Chapter 22

Kade

Kade had attended eleven Five Packs summits since taking the Blackthorn seal, and this was the first one he'd spent the entire two-day ride toward dreading instead of simply enduring.

He and Seraphine rode at the head of Blackthorn's delegation the way they always did at these things — a matched, practiced pair, five years of public appearances worn smooth into something that read, to anyone watching, like genuine partnership. It wasn't nothing, what they'd built. He'd stopped believing, somewhere around year two, that it needed to be nothing just because it wasn't the thing the mate bond had promised him. Seraphine had turned out to be sharper than half his council, more honest with him than his own father had ever managed to be, and steady in a way he'd come to rely on more than he was entirely comfortable admitting.

"You're quiet," Seraphine observed, riding beside him with the easy, practiced grace of five years' experience doing exactly this — appearing perfectly composed beside a husband who wasn't, in any way that mattered, entirely hers. "More than usual, even for you."

"Border dispute. Lot to think through before we're in the room."

"That's not it, and we both know it." She didn't push further, which had become its own kind of language between them over five years — the things she chose not to press on, the things he chose not to explain, an entire marriage built as much out of what they'd agreed not to say to each other as what they had. "Nightshade's confirmed for this summit. First time they've sent a delegation to a full gathering instead of just border negotiations by messenger. I imagine that's not a coincidence, given the timing of everything else."

"What timing."

"Kade." She said his name with the specific patience she reserved for moments when he was being deliberately obtuse, which had become, over five years, a language of its own between them too. "You've spent five years listening for every scrap of news out of the north like a man waiting for a verdict. I've watched you do it. I've never once said anything, because it wasn't my place to, and because some nights I genuinely hoped you'd find whatever answer you were looking for and it would finally let you sleep properly again. I'm simply pointing out that whatever this summit turns out to be, I don't think either of us should pretend to be surprised by it."

Kade didn't have a ready answer for that, and Seraphine, apparently satisfied with having said her piece, let the silence stretch comfortably between them the rest of that morning's ride. It was, he thought, one of the strange gifts of a marriage built on this particular foundation — she never asked him to perform feelings he didn't have, and in exchange he'd learned, slowly, to stop performing them at her either. Somewhere in that honesty, unglamorous as it was, they'd built something that functioned. He still wasn't certain, most days, whether functioned was the same thing as enough. He suspected Seraphine wondered the same thing about her own side of the arrangement, though she'd never said so directly, and he'd never asked.

They made camp the first night at the halfway point, the way delegations always did, and it was there, well after the fires had burned low and most of the retinue had settled for the night, that Torren found him sitting apart from the group, sharpening a blade that didn't particularly need sharpening.

"You don't have to do anything," Torren said finally, dropping down onto the log beside him, low, just for him. "Whatever happens in that hall when we get there — you don't have to do anything about it. You can sit through a border dispute like every other summit, go home, and keep doing exactly what you've been doing for five years. Nobody's forcing your hand here except whatever you decide to let yourself feel about it."

"I know."

"Do you." Torren's voice had an edge to it Kade rarely heard from him, five years of careful patience finally showing its wear. "Because I've watched you for five years, Kade. I watched you almost collapse at your own wedding. I've watched you walk that northern road a dozen times without remembering deciding to. I've watched you flinch every single time somebody mentions a pack reforming up north, and pretend, every single time, that it's nothing. I don't think 'nobody's forcing your hand' is actually true anymore, if it ever was. I think your hand's been forced since the night of that ceremony, and every year since has just been you getting better at hiding how forced it is."

Kade set the whetstone down, blade forgotten across his knees. "What would you have me do instead."

"I don't know. I'm not you, and it's not my mate bond sitting unresolved for five years." Torren's voice gentled, just slightly. "I just don't want you walking into that hall tomorrow still pretending you don't already know, in your gut, exactly whose banner is about to be raised on the western wall. Pretending costs you something every time you do it. I've watched it cost you for five years. I'd like to see you stop paying that particular price, one way or another, whatever the actual answer turns out to be."

Kade didn't have an answer for that, which had become something of a pattern in conversations like this one, and eventually Torren clapped him once on the shoulder and left him to the fire and his own thoughts, which turned out to be far less peaceful company than the silence had promised.

They reached the summit grounds by midday on the second day, and the forecourt was already filling when they rode in, banners marking out each pack's claimed ground the way they always did — Ashborne's colors dominant as host, Ironfang's raised near the stables, the fifth power's more modest presence toward the back, delegates and honor guards and the general low hum of five packs' worth of politics beginning to gather itself into something that would, by evening, become a full and formal summit.

And along the western wall, a banner Kade had never once seen raised at any summit in his life: dark violet-black, a crescent moon worked in silver thread at its center, unmistakably new and unmistakably deliberate in its simplicity. Nightshade.

Something in his chest went very still, the ache behind his sternum sharpening into something almost unbearable, sharper than it had been in five years of careful management.

"That's them," Seraphine said quietly, following his gaze, something unreadable in her voice. "First time raising a full banner at a summit. That's not a small statement, for a pack that was six people five years ago. Whoever's leading them now wants every pack in that hall to understand exactly what Nightshade's become."

Kade didn't answer. He was too busy trying to remember how to breathe evenly, standing in a crowded forecourt with a banner in his eyeline that felt, absurdly, like it was looking directly at him.

They took their seats in the hall proper alongside the other Alphas, the vast old chamber filling slowly with five packs' worth of delegates, tapestries from a dozen prior centuries of uneasy alliance looking down from walls that had witnessed considerably more history than Kade felt equal to adding to today, and Kade found himself watching the western entrance with an intensity he made no effort to disguise, not anymore, not after five years of failing to disguise it from the one person in the room who knew him well enough to see straight through the attempt anyway.

"Nightshade delegation," the herald announced, from somewhere near the doors, and the whole hall's attention shifted as one toward the entrance, five years of northern rumor finally about to resolve into something the rest of the Five Packs could actually see with their own eyes.

Kade's hand found the edge of the table in front of him and gripped it, hard, bracing for something he'd spent five years simultaneously hoping for and dreading in exactly equal measure.

The doors opened.