Junie comes at ten in the morning with a folded square of paper held out in front of her like it's hot, and she won't look at me while I take it, which is how I know before I've even got it open that it's going to ruin my day.
The alpha requests the healer at the lodge, eight o'clock.
Under that, in a different hand — Kastel's, cramped and apologetic even on paper — a second line. Spring panel postponed until further notice.
"He gave it to me at breakfast," Junie says, to the doorframe, to the middle distance, to anywhere that isn't my face. Her hands are doing a thing I've only ever seen hands do when they're about to drop something. "Said to bring it straight down. Said not to wait till noon."
"Okay," I say, like it's a request for cough syrup.
"Mira—"
"It's fine, Junie. Go on back before they miss you."
She goes, and she looks over her shoulder once at the gate, and I stand there in my own doorway holding a folded piece of paper that has just told me, in Dorian Vance's tidy, unhurried hand, that the bloodwork he wanted so badly two weeks ago can wait, because tonight he wants something that doesn't require a needle.
I read it three more times. It says the same thing every time. Funny how that works.
—
I do the arithmetic standing at my own counter, because arithmetic is a thing I'm good at and feelings are not, and I've learned that if you run the numbers out loud, even just in your head, they stop being a wall of dread and start being a worksheet, and a worksheet you can finish.
County road: watched at the gate, has been since before I was old enough to notice it being watched, two enforcers rotating in six-hour shifts, headlights logged.
Cash: ninety-one dollars in a tobacco tin under the floor, which would get me maybe to the next county over on foot if nobody with four legs and a nose came looking, and somebody with four legs and a nose is exactly what would come looking.
Ossian Reyle can run a scent line for thirty miles without resting, which I know for a fact because I've stitched up what's left of people he's caught at the far end of one.
Every roof over every human-born head in this territory, every ounce of flour in every ration shed, every stick of the fence Kade fixed two nights ago — all of it sits inside a trust with one name on the deed, and that name is not mine, and it is not Kade's, and it is not anybody's who might feel like helping me disappear tonight.
I have treated the documented outcome of a refused summons exactly twice in thirteen years. Once on a girl named Coral who is not in this pack anymore because she is not anywhere anymore. Once on myself, nine years ago, though nobody ever called it a refusal on the record, they called it "an accident with the woodpile," and I let them, because the alternative to letting them was worse.
So. The worksheet's finished. There is no column where I don't go.
—
I think about telling Kade for exactly as long as it takes me to picture what he'd do with the information, which is not long, because I already know what he'd do — he'd go to the lodge tonight himself, second-in-command or not, in open dissent or not, and put himself between Dorian and a door, and Dorian would have him for it. Insubordination, they'd call it, or worse, and there's a Circle full of old men who'd nod along either way, because a man who's spent two years and eight months refusing to fall in line is a man they're all just waiting for an excuse to remove properly.
I don't tell him. I tell myself I'm protecting the information, which is a lie, and I know it's a lie while I'm thinking it, and I let myself have the lie anyway because it's Monday and I don't have room for the truth on top of everything else the day is going to ask of me.
I open the kitchen drawer instead and take out my mother's pruning shears — good steel, sharp as the day she died, kept oiled out of some habit I've never examined — and I hold them for a while, weighing what they'd feel like against my palm going up the lodge stairs.
Then I put them back.
Because a weapon found on me makes it worse. I've watched enough of this pack's justice get administered to know that a woman who arrives armed is a woman who arrives guilty of something, and guilty of something is a worse place to stand than guilty of nothing, even when nothing is exactly what you are.
—
I dress plain. Plainer than plain — the grey wool that hides everything, buttoned to the throat, my most forgettable boots. I rebraid my hair flat and tight against my skull, no loose strands, nothing that could be called an invitation by anybody looking hard enough to want one, and I wash my hands with the vinegar I use to strip the workbench, scrubbing until the skin goes pink and stings, as if scent were a thing you could alibi your way out of, as if there were a version of me that could walk into that lodge smelling like nothing at all and come back out the same way.
There isn't. I know there isn't. I do it anyway.
—
Eight o'clock. Ironroot Lodge stands the way it always stands, three dark-timbered storeys pretending to be a hunting cabin that got ambitious, elk racks over the hearth catching the last of the light, Rurik Vance's portrait watching the stairs with that same red-brown beard and that same heavy, patient face he's worn since before I was born into any of this.
I am not seated at the long table tonight. Forty places set down there, forty chairs nobody's using, and Junie walks me instead to the small room off the hearth, the one with the good rug and the low fire, where a single place is laid, and Dorian is already seated, waiting, water poured, sleeves buttoned to the wrist though the room is warm enough that nobody else in it would need them.
He rises when I come in. Small courtesy. Big lie.
"Mira," he says, like we're old friends who haven't seen each other in a while, which, in a sense, is exactly what we are. "Sit."
I sit. He pours my water himself, which is a thing an alpha does not do, not for staff, not for anyone, and the pouring takes longer than water needs to take, and I watch his hands the whole time because watching hands is a habit thirteen years of stitching wounds has beaten into me and I can't turn it off even now, even here.
"How's the rue coming in," he says. "Wet spring like this, I'd think it'd be slow to establish."
"It's coming in fine."
"And the tansy." He tastes the word like it means something more than a plant to him, which it does, though I don't yet know how much. "Your mother ever teach you to dry wormwood standing up? Bundled, hung from the rafter, rather than laid flat?"
"She did."
"I thought she might have." He nods, satisfied, like I've confirmed something on a checklist only he can see. "Ilona kept a tidy garden."
I don't answer that. There isn't an answer to that that doesn't cost me something.
—
He talks, while Junie brings soup neither of us touches, about the Vance line, and his voice never once climbs — that's the thing I'll remember longest about this part, that a man can say the worst things in the gentlest register and somehow that gentleness is the worst part of it. His father Aurel, dead eleven years now, obsessed to his last stroke with keeping the blood clean. His brother Rurik, eleven years in the ground, killed in the Ring the day Dorian took the seat. A wife, dead eleven years this past February, and no issue.
"Issue," he says, and says it again a minute later, issue, like the word is a beam holding up a roof, load-bearing, and if you look at it wrong the whole structure comes down.
"Do you remember October of 2016," he says, finally, mild as the soup going cold between us.
"No," I say.
He smiles at that. Not unkindly. That's what makes it unbearable — there's no cruelty in the smile at all, just a mild, almost fond amusement, the way you'd smile at a child who's just told you a lie you both know is a lie and neither of you minds.
"You're a poor liar, Mira," he says. "I've always liked that about you."
—
Upstairs.
He takes his cufflinks off first, sets them on the dresser in a neat row like a man laying out surgical instruments, and buttons his sleeves back down to the wrist, and the smell of him — iron, antiseptic, the eucalyptus rub he keeps for his old training injuries — comes up off his skin and puts me back nine years exactly, whole and entire, before he has laid a single finger on me.
My scars itch. Top to bottom, right ribs, the three of them, in that order, the way they always do when my body knows something before my head has caught up to admitting it.
The first blow lands on my left shoulder, into the old crooked ridge of the collarbone where it healed wrong the last time, and the whole of me understands the sequence before my mind has finished deciding it's happening — my body has kept this appointment before, my body remembers the choreography better than I do, and some detached, professional part of me notes, almost with interest, there it is, right on schedule, the way you'd note a patient's pulse doing exactly what the chart predicted it would.
—
I am not going to walk you through all of it. I don't walk myself through all of it either, not really, not in any order that would hold up as testimony. What I have instead is flashes, and gaps between the flashes, the way a lamp with a bad connection gives you a room and then takes it away and gives it back changed.
I count cracks in the plaster ceiling. There are four, branching off a water stain shaped a little like Idaho, and I count them the way I once counted the rust seams of a tin roof at the edge of the treeline — and I lose the count somewhere around the second branch because counting requires a mind that's still in the room and mine has gone somewhere with better lighting.
Iron, in my mouth, off a split lip. My tongue finds the chipped molar on the left, worries the edge of it out of some old animal habit, and the ache in my jaw is confused about what it's for, want or nausea, the body's stupid signal that never bothers sorting the two out for you when it matters.
My hands, when I notice them, have gone perfectly steady. Surgically steady. The precise, useless calm they only manage at the exact moment the rest of me is coming apart, and I catalogue that too, distant, professional, interesting, the hands always know when to check out last.
There are minutes I do not get back. I don't go looking for them afterward. Some things you let stay lost, on purpose, the way you'd leave a fishhook buried too deep to dig for without doing more damage pulling it out than it did going in.
—
Afterward he washes his hands at the basin, unhurried, the water running warm, and dries them on a towel that's been laid out for exactly this, and when he turns back to me his voice has the same courteous register it had over the soup.
"Kastel won't be sending for you after all," he says. "The panel can wait."
He picks my coat up off the chair where I dropped it — I don't remember dropping it, but there it is — and he holds it open for me the way a man holds a coat open for a woman at the end of a dinner party, a small gallant gesture, and I put my arms into the sleeves because my body has decided that's easier than refusing, and he settles it onto my shoulders and smooths the collar once, flat, like he's checking a hem.
—
Ossian Reyle is waiting at the bottom of the stairs, and he walks me as far as the gate without a word, bare hands in the cold the way he always keeps them no matter the weather, and I don't ask him why he's there because I already know the escort isn't for my safety. Nobody assigns a man like Ossian to keep a woman safe. He's there to make sure I get exactly as far as the gate and no further off the marked path, and when we reach it he stops, and turns, and walks back toward the lodge without looking at me once, and that tells me everything the walk itself was supposed to.
I stand at the gate a second, alone, testing my own weight on the wrenched shoulder, and it screams the way I expect it to, and somewhere behind me the lodge door opens again.
—
"Mira."
I turn. Dorian's in the doorway, backlit by the hearth, sleeves still buttoned, hands loose at his sides like a man who's just finished a pleasant supper and is seeing a guest out.
"Tell Sable nothing," he says.
I don't answer. There isn't an answer that costs less than silence.
He tilts his head slightly, the way he does when he's finished the important sentence and is about to add the one he actually came out here to say.
"And count the days for me."
He goes back in. The door shuts, soft, no slam to it, nothing dramatic, just a latch finding its groove, and I stand at the gate in the dark with my ruined collarbone and my split lip going numb in the cold and those five words sitting in my chest like something swallowed wrong.
Count the days for me.
Count what days. Count from when. Count for what.
I start walking, because standing still in the dark outside this man's lodge is not a thing my body will tolerate for one second longer than it has to, and somewhere in the second mile, with the Cabinets a black wall against a barely-lighter sky, I understand — not all at once, but the way cold gets into a joint, slow and total — that he was not asking me a question.
He was giving me an instruction.
He is waiting on something. Something specific. Something with a number attached to it, a countdown he's already started and expects me to keep for him, and I have no idea yet what he thinks that number is going to tell him, only that he wants it kept, precisely, by me, like I'm the one holding the stopwatch on my own undoing.
