Chapter 4 — The Claim (2)

“I am not calling you Mister Voss. We did the bond thing. You don’t get Mister.”

The corner of his mouth did the thing. I hated that I was already learning his tells.

“So that’s it, then,” I said, crossing my arms. “That’s what ‘what belongs to him’ means. Me. The old king wants me.”

Silence.

The silence stretched. A dust mote drifted through the ruined ledger room. Kael said nothing, and in the nothingness I heard the whole terrible sentence complete itself.

He didn’t deny it.

“Oh,” I said. “Oh, you’re not even going to pretend. You’re just going to stand there and go silent the way you always go silent when the answer is worse than the question.”

“Some answers,” he said, “don’t survive being said out loud.”

“Try me. I’ve had a riot, a feast, and a fox telling me I’m gonna die screaming in the last forty-eight hours. My threshold is, like, a basement.”

He looked at the wall of names.

“Your bloodline,” he said, slowly, “is the reason he’s still alive. The reason any of us are. Every Handler in that room — every name on that wall — he built for. He wrote the curse to need you, and then he spent a thousand years making sure you kept coming.” His jaw tightened. “When he says what belongs to him, he doesn’t mean a woman, Lila. He means a lineage. A harvest. He’s been farming your blood for longer than your country has existed.”

My stomach did a slow, unpleasant flip.

“Farming,” I repeated.

“You were never a person to him. You were a crop.” He said it flat, like he was reading a weather report, and I hated him for the flatness, because the flatness meant he’d already decided I was going to take it badly and was bracing for it. “That’s why I posted the claim. Let him announce his harvest over my dead body. Publicly.”

I opened my mouth to say something sharp, because that was my whole personality, and then the building shook.

Not the ledger wall. The building. A low, sub-bass hum rolled up through the floor, the kind you feel in your fillings, and every carved name on the wall seemed to glow — just for a second, just a faint, sickly amber — and then it stopped.

Kael went rigid.

His eyes didn’t go black. They went quiet. The quiet before the black, the held breath, and I felt the bond between us pull tight like a wire somebody had just plucked.

“What was that,” I said.

“That,” he said, and his voice had dropped into something I’d never heard in it before — actual fear, under the glacier — “is not supposed to be possible.”

---

They dragged Corvin in two minutes later.

He came through the splintered door at a dead run, flapping, trailing feathers, and would have bolted again if two wolf enforcers hadn’t caught him by the scruff of his little messenger vest.

“Wolf King! Handler! I was flying by, I was not eavesdropping, the Hollow has excellent acoustics but that is not my fault, I have a wife and seventeen chicks and a mortgage and I am not a part of this —”

“Sit,” Kael said.

Corvin sat. He sat so fast he bounced.

“The cell,” Kael said. “Describe it. Now.”

The crow’s eyes darted to me, to him, to the ceiling. “The — the cell? The old one’s cell? It’s a cell, Wolf King. It’s stone. Very well stone. You did excellent stonework, centuries of excellent —”

“Corvin.”

The crow wilted.

“Okay. Okay. So for the last three nights, right, I’ve been doing the dawn route through the sub-basement, because the crows do the mail, someone has to do the mail, and —” He swallowed. “And the cell is humming, okay? It’s humming. Like a kettle someone forgot on the stove. The wards on the bars are flickering. I heard him breathing in there, Wolf King, and he wasn’t breathing like a prisoner. He was breathing like a man who’s about to be let out.”

The room went very cold.

“How long,” Kael said.

“Three days. Same as the letter. Same as —” Corvin gestured at me, wildly. “Same as her showing up.”

I felt it land. The arrival. The humming. The harvest waking up the second the crop walked into town.

Kael’s hand curled at his side. I put mine on it, on habit, thumb against his knuckles, and the storm under his skin settled by about two degrees.

“Thank you, Corvin,” I said. “You can go.”

Corvin looked like he wanted to kiss me. He looked at Kael. Kael nodded once, and the crow fled so fast he left a smear of feathers on the air.

We stood in the wreckage of the ledger room, the wall of names quiet again, and somewhere far below us a very old man in a very deep cell hummed his harvest awake.

“He’s getting stronger,” I said.

“He’s getting busy,” Kael corrected. “The hum isn’t power. It’s noise. It’s how he calls things. Wakes things. Reminds the clans what they’re afraid of.” He looked at the doorframe he’d splintered. “I’ll have the crows post double guards on the stairs. No one goes near the sub-basement.”

“Except you.”

“Except me.” He said it like a man admitting a relapse. “Not yet. Not while the wards are flickering. I’d be handing him a door.”

I nodded. I didn’t have anything better, and I was starting to learn that “better” was a very small category in a city run by monsters.

---

It was almost dawn by the time we made it back up to the Hollow proper. The street outside the opera house was that false-blue hour, the kind that promises morning and delivers nothing, and the clan heralds who’d been posted through the night were dozing against the tunnel walls.

One of them wasn’t.

A young wolf — barely old enough to have grown a proper tail, which he was now tucking between his legs the way dogs do when they know they’ve messed up — detached himself from the wall and came over to me. Not to Kael. To me. He glanced over his shoulder first, like he was afraid his own tail would tell on him.

“Handler,” he whispered.

I raised an eyebrow. “Yes?”

He glanced at Kael — who was three feet behind me, radiating the kind of patience that was actually a loaded weapon — and then he leaned in, and his voice dropped to something barely audible, something he clearly wasn’t supposed to say out loud.

“When the Wolf King posted the claim, Handler. The heralds — we all carried it. Every clan got the same words. But the version he dictated, the one for the inner circle —” The boy’s tail twitched. “He didn’t just say your name. He said the lineage. He said your mother’s name — or the blank where your mother’s name should be, anyway — and then he said —”

The boy stopped. Swallowed. Looked at Kael again, and then at me, and finished in a breath:

“He said your grandmother’s name. Not your mother. Your grandmother.”