They Called My Father a Traitor, So I Learned Every Secret They Buried novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: The Hands She Would Not Offer

Breda laid Corvin's unsigned certification warrant across Kestrel's treatment table and told me to put both hands on it.

The parchment landed beside the red-stained cloths and the bowl of boiled water. Kestrel was sitting against the wall with his coat open, one hand braced over the bandage beneath his ribs. Hadley stood near the stairwell. Three kennel boys had stopped outside the open door to listen.

I looked at the warrant. Then at Breda.

'Wynn,' she said. 'Both hands.'

'I can read with one.'

'You can read this with your eyes.'

Her voice had the measured edge she used when a patient was trying to bargain with a fever. She had given me the gloves that morning, short brown leather, soft from use, and told me tinctures ruined bare skin.

I pulled them on before touching the page.

The gloves kept the silver from answering the paper, the old marks, the pressure of Corvin's seal. They covered the hands he wanted examined. They made me look obedient while I watched Breda avoid the bottom line.

She had not signed the order.

Neither had Corvin.

The warrant carried his office mark and a blank space where the certification should have been witnessed. It was meant to become official only after I begged for it.

'You are required to present yourself for formal certification,' Breda said. 'Your rank will be reviewed. Your access to the clinic will be reviewed. The Alpha has offered a path by which you may retain your healer's duties.'

Hadley folded her arms. 'That sounds generous. Did he also offer her a chair, or is she expected to kneel for the paperwork?'

'No one asked for your assessment,' Breda said.

'People keep putting awful things in front of me and then acting surprised when I assess them.'

One of the kennel boys made a choking sound. Hadley did not turn around.

Breda's mouth pressed thin. She had once promised to put my name before the certification board. She had trained me after dark, when the senior apprentices were asleep and the clinic doors were barred. She had told me my hands could save wolves the pack had already decided to lose.

Now she held the order that would make me prove those hands belonged to Corvin.

'If you submit to the examination,' Breda said, 'the Alpha will reconsider the cottage classification and restore your mother's winter coal allocation.'

There it was.

A reward for kneeling. A threat against my mother dressed as procedure.

Kestrel turned his head toward Breda. His expression had gone still in the careful way it did when he was in pain and refused to give the room the satisfaction.

'Does the warrant state that?' he asked.

Breda looked at him. 'It states the certification process.'

'Then why did you mention the cottage?'

'Because the two matters are connected.'

'By which line?'

She did not answer him. She looked at me instead.

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