I dipped my knife in the cup on Jude's nightstand, and the silver went black before I could blink.
My shoulder tore the rest of the way open as I turned. Blood ran down my ribs, and I let it. Marten gone. Jude gone. Four nights to the Claiming, and I had left him alone to chase a girl's story to the ferry.
I took the lodge room by room. Study, kitchen, boathouse. Every dark door I opened, I noted what wasn't behind it.
Lamplight showed under the icehouse door. It was a squat stone box by the lake where the pack locked up its drunks and its troublemakers. Jude sat on the step outside in his shirtsleeves, grey as candle wax, sweat standing on his lip.
Alive. I had to put a hand on the wall.
"Couldn't sleep," he said. "Made myself tea from my own honey pot. One sip. It tasted wrong, so I stopped." He tried a laugh. It came out thin. "You've ruined me, Katherine. I check my own cup now."
"Who has your pot?"
"Nobody. Pantry, top shelf, my name on the lid."
Somebody had known which lid.
The door opened behind him and Silvan came out, coat buttoned to the throat, pipe cold in his teeth, left arm held in against his ribs. "The rogue," he said. "Out of her chair."
"Marten was in it."
"I called him to help search. The heir was safe in the house." He took the pipe out. "We went through Evander's rooms. Crossbow behind the wardrobe. Silver-headed bolts, a full quiver. And a bottle of mead." He held up a spoon. The bowl of it was black as a boot. "Dipped it myself. He's in the cells, in silver. The pack will call it solved by breakfast."
It was too neat. A man hides a crossbow in the one place anyone looks, and keeps the poison in the bottle everyone has seen him drink from.
"I want the crossbow," I said.
"No."
"Then I want to see the man."
Evander sat on a stone bench in the last cell, silver cuffs on his wrists, the skin under them rubbed raw. "Lowry," he said. "Come to propose a toast?"
A young guard named Roan held the crossbow like it might go off on its own. "Orders," he said, to the floor.
"Hand it through," I said.
Roan looked at Silvan. Silvan, in the doorway, said nothing, which Roan took for permission.
I passed the weapon between the bars. "Cock it. Load a bolt."
Evander took it in both hands.
The tremor started in his fingers and ran up to the elbow. He got the string halfway back and it slipped. He tried again, teeth set. The bolt rattled in the groove and fell twice before it seated, and when he raised the stock the point wandered a full hand's width in every direction.
"I can't hit a barn, Lowry."
I had run through those birches at dawn on Sunday. Forty yards, a gap between branches the width of a door, a bolt through my shoulder from a man who did not shake. This was not that man.
"Katherine."
Jude stood in the corridor with six of his people at his back. The charm was gone from his face. All of it, at once.
"Step away from my cousin."
"He can't make the shot."
"I said step away." In front of the guards. "You're using the pack's weapon on a prisoner. Put it down."
I put it down.
At noon, in the study, he pushed an envelope across the desk. It was fat.
"The balance of your fee. All nine nights, including the four you won't work." He didn't look at me. "Your contract is ended. My mother thinks you've done enough, and I agree. Evander is locked up. The threat is over. And you are bleeding through your shirt."
"Your mother thinks."
"She asked me to say it kindly. I'm saying it plainly." He turned to the window. "Go home before Sunday."
The Luna's advice, delivered in her son's voice, with a bag of money. Sensible, the kind a mother gives. I took the envelope. Refusing it would have been another scene. Every servant I passed on the way out looked at the floor.
I kept the file in my head and my knife on my belt. That was what I had left.
The boathouse dock ran thirty paces into the lake. I sat at the end of it after midnight with my boots over black water, and I did not leave.
He came down the boards at one, no coat, no charm.
"You were told to go."
"I was told my contract ended. Nobody mentioned the town."
He sat down beside me, close enough that I smelled cedar and the honey on his hands.
"At nineteen," Jude said, "I stood up in that council room and said I smelled Coldbrook on my uncle." His voice was very even. "I did smell something. I wanted it so badly to be Coldbrook, Kit. Because then it was nobody I loved. It was a stranger." He pressed his thumbs into his eyes. "I've never been sure it was there. I've never said that to anyone."
My father had been silvered for it. I counted my fingers instead.
"Kit," he said, which he had never once called me.
His hand came up toward my jaw and stopped a breath short of it. I could feel the warmth off his palm. I did not move. Neither did he. The water slapped the pilings. Somewhere a long way off, a door shut.
Then a lamp came down the path.
"Heir." Silvan, breathing easy, a shadow with a flame. "Luna wants you in the house."
He lifted the lamp to find the dock's edge, and his left sleeve rode back from the wrist. Under it was a bandage, grey-white, wound tight. At its border the skin was burned black in a ring around a fresh cut, the way silver burns.
I had put a silver blade into a wolf's left foreleg not twenty-six hours ago.
Silvan lowered the lamp and the sleeve together, slow as a man closing a door, and over the flame his eyes found mine and stayed.