Page 18 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

“Fine.” She takes the first corner.

The work settles fast after that. I lift lids and open cases and set each thing within reach of her hand. Her hand hovers over each piece, close but never touching. The stillness that takes her when she listens is total. Light comes down from the high slits and catches the silver in her hair, dust turning slow in it. I catch myself watching her hand instead of the shelf I’m supposed to be clearing. I want to watch her all morning. That’s exactly why I go back to the shelf.

Hours in, the dust is in everything, my collar, her braid, the back of my throat.

“You’re running a family attic like hostile ground,” she says, a laugh under her voice.

“Hostile ground never buried me in dust.” It startles a real laugh out of her, quick and unguarded. I go back to work with that laugh still in my ears. I’d get the words wrong on purpose to hear it again.

“Anything?” she asks, three cases later.

“Dust. You?”

“Dust, and a very old opinion about someone’s taste in silverware.”

We end up at the same long case, reaching past each other. Her shoulder settles against my arm and stays there while she works, warm through two layers of cloth, her scent closer than it’s been since the walk in. I hold still instead of leaning into it. Her hair has fallen forward over one shoulder, baring the long, graceful line of her neck. What I want is that neck under my mouth, to know what sound she’d make if I kissed just behind her ear.

I move down the case instead and put space between us. The work goes on. The scent of her stays with me long after.

A low run of cases sits in the far corner, under a lifetime of undisturbed dust. I cross to it without knowing why and start clearing the lids.

“Why that corner?” she asks.

“Instinct.” It’s the answer I’ve always given for the things I get right with no way to explain how. It’s always been the true answer. It’s never explained a thing. Every pack I’ve run with took the results and kept their distance from me anyway. I learned to stop offering more. I just keep clearing lids.

I open the last case and my hand goes straight to a broken piece of gray stone near the back, the same instinct that brought me to this corner in the first place. It’s cool and ordinary in my palm, nothing about it different from any other rock. I set it down in front of her anyway.

Her palm passes over it. She stops. Her hand comes down on it instead of hovering. The gold in her eyes brightens. She lifts the point out. It fits in one closed hand.

“This is it.” Barely above a whisper. The look on her face is new to me, lit and young. It’s the best thing I’ve seen since we crossed into this realm.

“What exactly is it?” I ask.

“It carries the same resonance as the marks. Whatever they’re pointing to, this is part of it. I’ll know more once I read it.” She wraps the stone and carries it out herself, the guards at the vaults nodding us past.

I’ve paid my way into every room I’ve ever stood in. Watch, fight, guard, earn it again when the faces changed. Nobody’s ever handed me anything. She walks out of the king’s vaults with a treasure in her pocket because all she had to do was ask.

We take it to a small room off the vaults, a table, two chairs, light from one high window. She sets the piece between us and lays her hands over it, the same way she found it. What it holds comes to her a little at a time. She tells me as it comes: names older than the fortress, the first dragons of Drakoria, the line that runs down through the centuries to Niko and to her own mother. Her voice fills the small room. I’d listen to that voice read grain tallies. There is nothing duller than grain tallies.

“Keep going?” I ask when she stops for breath.

“Keep going.”

The history goes back and back and then quits. When the account picks up, the first dragons of Drakoria are already alive and ruling. Where they came from, how the line began, is missing. She tries twice more to reach past the stopping point and gets nothing. She sits back.

“It wasn’t lost to rot or time. Someone took it out on purpose, ages ago. Careful work.”

“Someone went to a lot of trouble to hide where the dragons came from,” I say.

She says the rest of it quietly. “The line the account follows is the royal line itself. Niko’s. My mother’s. Rhonan’s and Evren’s. Mine, through Auriella.” The missing beginning is the beginning of her own family. Her hands go still around the stone.

I’ve spent as long as I can remember putting my body between people and the things that mean them harm. This threat lives in her family’s own history. My hands curl on the edge of the table with nowhere useful to be. There’s nothing here to stand in front of. There’s no door to put my back against. I take my hands off the table and hold still.

While she reads the piece, something in the stone around us catches at her too, a thread of magic that doesn’t belong. She lays her free hand against the wall to follow it, working back through the old magic laid into the foundations when Briarstone was built. Her fingers spread wider against the stone. Her breath goes short.

“There’s another magic woven in among the fortress’s own. Faint with age. Placed with care.” She recognizes his signature the moment she touches it. “It’s Faelan’s. He was inside Briarstone long ago. Nobody ever knew.”

Her eyes go distant, fixed on nothing, mouth pressing into a hard line. I hate seeing that on her face. I hate that there’s nothing I can do to take it away.