Chapter 58 CHAPTER 058
Stone's POV:
The festival proper began the moment the banquet hall emptied.
Someone had propped open the grand doors to the courtyard while we were still inside, and by the time the last guests filtered out, the grounds had already transformed into something louder and less controlled than anything that had happened at the table. Torches lined the perimeter in long arcs, their light orange and unsteady against the dark. The moon was fully up now, heavy and white above the treeline, and the crowd that had gathered on the grounds was larger than the one that had sat to dinner — the rest of the pack filling in the spaces the elders had vacated, younger, noisier, less interested in ceremony.
Tables had been set up along the outer edges. Food that would have been excessive at the banquet looked almost reasonable out here, arranged in long spreads that people moved along with plates and easy conversation. Wine and stronger things flowed freely. Someone had built a fire in the central pit and the smoke rose straight up into the still night air in a thin grey column.
It felt, as it always felt on festival nights, like the pack exhaling.
I let it happen around me.
I moved through it without stopping. People stepped aside without being obvious about it, the crowd parting and closing again like water, conversations adjusting their volume as I passed. I had learned early that this was simply how it was going to be and that there was nothing to be done about it. The weight of the Alpha position meant you were never quite inside a moment, only adjacent to it, watching the celebration from a distance of exactly one step.
Harry fell into stride beside me near the edge of the firelight.
We didn't say anything for a moment. We had known each other long enough that silence between us didn't require filling.
"Good turnout," he said.
"It's the festival."
"Still."
Harry stopped beside me.
"What do you intend to do with her?" he said.
I didn't look at him. "With who."
"The girl. Ari."
I reached for a cup from the table nearby. "I'm not sure why that requires a conversation."
"I'm making it one."
I drank. The fire cracked and settled in the middle distance. In the circle, the bigger one had finally gotten his grip and the smaller was fighting out of it badly.
"She's been assigned to my household," I said. "She's doing what she was assigned to do. I'm not sure what conversation there is."
"The conversation," Harry said, "is that Sierra is burying her."
"Sierra manages the household staff."
"Sierra is singling her out." He kept his voice level, which was how I knew he had decided to say this and wasn't going to be redirected out of it. "She's being handed twice the work of anyone else on rotation. She spent half of today with her arms above her head fixing something that wasn't her mistake to fix. And then she was asked to carry half the banquet to the table by herself." He paused. "You know what happened after that."
I said nothing.
"The maids follow Sierra's lead. You know that too. Nobody is making this easy for her."
"The household staff isn't my concern on a festival night."
"I'm not talking about the household staff."
I looked at him then.
He met it without adjusting.
"I'm talking about one person," he said, "who has done nothing except work twice as hard as everyone around her and take whatever is handed to her without complaint, and who is apparently being made to understand that this is simply how it's going to be."
I set the cup down. "You seem to know a great deal about her daily schedule."
"I pay attention."
"She's been talking to you."
"She hasn't."
"Harry…"
"She has not said a single word to me about any of it," he said, and there was something in his tone that was slightly harder than it had been a moment ago. "I have eyes. I was in that hall today. I didn't need her to report anything. Neither did you."
The fire spat once. The crowd around the wrestling circle had gotten louder.
I looked back at the tournament without answering him.
"She said don't," I said, after a moment.
Harry was quiet.
"Sierra raised her hand a second time and she looked her in the face and said don't." I paused. "I'm aware of what's happening in my household."
"Then you're aware it needs to stop."
"I handled it."
"You stopped one moment. Sierra will find other moments."
"Then I'll handle those too."
Harry exhaled — not quite a sigh, not quite frustration, something precisely between them. He had a specific register for when he believed I was being deliberate about missing a point, and this was it.
"What I'm suggesting," he said carefully, "is that handling moments is not the same as handling the problem."
"I'll take that under advisement."
"Stone."
"I said I'll take it under advisement."
He let it go. Not because he was finished with it, I knew. Because he understood when pushing would accomplish nothing, and he was practical enough to wait.
We watched the tournament.
The smaller fighter won it eventually, scrappily, in a way that made the crowd considerably happier than a clean victory would have. There was cheering and the kind of back-slapping that seemed aggressive until you understood it was affectionate. The two fighters gripped each other by the forearm and grinned.
I was about to say something to Harry — I wasn't sure what yet, something that would move us off the subject without making it obvious that was what I was doing — when the sound cut through everything.
The crowd shifted. Heads turned.
A woman was pushing through from the northern edge of the grounds, her formal dress incongruous with the way she was moving — too fast, too desperate, both hands reaching forward as if she could physically part the people in front of her.