Ilsa folded her arms. “I don’t see how neither of those things helps us.”
He grinned. “Oh, we’re sending Cogna back, alright. In a coffin. I shall attach a note saying ‘sorry’ to the lid and I’m sixty per cent certain this whole kidnapping saga will blow over.”
Ilsa gaped. She didn’t know him well enough to tell if he was serious. “They’ll know,” she said.
“Ah.” He wagged a finger at her. “But they can’t See Cogna. They won’t even try to check.”
“That’s still the stupidest plan I ever heard.”
Gedeon winked. “But you have to agree it has a roguish charm.”
He took in her total lack of amusement and sighed. “We have bigger problems, Ilsa. For all we know, every member of the Fortunatae was at that orphanage, and are now all dead. All but the one who matters.”
Alitz. Ilsa hadn’t really expected to find her in the fray, but in the night, she had dreamed that she had. She had dreamed it was the Sage’s throat she had torn out in that attic.
Then, in the morning, she had found Georgiana and asked her if the wolves kept records.
“What kind of records?” she asked, frowning.
“Like reports of incidents and deaths and that.”
“When anything like that happens, we write a written report for the commander.” She shrugged. “The alpha sees them weekly, but I don’t know what happens to them after that.”
She took Ilsa to Liesel, who told them to ask Cassia, who directed them to a corner of the library where Georgiana helped Ilsa search decades of wolves’ reports until she found what she was looking for.
Alitz had implied that the incident she once described – the death of an abusive husband and the Whitechapel steward who had tried to protect the man’s wife – was recent, or perhaps Ilsa had just assumed. But after learning the Sage’s identity, a vague hunch had taken hold.
And she was right. It had taken her the whole morning and three cups of tea, but Ilsa finally found the report from fifty years ago. The wolf who had recorded the incident had been thorough, and perhaps a little emotional, as they described the tragedy. How the woman had approached the border, lip bleeding and nose broken, and begged the stewards to keep her husband from her. How the stewards had refused her husband entry to Whitechapel. How he had appealed to the wolves, but they had sided with the stewards.
But then the accounts diverged. The wolf wrote that the man had indeed shifted into a bear and charged the guard point, but as the wolves had rushed to tackle him, one of the stewards had reached out with their magic and subdued him. Heedless to the danger having passed, a second steward had raised his gun and shot the bear dead.
The author didn’t know who struck first after that – the wolves or the stewards – only that the single casualty of the fight had not been at the hands of either militia, but the dead man’s wife, who had taken his killer between her teeth and torn his throat out. The wolf’s handwriting shook as they recorded that the dead steward’s young daughter had been sent to fetch him home for tea. The fighting had stopped when the child ran out into the fray. She had knelt in the street with her father’s head in her lap, sobbing as he bled out.
His name was Amadeo Dicer.
Ilsa wondered at how Alitz remembered it differently. In her eyes, her father had been a hero, guilty of nothing but defending himself and the woman who ultimately took his life. Could the wolf who reported on the tragedy be mistaken? Or had Amadeo killed a man who posed no threat to him?
Ilsa couldn’t know if what Alitz had suffered as a child made her choose the path she had gone down – the massacre she had ordered over three decades later – or whether watching her father die like that solidified a hate Amadeo himself had nurtured in her.
But whatever had happened that day, and whatever it had done to Alitz, Ilsa knew none of the people who were dead because of the Sage had been responsible. Not her parents, nor Hester’s father, nor the grandfather and aunt she never knew. Not Oren, or Bill Blume. Alitz’s quarrel was with a distraught widow who was probably in the grave.
But now Ilsa’s was with Alitz.
She decided she would tell her brother what she’d discovered that morning, but not yet. The revelation that Alitz was the Sage had wounded Ilsa, but Gedeon had learned that the person who had slaughtered most of his family was someone he had known and trusted his whole life. She didn’t want to inflict what she was feeling on him too; the sense of injustice, the futility of everything that had been lost, and the fear of the way her own hate was eating at her.
Gedeon was staring off across the lawn. No doubt his thoughts were also on Alitz. Perhaps he was thinking not of the past, but of what the Sage’s next move would be.
“The matter with the Oracles is done with,” he said. “I don’t believe the Seer ever planned to shackle themselves to the Fortunatae. They broke the Principles against the Heart when they aided the rebels in the raid, possibly against Whitechapel too for the Fortunatae’s part in this. And whilst the Principles are foggy on the legality of allying with insurgents in retaliation for kidnapping, if the Seer has any sense at all, they’ll want to call this one even. They can’t afford to hold a grudge over a fake kidnapping any more than Camden can afford to worry about it.”
Ilsa gingerly perched next to him. “If you’re trying to reassure me—”
“I’m not.” He braced his forearms on his knees, his levity vanishing. “I want you to know what kind of city
