Chapter 2: The Man Bleeding Black

They threw him out, of course. Four guards. Two of them limped afterward and couldn't explain why. They threw me out too — but they did it properly first. The whip came down in my uncle's study, three strokes across my back, and the only sound in the room was my mother's breathing and Dorian's boots as he shifted his weight to see better. "You embarrassed me," Ulric said, coiling the leather. "You stood there and let the Goddess make my pack a joke." "I stood there," I said, "while your son talked. That's all I did." Fourth stroke. I bit down until I tasted copper. I did not scream. I had learned not to scream when I was eight years old, and Ulric hated that more than anything. Then my mother knelt. She knelt on the stone in front of the man who murdered her husband, and she put her forehead down, and she said, "Alpha. Please. She's a servant. She's nothing. Let her be nothing." That is the part that makes me want to burn the world down. Not the whip. He let me go. The alley behind the tavern smelled like rain and old ale. My back was singing. I had one hand pressed to the wall for balance when I heard the sound — a wet, ugly, wrong sound. He was on his knees between two barrels, hood down, one arm braced against the stone. The black veins had crossed his jaw. They were in his cheek now. Reaching for his eyes. "You're going to die in a puddle," I said, "and I'm going to have to explain it to the innkeeper." He laughed. It turned into something worse. I should have walked away. I knelt. "Rogue poison," I said. "How long?" "Four months." His voice was shredded. "Healers gave me three." "Then your healers are decorative." I pulled the flask off my belt. Plain leather, dented, the kind a kitchen girl carries so no one asks questions. Inside was wine. Mostly. I tipped one drop onto my fingertip. In the dark it glowed faintly blue — the color of deep water with lightning underneath. "Open your hand," I said. "What is that." "Wine." "That is not wine." "It's mostly wine." He looked at me for a long moment. Then he opened his hand. The drop hit his palm and sank, and blue light raced up his forearm like a river finding a channel, up under his sleeve, into his chest. His whole body arched. His eyes flew open, silver and wild. The black veins in his face receded — down his cheek, down his throat, back under his collar. Not gone. Never gone. But leashed. He sat there in the wet gravel, breathing like a man who'd just surfaced from under ice. "Thirteen weeks," I said. "That buys you thirteen weeks, maybe. The root's still in your heart. When it comes back it'll come back hungrier." His hand shot out and caught my wrist. Not hard. But absolutely, immovably. "What are you," he said. "A dishwasher." "Seraphine." My name in his mouth did something inhuman to my pulse. "You have no wolf. I can smell it — there's nothing there. And you just did something the royal healers cannot do." "Rejected goods," I said. "You said it yourself." Something moved behind his eyes. Guilt, maybe. Or calculation. "Why help me?" "Because you walked into a room full of wolves who hate me and offered to take me out of it." I pulled my wrist free. "Nobody's done that since I was eight. Even if you're a liar." He stood. It took him two tries, and I pretended not to see. "Tomorrow," he said, "the Moon Trials open. The King is dying. He has no Luna, no heir, and the rogues are already at the border, waiting for his last breath. The Goddess will name candidates herself." "Fascinating. I have four hundred plates to wash." "Enter, Seraphine." "Wolfless girls don't enter Trials." Boots at the mouth of the alley. A giant of a man, black armor, sword hilt at his shoulder, moving fast. He stopped dead when he saw us. Then he dropped to one knee on the wet stones. "My King," he said. "We have to move. They know you're in the city." I looked down at my hand. At the hand I'd just been holding.