Page 59 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

“I fed before I left Ash Hollow,” I say but the order stands.

My father sits across from me and asks me about the crossing while we wait, whether it ran clean, whether the family gate still sets a person down half a stride short. It’s an easy question with nothing under it and I take it gratefully. The steward comes back with two chalices already filled to the rim. He sets them down on the low table between us. Both of them make the same small sound against the wood. He’s out of the room before the second one has finished settling.

My mother picks one up, putting it into my hands and closing my fingers around the stem, both her hands over mine while she does it, so setting it back down would take a decision on my part.

“This is family blood,” she says. She uses the old cadence for it, the formal one she keeps for inside these walls. “Given freely. It was not bought from a man in the lower quarter for a fistful of cruor.”

I look down into the cup. It’s warm through the metal against my palms. What I buy in the lower quarter is warm too but comes in glass, off a board, from a man who bites a coin to make sure of me first and forgets my face by morning.

My mother sits down across from me, close enough that her knees nearly touch mine.

“What happened between you?”

She asks it the same as she’d ask about a wound that needed looking at. I put the chalice down on the table and look at her, then at my father, sitting there with his hands loose on his knees, both of them waiting without one word of pressure. I pick the chalice back up. I turn it once in my hands. Then I tell them.

“I knew what he was the first day I laid eyes on him. He was standing in the trees at the edge of the compound and I read him from the porch, a hundred yards off. Ancient. Divine. Asleep. A thing that looks like a wolf who can’t shift and is nothing of the kind. He hadn’t come in yet, hadn’t given anybody his name. I said nothing about it to a single person. Not to Dane or Kaspian. He walked in off the perimeter weeks later told me his name, and I stood there and let him do it.”

My voice catches on his name and nowhere else in it.

“Then I said nothing for months. He worked our line every night and I let him go on believing his thoughts. He believed it through four realms. In Doria he was still believing it while I read the account of what he actually is off a page, standing close enough to touch me.”

Neither of them says anything.

“He found out because he came to my door and heard me telling Kaspian. Not because I told him. He was never going to hear it from me, not that night, and I don’t have a good answer for when he would have.”

My mother is quiet for a while.

“You have been deciding what people are allowed to know about themselves since you were a child,” she says. “You did it to your brother. You’ve done it to me.”

“I didn’t want either of you worrying about it.”

“I know why you did it. It still wasn’t your decision to make.”

My father sets his cup down on the table.

“Stop doing it,” he says. “Not for his sake. For yours. You’ve been keeping other people’s secrets on your own and it has done you no good at all.”

“And if the truth ruins them?”

“Then it ruins them. That’s theirs to live with. It was never yours.”

I drink from the chalice when there’s nothing left to tell them. My father reaches across and puts his hand over mine around the cup. He doesn’t take it away, just steadies it and leaves it where it is. My mother reaches over and tucks a piece of hair back off my face, two fingers, the same as she’s done since I was small enough for her to lift. Her hand stays at my temple, then she lets it drop. My father picks up the second chalice for himself. He drinks without ceremony.

“Is the room too cold for you?” my mother asks.

“No.”

The blood goes to work almost before I’ve finished swallowing it. Nothing down there is this old or this clean. It goes through my chest, then out along both arms. It doesn’t stop halfway. What Evren gave me was enough to travel on. This is something else. I finish the chalice, set it down. There’s nothing left in me that’s short. For the first time since before Drakoria I’m standing in a body that has everything it needs.

My father puts his own cup down beside mine and stands. “There’s somewhere I need to take you before you go,” he says. “It’s below the archive. The map has something to do with it, and so do your mother and I.”

My mother doesn’t move to stop him. She’s looking at the window.

“I kept something once,” he says. “A long time, and from people who had a right to know it. It wasn’t only mine to tell, which is the reason I always gave myself. You may find some use in hearing how that went.”

He puts out his arm the way he has since I was young enough to need it on these floors. I take it. He walks me out of the receiving room and deeper into the palace. My mother comes a step behind.

Chapter 34