“Fake!” Geneva said. “The ring is fake, she’s a forger—”
“Then swear it.”
“I swear she’s a forger. I swear it on the stones.”
The ink on her pen ran black again and climbed her fingers, and she dropped it like it had bitten her. My wrist burned bright through my sleeve.
Kell ran for the trees. He made four steps.
The pewter ring came off his hand, and where it had sat his palm was banded black. He looked at it and made a sound I’ve only heard from dogs.
“Fifty thousand a year,” he said, to the stones, to nobody. “She paid me fifty thousand a year.”
I held up my phone, and the recording played across the wet grass. “Sell, girl,” said the little speaker.
Then I opened my mother’s true Lines book and read the gate-oath from the night the old alpha died.
The true mark dug up what the false one buried. A date. A name. A latch.
“Geneva Locke,” I read. “East gate. Opened. Sealed in the regent’s own hand.”
Rhys set his father’s book on the stone. “I found his dispatch in the study. Same night, same latch.” His voice cracked. “He wrote down who he was meeting there.”
“Read the bindings,” Orin said. “All of them.”
I read Tierney’s binding. The thread between her and Rhys showed like an old spiderweb — pale, dry, unlit. There wasn’t one.
Then I read my own thread, and it went gold on the grass, so bright the kids behind the fence said ohhh.
His wolf came up behind his eyes. After the mourning, he heard me. I watched it land on his face, and made myself wait one breath.
“Alpha’s oath,” I said. “Come say it, heir.”
He came down off the dais and knelt in the grass, and I read the Alpha’s Oath onto the stone. The roll. The border. The hunt. The winters. His voice answered every line.
At the last, my ring cut deep. Blood for ink. My wolf came up out of my chest with the strangest sound — not a howl, more like a door opening for a whole pack at once. The stone answered, the strike on the Roll lifted, and my mother’s name came back black and wet and hers.
Every wolf went to their knees. Even the council. Even the ones who had voted.
“You opened my father’s gate,” Rhys said to Geneva. “You paid a forger to keep thirty years of paper quiet. Council. Read the law.”
Orin read it. Regency forfeit by the regent’s own mark. Strikes restore. Every line the Grey Hand touched is void — the border sale with them — and the relief fund got its $58,000 back.
The council gave Geneva the Walk. Same words she’d said to me. Same moonrise. Tierney packed one bag, and nobody in Grey Hollow called my mother a thief again.
Geneva stopped in front of me.
“The cottage,” she whispered. “Take everything. Just tell them not to read my name—”
“Your name’s already in the book,” I said. “It’s the first one tonight that burned true.”
Rhys asked me three times. The third time he asked like a man, at the stones, with the pack listening. I said yes on the last Reading Night of the season, and the stone took our bonding line gold.
“The night of the Althing,” I told him later. “I can’t remember the walk. That was the ink’s price.”
“You don’t remember the wolf in the trees?”
“Something in the trees. That’s all it is now.” I closed my eyes. “Ada says I didn’t walk alone.”
“You didn’t.” His voice was rough. “The law says the heir can’t speak before the Roll is read. It doesn’t say he can’t follow her out. On that road I decided I’d marry you, even if you never spoke to me again.”
I keep the Lines book now, at the cottage. The pack kneels to it every Reading Night, and I never make them say they’re sorry. The ink does.
Blood for ink, my mother wrote. She never said what the ink pays back.
This morning I paid the price for our bonding line, and stood a while in the kitchen trying to remember what I’d lost.
Then he came in with the coffee, and I decided the price was fair.
