I drove for forty minutes before I stopped.
The neutral zone stretched wide and empty at this hour - a managed wilderness
between pack territories, maintained by the inter-pack council as a space of legal nonaffiliation.
No Alpha's word held here. No pack law applied.
It was, in the strictest sense, free ground.
I had always found it peaceful.
Even now. I parked at the overlook above the Greyvale river bend; a place I had come to
sometimes when the weight of things became manageable only at a distance.
I sat in the car for a while.
Then I took out my communication stone and made the call I had been building toward for two days.
She answered on the second pulse.
Her voice, even through the stone, was without any doubt; Isolde - direct, slightly rough at the edges, zero preamble.
"You look terrible," she said, even though she couldn't see me.
It was simply her assessment, delivered on general principle.
"Isolde, I need you to know where I am," I said. "And I need you to have the recorder's contact at Aldous in Ironstone. He has the letter."
"How long do you have?" She asked.
"I'm not sure. The healer said two days from yesterday. Possibly less. I pushed
myself last night."
I heard her breathing change - a controlled thing; Isolde's version of distress.
She had always managed her emotions the way I managed mine, which was one of the
reasons we had been able to understand each other without a great deal of explanation.
She had been my closest friend for eleven years.
She had told me, when I decided to bond with Cassian, that he was not a man who would grow toward someone strong.
That men like Cassian needed to feel singular, and I was the kind of woman who would make him feel ordinary by comparison, and eventually he would resent me for it.
I had not listened.
"Tell me the assets are secured," she said.
"Bloodline locked. All of it. The studio designs are already registered under the
holding company in neutral territory.
The northern territories are locked behind my blood and can't be transferred without my authorization or a blood relation's."
"Sable's."
"When she's of age. Aldous knows."
"And the letter I'm holding after goes to the inter-pack legal council and the regional pack oversight body simultaneously.
With the supporting documentation." I paused. "It names everything. Every document Lyra falsified to maneuver her way into the pack hierarchy.
The forged introduction letters my parents never questioned.
The runework designs she presented
to the elders as her own during the first year.
I have the original dated drafts in my
notebooks."
"Nadia." Her voice was quiet. "This is a significant legal action."
"Yes I know!" I said.
"You want it released after you're gone?" She asked.
"I want it released when it cannot be suppressed. When Cassian and my parents
have been celebrating long enough to believe it's over and when Lyra has begun trying to access the assets I locked." I said.
Isolde was quiet for a moment. "She'll go for the assets within the first week.
Probably sooner."
"I know. And when she discovers they're locked, when she finds out the studio
designs are gone, the territories are frozen, the accounts are sealed, that's when the
letter should arrive."
"Wow, you already have all this planned out." She said lightly.
"Some of it I planned weeks ago, when the marks first appeared. The rest I worked out these last three days."
*Another silence.*
When Isolde spoke again, her voice had dropped. "I should come now."
"Yes," I said. "Please come now."
I listened to her move. The sound of someone gathering herself quickly, the way Isolde always moved when something mattered.
She lived four hours by road from the neutral zone, two by the faster route through the highland passes.
"I'll be there in three hours," she said. "The clinic on Greywater Road; the one
run by the neutral healer."
"I know it."
"Nadia."
"Yes?"
*She stopped.*
In eleven years of friendship we had, on occasion, found ourselves at the edges of what language could do efficiently.
This was one of those moments.
There was too much to say and the wrong kind of time to say it, and we both knew it,
and so:
"I'll be there in three hours," she said again.
"I'll be there," I replied.
I ended the call.
I sat for a while longer at the overlook, watching the river below. The light was
thinner now, the sun dropping behind the western tree line, the shadows long and blue across the water.
It made me think about a lot of things.
I thought about Sable's hands, the careful way she turned them over, examining
her palms.
I thought about six years of early mornings in the studio, the smell of copper and resin, the clean satisfaction of a sigil matrix that worked.
I thought about the moment I had seen Lyra at Coldwater Creek and felt the sharp, simple impulse to help someone who was alone.
I thought about the last time Cassian had looked at me with something that
resembled being present - actually present, not managing me, not being patient with
me. And I realized I could not identify when that had been.
Somewhere in the middle years, the quality of his attention had shifted.
He begun to see me as a fixture.
Something reliable and therefore ignorable. The way you stop seeing a load-bearing
wall.
I did not regret building things. I only regretted who I had trusted to stand inside
what I had built.
The dark lines climbed up to my jaw now.
I could feel them in my peripheral vision
when I looked to the side. It stung.
I drove to Greywater Road.
I checked into the clinic.
I lay down on the narrow bed and looked at the ceiling and listened to the sound of my own heartbeat, which was still steady, which would keep going for as long as it could because that was what it knew how to do.
I waited for Isolde.
The afternoon became evening.
And somewhere deep inside the Ironstone Pack's territory, a celebration was being planned. I knew the shape of it without needing to see it - the long tables, the fire in the central hall, the elder circle's blessing, Lyra in something luminous, Cassian at the head of it all.
Let them have tonight, I thought.
I had done what I came to do.
What came next was no longer mine to manage.
I closed my eyes...