Chapter 110 — The Vinter Varg

Chapter 110: Chapter 110 — The Vinter Varg

~ Raven ~

Raven stood there for a while.

Long enough to work out that shouting Cassian’s name across the library would achieve absolutely nothing except letting him know he’d succeeded in annoying her.

He probably would have enjoyed that.

Then the noise behind her finally got through.

Raven turned her head.

Four tables were watching.

Two had stopped pretending otherwise. A boy near the end of the row had his slate raised at shoulder height and had clearly been holding it there for some time. The second Raven’s eyes found him, he dropped it and became intensely interested in a book he hadn’t even opened.

Someone farther back was still recording.

And the three girls by the window were somehow worse.

They weren’t laughing at Raven at all. Their heads were bent together, whispering, while one rested her chin in her palm and stared dreamily toward the shelves where Cassian had disappeared.

You have got to be joking.

Raven lifted a hand toward the boundary.

She stopped halfway.

Because she knew exactly what happened next.

She would hit the glowing wall, shout something obscene after a man who had already left, and by supper Bellringer would have a recording of Raven Rivers losing her mind inside a library cage.

By tomorrow somebody would add a caption. By the day after, the incident would probably have a name.

She had already given this academy more than enough to talk about.

They were not getting this too.

Raven turned her back on every one of them.

She pulled out the chair, sat down and squared the stack of books with the side of her hand until their edges lined up neatly.

Then she opened the first one and began reading as though being sealed inside a library by a Cardinal heir had been the plan from the beginning.

The whispering continued behind her.

Raven let it.

~~~~

For the first several pages, she absorbed absolutely nothing because her mind was busy arranging a surprising number of things she could do to Cassian Blade, starting with mildly unpleasant and getting steadily more satisfying.

Somewhere around the fourth, she realised she had turned two pages without reading either.

Fine.

She went back.

A heading near the middle of the page stopped her.

HOUSE LATTICES.

Raven’s finger paused.

She had been hearing that word since she entered Valerius—in the assessment hall, during the Redress, from instructors and even the Headmaster—always spoken as though everybody already knew what it meant.

Nobody had ever bothered to explain what it actually meant.

So Raven began again, this time properly.

A Lattice was not one sigil.

It was a network of them.

Living inscriptions connected to one another and developed by a Great House over generations, until the structure became anchored into the bloodline itself.

What appeared across the skin during activation was only the visible portion. Most of the Lattice existed deeper, carried through blood and essence where nobody looking from the outside could see it.

The Houses preserved abilities, combat techniques and traits inside those networks, things that might otherwise have vanished when the wolf who first manifested them died.

Each generation inherited what came before and, where possible, added to it. Direct heirs received the most complete version their House possessed.

Raven sat back slightly.

So that’s what it is.

She turned the page.

The four Cardinal Houses were listed plainly beneath a section on elemental Lattices.

Prymont — Fire.

Blade — Air.

Ashbourne — Earth.

Hale — Water.

Her attention went immediately to the first two because they were the only ones she had experienced herself.

Dante came to mind first, along with the heat rolling off him whenever he stood too close...

Her eyes moved to the next line.

Blade — Air.

The storeroom returned with uncomfortable clarity.

Her sleeve fluttering against her wrist despite the closed door.

A loose strand of hair lifting across her cheek.

Those small, sharp stings over her skin.

Then the air itself tightening around her while Cassian stood several feet away and barely moved.

Raven stared at the word.

Air.

So that had been his Lattice.

She turned the page harder than necessary.

~~~~

The next section dealt with alignment.

Elemental affinity followed blood. It could not simply be chosen, and no amount of training could force an element into someone whose bloodline did not support it.

Even the Cardinal Houses, with generations of refinement behind them and some of the deepest Lattices in existence, remained tied to one primal element each.

Then, near the bottom of the page, another heading caught her.

RECORDED EXCEPTION — THE ALPHA QUEEN.

Raven’s hand stilled on the page.

For a moment she was back in the Blackthorn kitchen, with Sera’s voice coming from beside the ovens, barely louder than a breath.

Only one line ever carried more than one Alpha mate.

The Alpha Queen.

The Queen is always bound to four—

Then Marta had rounded on her before she could finish.

Comparing a wolfless omega to the Queen — that’s sacrilege.

At the time, Raven had been standing in a kitchen with two newly discovered mates who had already decided she wasn’t good enough for either of them, Celeste nearby and half of House Blackthorn staring.

An old story whispered beside the ovens had not exactly ranked high among her problems.

Now it was printed in an academy book.

Raven pulled the lamp closer.

And read.

~~~~

The account went back much farther than she expected, beyond the Great Houses and even beyond the point where wolves and vampires had become separate peoples.

According to the oldest surviving traditions, before that division there had been one source.

The Vinter Varg.

Raven frowned.

She read the name again.

The oldest accounts described the Vinter Varg as the origin from which both races descended. Wolves and vampires had separated over generations, becoming different bloodlines, different societies and eventually rivals, but records preserved on both sides still pointed toward the same beginning.

Both sides.

Raven’s eyes lingered there.

She hadn’t even known vampire records were kept in Valerius.

She continued.

The Vinter Varg had not disappeared completely with her first death.

Her essence returned, but not through blood inheritance or from mother to daughter.

When one incarnation died, another eventually appeared somewhere in the world, born into a different body, a different family and an entirely different life, with the same ancient source beneath it all.

Raven’s eyes moved more slowly across the next paragraph.

Each incarnation remained her own person.

The text was unusually firm about that. The women who carried the title did not necessarily awaken with the memories of those who had lived before them. Most recorded incarnations apparently had not.

At some point, Raven realised she had stopped moving in the chair.

The book went on to explain why the Alpha Queen had mattered at all.

Wolves and vampires had begun from the same origin, then divided until they became two peoples capable of turning on one another. Again and again, the balance between the races had fractured badly enough to threaten both.

The Alpha Queen was the one figure tied to both, not simply by politics, but by blood and spirit.

She appeared in periods when that balance began to collapse.

Raven’s brow furrowed as she thought about it, then she turned the page.

On elemental capacity, the next section began.

She nearly skimmed past it.

Then the second line stopped her.

Every significant bloodline carried one dominant elemental alignment.

That was the rule.

The Cardinal Houses were the clearest surviving proof.

The Alpha Queen was the recorded exception.

Every known incarnation had demonstrated affinity for all four primal elements.

Fire.

Air.

Earth.

Water.

Not mastery—the text made that distinction carefully—but the capacity to resonate with all four rather than being limited to one.

Raven stared at the list.

Then she turned back two pages and looked again at the Cardinal Houses.

Four elements.

The old kitchen conversation surfaced again.

Four mates.

A queen who returned in different lives.

Raven’s mouth tightened.

No.

She put her palm flat against the page.

Absolutely not.

The two Blackthorn bonds had already done enough damage, and whatever the hell had happened between her wolf and Cassian in the Hunt was a problem she was not dragging into some ancient prophecy.

Alaric had appeared only this afternoon offering to forgive her for escaping them. None of that was fate revealing some grand design.

It was a bad year.

And the rest of this ridiculous connection depended on one sentence spoken by a kitchen servant while everyone around her was panicking. Sera had been shouted down immediately. Old Bren had been making signs to the Goddess. Someone had even dropped a ladle.

People said strange things when they were frightened.

Old stories could fit almost anybody if you twisted them far enough.

You are not doing this.

Raven breathed out and rubbed two fingers over her forehead.

Only then did she glance at the lamp and the number of pages already turned.

She had been sitting here much longer than she’d intended.

Cassian had not sealed her inside a glowing boundary in the middle of a public library so she could spend the afternoon reading about ancient queens.

Raven straightened the book.

Then she turned the page.

A new heading filled the top.

DREAMWALKERS.