Evander stood at the council table with his mead in his hand and said my whole name to the pack. "Katherine Lowry. Tobias Lowry's girl."
The sling dragged at my shoulder when I turned my head. Under the bandage the bolt hole had gone black at the edges, like a cigarette burn in a sheet. Six elders at the high table, forty wolves below, and not one face surprised. Somebody had been talking since dawn, and I did not know who.
"Sleeping down the hall from our heir," Evander went on, delighted. "On the pack's wages. I only mention it because I'd want to be told."
Silvan rose. Pipe tobacco, wet wool. "The coin," he said, and laid his handkerchief on the table and opened it. "I wrapped it. Nobody watched her hand but me. It was black before it hit the tea."
The sound the room made was low and pleased.
"Wolfsbane doesn't work that fast. She darkened it herself, knocked the cup, and got close to him. Then a bolt, so the closeness would look honest." He did not look at me. "A Lowry has reasons."
I had one chance and no practice at this. "If I wanted him dead, I'd have let him drink," I said. "I had a second to decide. I thought about it. One second. Then I didn't."
That was the wrong thing to say, and I knew it as it left my mouth. Benches scraped. Someone said *there it is*. Someone else said something about my father that I will not write down.
"Enough."
Isolde had not stood. She sat at the head of the table with her hands folded, and she said it quietly, and every Thackery wolf in the hall went down into their seats like a field under wind. Silvan's jaw cracked sitting. Jude, three places along, dropped onto his bench with his teeth shut.
I stayed on my feet. Nothing in that voice had hold of me. Forty heads came round to look at the one standing.
It was the old elder who spoke first, Osric Vane, dry as a cracker. "Until the Claiming," he said to the ceiling, "even the heir answers to the Luna's voice. After it, she answers to his. Hard week for heirs. Some of them don't survive the Claiming. The bond refuses them." He sipped his water. "I'm only noting the calendar."
"Thank you, Osric," said Isolde, in the tone she used on bees. Then, to the hall: "She took a bolt for my son. I watched my son carry her in. I cut the silver out of her myself." She let that sit. "Katherine stays until Sunday, under watch. Silvan will see to the watching. And an Accord warden, Petra Okoro, comes Sunday to witness the Claiming, so I will hear no more theatre before then."
Silvan bowed his head like a man swallowing a stone.
Then Jude stood up.
"She doesn't need watching for the reason you think." His voice was flat, the charm switched off at the wall. "I knew who she was before I hired her. I read her name off Odile's list and I sent for her anyway."
Nobody breathed. I watched six elders' faces close one after another, like shutters down a street. A week before his Claiming, the heir had just told them he'd brought a Lowry into the house on purpose. Roan set down his glass and did not pick it up again.
Jude sat. He didn't look at me, which was how I knew it had cost him.
I went up the east corridor with Silvan's footsteps behind me. At the third door the latch was off and the door stood a hand open, and I looked, because looking is the job.
A man lay in a big bed with the curtains drawn, so thin the blanket hardly rose over him. Grey in the skin, grey in the lips, the grey that gets into the wolf and eats it from the inside. A doctor's bag stood open on the chair, and the room smelled of camphor and boiled linen. Leopold Thackery, sixty-one, the Alpha. He turned his head on the pillow and found me in the gap, and his eyes were clear and entirely awake.
Silvan shut the door on him without a word.
Jude's study was empty when I got there, so I sat in his chair and waited. He came in eleven minutes later and I didn't get up.
"The file," I said. "Now. Not after the Claiming."
"Katherine."
"They've had my name since breakfast. I stood in your hall and said I'd thought about it. I've paid for it twice, and you owe me both." My shoulder was pulsing in time with my pulse. "Now."
He went to the window and stood with his back to me. He had Edric's watch on the sill, a steel thing with a cracked face, and he picked it up and turned it over.
"You wanted to know why a Lowry," he said. "Because I'm reopening my uncle's death. And every wolf in this house either could have done it or would do what they're told. You're the one wolf alive I know didn't. And nobody here can command you."
"You testified."
"I was nineteen. I told them what my nose said." His thumb moved across the cracked glass. "If I got it wrong, I put your father in the cold and I've spent nine years not looking. I'm looking."
He opened the desk's bottom drawer, took out a brown folder, and put it in front of me. His hand was not steady, and he didn't hide it.
I opened it. The council's verdict, three witness statements, a map of the Coldbrook border. Beneath them, one photograph, glossy and slightly curled.
Edric Thackery lay in the reeds with his face turned away. His right fist was clenched on his chest, and in it, pulled out a few inches, was a length of green wool.
I knew the green. I knew the corner, darned in orange thread because she'd run out of green, in a little cross like a star.
It was my mother's scarf.