Page 24 of The Iron Alpha

I pull my fingers through the worst of the tangles and twist the length into a rough knot at the base of my neck. It won't hold past midmorning. It doesn't need to. It needs to hold long enough for me to walk through the Tower looking like a womanwith a purpose instead of a woman who spent the night being taken apart.

The door is unlocked. I step into the corridor and let the stone swallow the sound of my footsteps.

The cistern is where I left it. Inner ward, east side, tucked against the curtain wall where the old Roman waterworks fed through channels that haven't been maintained since the world ended. The leak at the bottom has worsened overnight. A dark stain spreads across the courtyard stone, and the water level inside the stone basin has dropped enough that the feed from the wall spout is barely a trickle.

I crouch beside it and run my hand along the joint where the mortar has crumbled. The crack is structural, not cosmetic. The basin itself is sound, but the seal where it meets the wall has degraded to the point that more water is leaving through the gap than reaching the distribution channels. The channels themselves run under the courtyard to the kitchens, the great hall, and the lower ward. If the basin fails entirely, the Tower's interior water supply drops to whatever can be hauled from the river by hand.

I can fix this. I know how because I built Dover's water system with my own hands, digging channels through limestone and sealing them with clay and rendered fat before I was old enough to sit on the council. The principle is the same. The materials are available. The labor is the only variable, and the wolves aren't doing it because wolves don't think about infrastructure until it collapses.

The question isn't whether I can fix it. The question is what fixing it costs me and what it buys.

If I fix it, I become useful. Useful people have access. Useful people have conversations. Useful people are harder to discard and harder to replace. At Dover, I earned my seat at my father's side by being the person who solved problems no oneelse wanted to touch. My father traded me anyway. The lesson there is that usefulness isn't safety, but it's closer to safety than anything else I have.

If I don't fix it, I stay what I am: a body in Ryland's bed, a mouth he commands, a woman whose only value is what he takes from her at night. That is the rhythm of my life he described. He left no room in it for me to be anything else.

I intend to make room.

Margery finds me at the cistern when the morning light reaches the courtyard. She's carrying bread from the kitchens, and she sets a piece on the wall beside me without comment. I eat standing. Margery watches me examine the mortar with the same flat assessment she gives everything.

"The wolves won't fix that," she says.

"I know."

"They've been hauling river water for the west kitchens since last month. Two men, four trips a day. They don't complain because complaining about infrastructure is admitting they need something they can't hunt or kill."

"How long has it been leaking?"

"Since before the last frost. Three of the women reported it to Thane. He noted it. Nothing happened." Margery tears her bread in half. "The wolves manage territory. They don't manage plumbing."

"I managed plumbing in Dover. I built the distribution system that feeds the upper settlement."

Margery looks at me. The appraisal in her eyes sharpens into something that isn't warmth but is adjacent to respect. "You're going to offer to fix it."

"I'm going to tell Ryland I can fix it. The difference matters."

"Does it?"

"Offering is a request. Telling is a statement of fact. Requests can be denied. Facts are harder to dismiss."

The corner of Margery's mouth moves. "You'll need clay. Rendered tallow. Sand for aggregate. Tools the wolves have but don't use. You'll need access to the channels beneath the water gate, which are inside the restricted zone."

I look at her. She looks back.

"I mapped the restricted zones my first day," I tell her. "Those passages aren't sealed because they're dangerous. They're sealed because no one has gone down there since the wolves took the Tower."

"Same thing, in this place."

I finish the bread. Brush the crumbs from my hands. "Thank you for the information."

Margery stands. "Don't thank me. I'm tired of either having to ask the wolves to haul water or having to do it myself."

Thane intercepts me on the way to the great hall. His composure is intact, but something in the angle of his attention tells me he's been looking for me specifically. "The alpha is in the council chamber. He asked for you."

This is new. Ryland has summoned me to meals, to his bed, to his side for public performance. He hasn't asked for me in a council setting. The distinction registers like a change in the guard rotation: small, possibly meaningless, worth noting. Someone reported that I was at the basin again at dawn. Thane, most likely. Everything I do reaches Ryland eventually. The only question is how fast.

The council chamber is colder than the rest of the Tower. Arrow slits instead of windows, and the morning air cuts through them with an edge that makes my skin tighten. Ryland is standing at the table, dressed, his hands flat on a spread of maps. A strip of parchment lies beside his right hand, unrolled, weighted at the corners with flat stones. The handwriting on it is small and tight, and from where I stand I can see the red waxseal of a message delivered by raven. Something arrived in the night.

He looks up when I enter, and his gaze tracks from my face to the knot of hair at my neck to the way I'm standing with my weight forward, keeping the bruises off anything solid. His attention lingers on the mark at my collarbone, the one his mouth left, and the weight of that focus sends a thread of heat through my belly that I didn't authorize.