and went out of the world without a single question answered, loyal to his last breath to someone whose name he took with him.

Orin turned the dead man's forearm to the torchlight. Burned into the skin on the inside of the wrist, old and deliberate: a single fang, inked crimson.

"Fang work," he said grimly. "Bought and branded."

Sierra heard it distantly. She was already moving — one moment to her son, because queens are mothers first no matter what the portraits say.

Knox stood rigid on the platform rail where he'd shouted, fists white, vibrating now that the moment was over, the way soldiers do after their first real battle. Sierra took his face in both hands.

"Look at me. You're safe."

"I wasn't scared," Knox said, through chattering teeth.

"I know."

"He was counting the guards. People who count guards are—"

"You saw what grown soldiers missed." She pressed her forehead to his. "You did everything right, my heart. Now breathe."

Over her son's dark head she saw Kade, ten feet away, stopped mid-stride like a man who had hit glass. Every line of him strained toward the shaking boy — his son, his son who had just saved a man's life with a shout — and every line of him knew he had no right to close the distance. His hands opened and closed at his sides. He stayed behind the glass.

Ash arrived instead, slipping his guards for the third time that week, and stood beside his brother in silence. After a moment he said, "Statistically, you're now the most effective soldier at this trial," and Knox made a wet sound that was half laugh, and started breathing again.

"MAJESTY!" The royal healer's shout snapped every head toward the dais. "He's alive!"

Dr. Fenn lay where he had folded, and the old healer knelt over him with her sleeves bloody to the elbow and a look of profound professional irritation.

"Fifty years he's worn this bag strapped across his chest," she snapped, holding it up. The knife had gone through leather, through a tin of salve, through a folded bundle of splints — and slowed, and turned. "Vials, tools, half an apothecary shop. The blade spent itself on his own kit before it found him. Deep, but it missed what matters." She glared down at her patient. "The bag you never take off saved your life, you stubborn relic."

"It's a very good bag," Fenn whispered.

Sierra knelt at his other side. His face was gray as ash-water, his hand cold when it found her wrist, and his grip was still a doctor's grip — checking her pulse out of pure fifty-year habit even now, even flat on his back with a wound in his chest.

"You held on till dawn once, old man," she said quietly. "Do it again."

Something in his eyes went bright and broken at once. "You remembered."

"I remembered everything. That's rather been the theme of the evening."

"Then let me finish." He tried to rise. Three sets of hands stopped him. "No — listen — they spent a knife tonight to keep what's in my head in my head. That prices it, Majesty. Get it out of me while I still have breath to sell it."

"You're not dying," the healer said, exasperated.

"Everyone's dying. I'm merely punctual." His voice found one last vein of strength, and it carried — across the dais, across the sealed and silent ground, into three hundred pairs of ears. "The gold, Majesty. Five years I followed it. The rogues on your exile road. The forger who birthed that ledger in a night. The hunters on my own trail — I bought one of them a drink once, gods forgive me, cheapest information of my life." A cough rattled him. "It all runs through Pierce. His accounts. His cipher. His couriers. The elder in your chains is guilty to the marrow, and I'll swear it on the stone the moment I can stand."

He pulled Sierra closer by the wrist, and the whole gathering ground leaned in with her.

"But I counted it, Majesty. I'm an old man; counting is what's left. The safehouses in three territories. The border tolls that looked away. The silence bought in towns Pierce has never set foot in. The sums." His eyes, fever-bright, held hers. "No border elder has ever had that much gold. Not in ten lifetimes of skimming a starving pack."

"Fenn—"

"Pierce paid," the old doctor said, each word costing him something and spent anyway, "but he wasn't paying alone."