Page 81 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

“Welcome home,” he says.

He walks back across to Nova.

“Valen.” Ben calls from behind the lodge. “Give me a hand with this bench, would ya?”

Valen heads over to him. I go up onto the porch and watch from there. Valen lifts one end. Ben takes the other. They carry it across the yard to the fire pit and set it down. Ben backs off a step and looks at it.

“That’s crooked.”

“It’s the ground,” Valen says.

“It’s you.” They pick the bench up, shift it eight inches, and put it down again. Ben looks at it a second time.

“Worse.”

Valen laughs. I’ve never heard him do that. The porch rail is worn smooth under my palm. Kaspian comes to stand beside me. He doesn’t say anything. His shoulder settles against the post, and he looks out at the yard, standing the way he has stood next to me since we were children. I push off the rail, sit down on the porch steps, down among them. Somebody puts a plate in my hands and is gone before I can see who it was. I eat what’s on it.

The afternoon runs down. Lyanna comes through, takes my chin in her hand, turns my face to the light. She smiles at me, lets go and moves on. Evren comes past with an armload of wood. He’s carrying it bare-handed, and the bark isn’t smoking, it’s the first time that’s been true in a month. Evie’s on the end of the woodpile, boots hooked on the log under her. She looks like she hasn’t slept. I’ve read that girl since the first week I knew her. There’s been nothing there to read since before we left for Drakoria. Evren comes back through and sits down on the log beside her.

The yard thins out by degrees. A fire starts in the pit. Somebody takes up a guitar, badly, is shouted at, keeps playing. I find Valen at the treeline. He’s out past the last of the firelight with his back against a pine. When there’s no work left, this is where he ends up. I put my hand in his, walk him a short way further out, away from the fire and the noise. He comes with me.

“There’s something I never told you.”

He turns to face me. Out here I can see him better than he can see me. His hair is still down over his forehead. His mouth easy. He waits.

“Doria. The balcony outside your room, the morning you went out to walk the grounds.”

“He came to you.” He says it like something already settled. “I heard him say so in that chamber.”

“You heard what he wanted the Council to hear.” I make myself say the rest at a normal speed.

“Before he asked me for anything, he told me where the third point was. Under the floor of the Purification Chambers. It isn’t in an archive, and it isn’t in anybody’s history. I was never going to find it. He handed it to me. Then he asked me to stand aside.”

Valen doesn’t move.

“At breakfast you told me you turned it up in the court records,” he says.

“Yes.”

“On the stair you told me Lachlan mentioned it.”

“Yes.”

“I heard you do that.” His voice comes out low. “I decided I’d misheard you. I wanted to have misheard you.”

“You didn’t. I said it two ways because I hadn’t worked out which one you’d let go.”

He waits me out. “There’s the rest of it,” I say. “When I put my hand on his throat, I told him he was right about the crime. He didn’t lie to you in that chamber. Not one word of what he said about me was untrue.”

His hand stays where it is on my arm. “We came home out of Doria with three points because he gave us one.”

“Yes.”

“And you carried that alone through Blood Moon and everything after it.”

“Yes.”

“Why now?” he asks.