Chapter 6

Chapter 6: The Old Beta

Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation

The Welcoming ran its long, civilised course.

By five the formal receiving line had broken into pockets of conversation; by six the orchid lawn had emptied to a quiet of butlers folding chairs; by seven the smell of supper was drifting from the open doors of the great hall and the older guests were drifting toward it. The Cross delegation had been escorted to the south wing; Vivienne Marlowe had shut herself in a guest room with a complaint of headache; Lyra had gone to change into her supper dress with a face that promised, even as she left, that there would be a thousand questions before the night was out.

I did not have a thousand answers ready. I had two more pieces of the day to set, and only the windows between dusk and supper to set them in.

The first piece was Ezra.

I had spoken to him in the courtyard that morning, in the green tunnel of the boxwoods, and I had told him three things he had not understood and one thing he had: do not go to the eastern hunting grounds for the next nine months. If a private contract is offered to you, tell me before you say yes. Trust me. He had nodded because he was Ezra, because he had known me since the day my mother had carried me down to the kennels to be sniffed by his father's old wolfhound; because he was not, in either of his lives, the kind of young man who said no to a Lady when she said trust me.

I needed him to understand more.

I needed him to be afraid in the right direction, and I needed him to be afraid before Damien's people, in the next two weeks, made him their first soft offer.

I found him near the stables.

The Welcoming guests' carriages had been moved through; the stable yard was a rectangle of warm dust in the long evening light, the kind of gold you only got in Ewavite in late summer. Ezra was on the cobbles with a curry brush in one hand and the bridle of a Cross delegation gelding in the other, doing the work he did not have to do because it gave him an excuse to be exactly where he could see who came in and went out. He had always been like that. He had been like that as a child, sitting with his father in the kitchen courtyard so he could mark every face that passed through the gate.

It was the thing that had made him useful. It was the thing that had made him die.

"Ezra."

He straightened so quickly the gelding shied. He muttered an apology to the horse. He did not look at me directly until he had set the brush down on the stone wall.

"Lady Selene." A small bow. He glanced once over my shoulder and then, satisfied no other eyes were on us, met mine. "I, ah. I have done what you asked."

"You have already?"

"I told Hugh this morning I would not be on the east patrol this season. I gave him a story." He hesitated. "I gave him a bad story. I said my knee was wrong."

"Your knee is not wrong."

"My knee is not wrong, Lady. But I have not been able to come up with a better lie in six hours and I did not — I did not want to wait."

I felt something hot and unwelcome rise in my throat. I had asked him to do a thing. He had done it. He had done it in six hours, with no explanation, on the strength of nothing but my eyes in the boxwoods and the word premonition.

"Walk with me," I said.

"Lady?"

"Bring the brush. Walk with me. Anyone watching is going to see Lady Selene and the stable Beta walking around the long stable, talking about the gelding's left foreleg, which is going to come up lame inside the week."

"It isn't lame."

"It's going to be," I said. "I had a premonition."

The smallest jolt at the corner of his mouth. Almost a smile.

"Yes, Lady."

We walked. The long stable stretched along the back of the yard, all warm wood and low summer hay; the windows on the lawn side were open, and the warm dust in the air smelled of horse and cut grass and old leather. We were very visible. We were also out of earshot of every reasonable ear in Silvercrest, and that was the point.

"Ezra."

"Mm."

"I am going to tell you a thing that, if you repeat to anyone, will be the end of me."

He stopped walking. The brush hung from his hand.

"Then do not tell me."

"I have to tell you part. You will not do what I need you to do for the next nine months unless you have part."

"Lady Selene." He turned to face me fully. He was twenty, sandy-haired, sun-browned, soft-mouthed, and he had — I now saw, looking at him without the haze of the past life — his father's grave eyes. "I will do what you ask. With or without the part. I have known you eighteen years."

"I know."

"You did not have to come find me."

"Yes I did. I have to find you twice." I drew breath. "I will give you three pieces of a thing. You will keep them in your head and you will not write them on paper, you will not whisper them to anyone you have ever loved, and you will not, if anyone asks, admit any of them."

He said, very carefully, "All right."

"One." I lifted a finger. "In the next two weeks, a man who is not from Silvercrest will offer you private guard work. He will offer it indirectly. Probably through a third party. He will offer it well. The job will sound like an honest contract. The job will be a means of removing you from this household."

His face had gone still.

"Two." I lifted a second finger. "Six months from now, on a north patrol, four wolves in unmarked leathers will come for you and the men beside you. The men will be lightly armed. The wolves will not be rogues. The wolves will be paid for."

"By whom?"

"That is the third piece. By a Lord whose name I cannot speak in this courtyard."

"A Lord we received this morning."

"A Lord we received this morning," I said softly.

He absorbed it. He did not flinch. He did not, to his enormous credit, look around — he was not the kind of fool who would look around in this moment, no matter how badly the body wanted to. He kept his eyes on me. He kept the brush in his hand.

"You believe this," he said, after a long beat.

"I know it."

"How."

"I cannot tell you how. Not yet. Possibly not ever. I am asking you, Ezra Hale, on the strength of eighteen years and a sister you taught to ride and a father of mine you have served longer than I have been a daughter, to take what I have said and to act as if it is gospel and to come to me before you do anything that might cross any of these three pieces."

He was quiet. The shadows in the stable were beginning to deepen; somewhere down the row a horse stamped, slow and heavy. His thumb stroked, absently, along the back of the curry brush.

"Lady."

"Yes."

"My father says you have been odd this morning."

"He says that, does he."

"He says you held my arm in the boxwoods like a woman holding the last warm thing she had."

I had to look away. The stable wood swam.

"I am not mad, Ezra."

"I did not think you were." His voice had gone very gentle, the voice he used on the gelding. "I think something has happened to you. I do not need to know what. I will do what you ask."

"Thank you."

"And, Lady —" He paused. He looked, despite himself, very young in the failing light. "If a man offers me work, and I come tell you, what will you have me do?"

"You will say yes," I said.

The brush stilled. "Yes?"

"You will let him think you are the kind of Beta whose loyalty has a price. You will accept the contract. You will tell me every word, every name, every coin. You will let me move first. And then, when I move, you will be exactly where I tell you to be, and not where he tells you to be."

"Lady." His voice had a low, surprised laugh in it now. "That is — that is not a small thing you are asking."

"I know."

"That is the kind of thing a man hangs for, if it goes wrong."

"I know."

"I will do it," he said simply.

I did not weep in front of him. I had given that up at the pyre. But something in my chest folded once, the way a piece of fine paper folds when you press it, and stayed folded.

"There is one more thing," I said.

"Lady?"

"I will be — odd — for a while. People will notice. The Cross household will notice. My mother is going to notice and pretend not to. If anyone asks you, in any context, what you make of Lady Selene this season —"

"You had a long fever in the spring," he said immediately, "and you have not been quite the same since the dreams. You are bookish now. You are going to be a managing sort of older sister. You are not as soft as your mother thinks. I could write a sonnet on it, Lady, by supper."

I laughed. The laugh broke a little around the edges. "Ezra."

"Lady."

"Be careful."

"I will be careful."

"And do not — " I had to stop. The next sentence was the one that had cost me my throat, because the next sentence was the one I had not had the chance to say in the past life. "Do not die for me, Ezra Hale."

His brows came together. He did not understand — could not, yet — but he heard the weight in the voice. He bowed his head, very slightly, the way a Beta bowed to a Luna, which was not a thing he should have done in a stable yard to a seventeen-year-old daughter of his Alpha.

"I will try not to, Lady Selene."

I left him.

I crossed the yard with steady steps. I did not look back. At the long-stable door I paused, only for a heartbeat, and turned my head just enough to see, in the gold of the dying light, Ezra setting the brush back down on the stone wall and lifting, slowly, his hand to the back of his neck the way men did when they had just taken a heavier weight than they had thought, and were quietly testing the shape of it on their shoulders.

He had taken it.

I went up the kitchen stair, through the gallery, to my own door. I had a half hour before supper. I had Garrison at eleven. I had two letters to write before I dressed, one to a midwife in Ironclaw who did not yet know I existed, and one to a name I had been turning in my head all day: Halia Voss.

I sat down at my desk. I uncapped the inkpot. I dipped the pen. I began.