Nobody had said that name aloud in nine years. My hand was at my ankle, on the knife, before Jude finished the second word.
"Don't," he said mildly. "Silvan is outside the door, and he'd enjoy it."
Katherine Lowry, of Coldbrook. In this house that name was a stain. Forty wolves had just watched me save their heir, and every one of them would change their mind by breakfast if they learned whose daughter I was.
"Who else knows?"
"You. Me. Odile Brannock, who didn't tell me." He sat on the edge of the desk. "I asked her for you by name, three weeks ago. She said you'd refuse. I said I'd pay for the refusal."
"Why me?"
"Do you always guard the door from the inside? It's very good. I feel like a hostage."
"Why me."
"Not on offer tonight." He lifted a finger. "Terms are. I keep your name to myself. You stand next to me until the Claiming, Sunday, full moon, nine nights counting this one. The morning after, you get the Accord file on your father's trial."
I had come to Greywater for that file. I had not told Odile, or anyone. My mouth went dry anyway.
"Why would you open it?"
"Why would you want it?" He tilted his head. "Come on, Katherine. Answer a question for once."
"I took this job to make you say it." It came out flat, and too fast. "That you lied. That you stood up at nineteen and lied about my father."
The charm went off. Just like that, the room got colder.
"I didn't," Jude said.
He said nothing else. He poured my untouched glass back into his own and told me my room was the last door on the corridor, his was the first. Nine doors between us.
By Saturday morning it was eight nights, and I still had no one to ask about the girl.
Roan Penn found me on the terrace. He was about twenty-two, a junior guard with a cap he kept turning in both hands, and he spoke to my boots.
"The server. Red hair. That was Torvald. My sister."
"Where is she?"
"Alive. The Luna sent her to our aunt's last night, for her nerves. She texted once, then her phone went dead." He swallowed. "I don't know the address. Nobody will say."
"Somebody will."
I went looking for the Luna, and the Luna was in the bee yard behind the greenhouse, in a veil and a cardigan, working a smoker among the hives. Burning pine needles. A sweet, sleepy smell.
"Sweetheart," she said, without turning. "Don't stand in the flight path."
I moved. "Ma'am. Torvald Penn. Her aunt's address."
"Resting, I should think." She puffed smoke over a frame, gentle as a hand on a shoulder. "Let the child breathe for a week."
"A girl handed your son poison."
"A frightened girl was handed something, I'd wager. You saw her hands." She lifted her veil. The kind, tired eyes again. "No address, Kit. I'd sooner you were angry at me than she was frightened again."
She pressed a jar into my glove. Clover honey, dark gold. "For your tea. Yours, mind."
"Thank you."
"And you'll do me a kindness one day." She left no room for a no, and I had said yes before I noticed. "You remind me of a girl who used to run parcels over the border from the north shore. Years ago. Same way of standing."
"Common stance."
"Mm." Then she was talking about the bees again, how they knew when a hive was ailing before the keeper did. Half the north shore stood like that. I walked out with a jar I didn't want and a debt I couldn't name, and nothing else.
At dusk I went down to the boathouse dock to look at exits, and found Evander Thackery sitting at the end of it with a bottle of the house mead between his knees. His hands shook so that the bottle chimed against his ring.
"Don't mind me," he said. "I'm decorative. Terrible shame, last night. Or a long weekend saved, depending who you ask."
"Which are you?"
"Ask me when I'm sober. I'll lie better." He pointed the bottle across the water. "Look. North shore."
Grey shapes were coming down through the birches to drink. Six, then eight. Thin and careful, heads low.
"Coldbrook's ghosts," Evander said. "Drifted ones. They come every month about now."
My mother had gone into those trees as a wolf seven years ago. Tall, silver at the muzzle by then, a white blaze down her throat like spilled milk.
I looked at every shape that came down. I looked at every throat. I told myself I was watching the exits, and then I watched the wolves, eleven of them, and none of them lifted their heads.
Here is what I told no one. For a year the full moon had been taking pieces out of me. A missed hour, a lost afternoon, once a whole night, and me standing in a field with dirt under my nails. Rogues call it the drift. Everybody knows how it ends.
I sat up on the bed in the last room of the east corridor with my back to the wall and the jar of honey on the sill, and I counted. Doors. Breaths. Seconds on my watch. Eleven forty-one. Eleven forty-two.
I counted until the numbers went soft at the edges.
The next thing I knew, the floor was cold under my bare feet, and my watch said twelve twenty-one.
Forty minutes. Gone, like a page torn out.
I was standing in the corridor outside Jude Thackery's door. No glove. My right palm was blistering, and my fingers would not open, because they were closed around the hilt of my silver knife, drawn, its point an inch from his door.