Chapter 24: The Door

Our daughter was three weeks old on the morning the whole world came knocking.

She slept in the carved cradle by the window of the Warden's quarters, with one fist beside her ear.

A pale silver light moved under her skin.

It was the Supreme's light, and it didn't frighten me anymore.

Ivo sat on the floor beside the cradle in his shirtsleeves, with the ridge at his left temple risen a little.

It rose whenever he looked at her, and he had stopped trying to hide it.

"You're not even tired," he said, softly, to me, so as not to wake her.

"I sleep eight hours now."

"You haven't opened the door."

"Nobody's knocked yet."

"They will."

The Board had given him the Fourth Year Trials back in the spring.

I had abstained from the vote, on principle, and he had said he preferred it that way.

He had asked me for nothing since the inn except the same thing, every morning, in the same low voice.

Stay.

I had.

The first knock came a little before nine, and it was light and quick.

I opened the door, and my sister stood on the landing in a travelling coat with her cheeks pink from the stairs.

"Cassie."

"Bea."

She did not run at me, and she did not apologize.

She hugged me hard, and I felt her wolf stir against mine, small and brown and warm, with nothing borrowed in it at all.

"I shifted," she said into my shoulder. "On the road this morning. I ran for a mile.

"I'm slow, and I fell over a log, and I loved every second."

"Beta?"

"Beta." She laughed, wet-eyed. "A thin, brave, mid-ranked Beta. I've never been so pleased with anything."

She went to the cradle and knelt.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, she's so bright."

"She's yours too. She's your niece."

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