Silver Scars & Hollow Hearts

The Verdict

They called it a judgment, which was the pack's word for a trial that had already reached its conclusion and was proceeding through the formal steps in the order tradition required.

Klaus knew this. He had presided over pack judgments himself, in Aldric's absence, on two occasions. He knew the shape of them. He knew how they moved, from accusation to evidence to witness to deliberation to verdict, each step necessary and each step, in the cases he had seen, reflecting something true.

He stood at the center of the pack's gathering circle, outdoors, because a matter of this gravity required the open sky and the whole pack present and he counted heads. Four hundred wolves. Every adult member of Silverstone pack. 

He had the sudden, strange thought that he had never been in the center of this circle before. He had always been at the Alpha's side, slightly behind, watching other people face what he was now facing.

He made himself be still.

He had done nothing wrong. He knew he had done nothing wrong. He knew that knowing was not the same as being able to prove, and he also knew that an accusation this serious, with evidence this arranged, was not something that had happened accidentally.

Someone had built this.

Someone had built it very carefully, around him, while he was sleeping.

"The charge is murder."

Aldric's voice rang out across the gathering circle with the particular resonance it took on when he was being formally Alpha,not the conversational warmth of the man Klaus had known his entire life, but the thing underneath that, the thing that was older and harder and did not bend.

"The murder of Elder Cassian, senior council member of the Silverstone Pack. The evidence has been presented to the council. The council has deliberated. Do you have anything to say in your defense, Klaus Dravon?"

He did. He had a great deal to say. He had been saying it, to anyone who would listen, since the council chambers, and he had watched each word land and slide off and leave no mark.

He said it anyway.

He said he had not left his quarters. He said his knife had been taken while he slept. He said the blood on his hands was impossible, that he could not have been present at a killing, returned to his quarters, and slept through until morning without the scent of it waking him, because no wolf with his training slept through the smell of fresh blood at close range. 

He said Elder Cassian had been kind to him since childhood, that there was no motive, that there had never been any conflict between them.

He said all of it clearly and steadily and he watched it make no difference at all.

He looked at Renna. She was looking at the ground.

He looked at Liora. She was looking slightly to his left, at nothing.

He looked at Aldric.

His brother was looking at him with the expression of a man who was bearing something terrible, and it was so exactly what grief looked like and so completely wrong,wrong in a way Klaus had no language for, wrong in a way he would not be able to articulate until much later, when he had distance and time and the particular clarity that comes from surviving something that should have killed you, that for a moment he simply could not breathe.

"The council has reached its verdict."

Vanitas let the words settle.

"Guilty."

The word hit Klaus in the chest.

It did not knock him back. He had too many years of discipline for it to show on his face or in his posture. But something inside him, something that had been held upright by faith, by fifteen years of believing that loyalty was not wasted, that the things you built were real,took the word and came apart.

"No."

He said it without meaning to.

"No. I didn't do this. I didn't, Aldric, tell them. Tell them you know I didn't…"

His brother's face did not change.

It was that that broke him. Not the verdict. Not the silence of four hundred wolves. The stillness of his brother's face.

"The sentence."

Vanitas turned from him to address the pack.

"In accordance with pack law. For the murder of a council elder. The accused is stripped of rank, bloodline recognition, and pack membership. He is to be exiled beyond pack borders."

A pause.

"To the east."

Murmurs through the crowd. East meant vampire territory. East was not exile. East was a death sentence dressed in different words.

"Let the border collect what the pack no longer claims."

Klaus said nothing.

There was nothing left to say.