Chapter 4

They think I'm walking away.

I'm walking to the council hall.

The three cedar boxes ride on my shoulder like they weigh nothing now.

I don't bother hiding what I am anymore.

My eyes are still burning silver, my claws still out, and my scent walks into every room a full breath ahead of me.

Behind me, half a pace back and making no secret of it, the Alpha King follows.

Not helping. Not talking.

Just watching me the way a wolf watches the one hunt he hasn't run down yet.

The elders are still mid-celebration when the doors bang open.

Kaine's crowning feast. Roast laid out down a table thirty feet long, every high wolf of the Frostmark raising a horn to the rogue who "rose from nothing."

The horns stop halfway to their mouths when they see who's behind me.

"My King." Elder Voss is on his feet, bowing so fast he spills his wine. "We did not know you would honor—"

"I didn't come for you." The King doesn't even look at him. "I came to watch her."

Every head in the hall turns to me.

I set the first box on the feast table, right in the middle of the roast, and tip it over.

They spill across the wood. Hundreds of them. Little bone tokens, the ones every pack carries to the elders each moon to show how strong it is.

"Five years of these," I say. "Every single one brought to your door in Kaine Ashford's name. Proof his lands were fat and warm the whole time he stood here crying poor to your faces."

The hall goes dead quiet.

Elder Voss's smile freezes. "That's... those could be anyone's marks—"

"Turn one over."

He doesn't move. So I pick one up myself and hold it to the firelight. On the back, carved small, in the old tongue: a claw-mark signature. Mine.

"Every token. My claw. My hunts. My blood." I let it drop, click, onto the table. "Kaine didn't rise from nothing. He rose from me. And you handed him a crown for a story I wrote and paid for."

Down the table, Kaine's face has gone the color of ash. "She's lying. She's a bitter—"

"Then go sniff the border stones yourselves." I turn to the elders, cold, easy. "Five years of patrols. See whose scent is soaked into every marker on the Frostmark line. Go on. See if even one of them smells like him."

Nobody opens anything. Because they already know.

Celeste recovers first, sliding in beside Kaine, voice sugar-smooth. "Even if she ran a few patrols, that's a servant's work. It doesn't unmake an Alpha. The council already crowned him. It's done."

"You're right." I smile at her for the first time all night. "It is done. Just not the way you think."

I open the second box.

Because those bones only prove he lied. The second box proves what he lied about.

I lift out a single black stone. Cracked down the middle, still faintly warm, humming with trapped moonlight the whole hall flinches from.

An elder chokes. "That's a—that's a heart-oath stone. Those haven't been carved since—"

"Since the last Silver sat the throne." I close my hand around it, and the silver in my blood answers, bright as a full moon dragged indoors, throwing every shadow in the hall backward.

"Five hundred years ago. Before your council decided a bloodline the Moon Goddess herself lit silver was better off declared extinct."

The elders aren't looking at Kaine anymore. They're looking at me the way prey looks at the thing that just walked into the den.

Behind me, low and dark and delighted, the Alpha King finally speaks.

"You told me she was a rogue's cast-off." He steps up beside me, unhurried, silver eyes sweeping the shaking hall.

"You crowned a liar and buried a queen. And now she's standing in your feast hall holding a heart-oath stone."

A slow, ruinous smile. "I would start running."

But I don't need him to threaten them for me.

I set the stone down on the table, right beside the spilled bones, and I look straight at the men who wiped my family off the earth.

"Kaine tested whether I was strong enough to keep." My voice carries to the last dark corner of the hall. "You should all have asked the same about your crown."

I pick up the third box. The one I haven't opened.

"This one," I say, "I'll open in front of the whole Frostmark."

And I walk out of their feast, leaving the roast cold and the King smiling and every elder in the Frostmark wondering which of them is in it.