Page 4 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

“Then why do we keep doing this?”

“Because you’ll sit still for me and not for anyone else,” Lyanna says.

“That’s not true.”

“You climbed out of a window when there was a healer covering for me the one-time Doria needed me back for a few days.”

“That window was an emergency exit.”

“It was a checkup.”

Lyanna moves around the table with the same unhurried economy she brings to everything, two fingers to the inside of Harper’s wrist, then her throat, checking things a human doctor would need machines for. She’s done this so many times for Harper it barely counts as a formality anymore.

Harper runs light and efficient even on her back on a healer’s table. She talks the whole way through the check, because being tended to without a job to do doesn’t sit right with her. It never has. The silver-white knotwork on her inner wrist hasn’t changed in months, thin lines wound into a pattern too precise to have happened by accident. A scar from a bad season she survived and outlived.

I read her anyway. Harper’s tired in the ordinary way, the kind that comes from running a pack’s logistics and loving a man who took a long time coming back to himself. There’s nothing urgent underneath, so I let the read go loose and drift instead of holding it.

Lyanna’s hands go still over Harper’s wrist. Nothing changes on the surface. The silver lines don’t move. But Lyanna’s focus sharpens, she goes completely still. She only does that when she’s caught something nobody else in the room can.

She doesn’t reach for alarm. She reaches for me and I’m already watching by the time she lifts her eyes. I cross to the table expecting to hand them good news. I’ve read a hundred dying things wind down before, that’s what I brace for here, the last twitch of a network that already failed. I know this isn’t that the moment I reach for it. Whatever moves under the silver is ordered. It’s going somewhere.

“What is it?” Her hands don’t move from her thighs. Her breathing doesn’t change. She’s not letting anything else show.

I don’t answer yet. I drop past the surface of the read, past the shape of the knotwork, down into the current running underneath it. It runs in a deliberate direction, traveling somewhere along lines I can almost trace. It’s being done. Not undone. The surprise of it gets past me before I can manage it. My thoughts go short. Certain. Everyone took the quiet after the collapse for death, including me. The quiet wasn’t death, it was a pause, and now it’s ending.

Under the pattern, the signature is exactly what it’s always been. Faelan’s. The same knotwork he left on her the day she touched the Debt Stone. Lyanna caught the movement with her own senses too. She doesn’t need the name on it.

“What’s it doing?” Lyanna asks.

It sits in the room with the ward hum and the sound of Harper trying to breathe like someone who isn’t scared. The thing I’ve chased through old records for years isn’t a memory anymore. It’s alive, right now, in a friend’s body. I was right, when for once I wanted to be wrong.

Harper’s the first to ask. It’s her wrist. She has the right.

“Is this the same as before?” No flinch in it. “Is it starting again?”

She’s already bracing for whatever’s on my face.

I draw my hands back from her wrist, let it go, sit back. I can’t tell her it’s over. I can hand Harper the whole thing right now, every edge of it, honest, frightening and hers by right. Or I can give her a true, measured version, hold the rest back, and carry the worst of it alone until I’m certain enough not to frighten her for nothing. Harper doesn’t panic, but whatever I tell her, she acts on immediately, and that moves through this pack fast. It reaches Ben, Dane, every corner of this pack before I’ve even confirmed what I’m looking at. I hold most of it back. I’ve done this before, deciding what someone gets today and what has to wait.

“The marks are waking,” I say. “It’s his work and it isn’t finished.”

That’s the part they can use. The rest, what I actually think this means, I keep behind my own still face, folded down where it won’t spread. Then I move. Moving is the only thing that quiets it.

“I need to see Nova. And Kari.” I’m already up, three steps past this room in my head.

Harper turns it into a task. The fear doesn’t leave her. It just gets a job.

“What do you need?” she says. “Who else needs to know? How do we keep this from getting ahead of us?”

“Not everyone. Not yet.” I need to see Nova and Kari first, on my own, before this becomes a pack-wide alarm that might be wrong in its edges even if it’s right in its center. “You’ll know before anyone else does.”

“That’s not the same as knowing now.”

“It’s what I have right now.”

She doesn’t push past that.

Lyanna’s eyes find mine over Harper’s head. We have a whole conversation without a word spoken between us. She’s the only other person in this valley who carries anything close to what I do, and her face has the same dread I’m hiding.