Liora sat on the cold bank with her boots drawn up, the hem of her cloak damp where it touched the grass. The river moved with the patience of the world, a steady, indifferent current that swallowed light and sound and secrets without judgement. She picked up a smooth stone and tossed it, watching the circle ripple outward and disappear. Then another. And another. Each small splash was a punctuation, a private litany she could not speak.
The night before still lingered like a bruise behind her ribs. She could feel the press of it when she breathed: the blood slick of the courtyard stones, the smell of iron that had not washed from her hair, the way faces had slid from worship to panic so quickly that gratitude had never had time to form. She had been the blade and no one had acknowledged the hand that wielded it. Instead, their eyes had been only for the collapsed white figure on the altar and the child now claimed by the river.
She counted the ripples like a child counts beads. One—two—three. Each one died before the next thought could take hold. Ideas came and slipped away: revenge, speech, a public claim, a sudden, furious confrontation that would scorch everything to ash and make them remember. None of them lasted. When she tried to imagine lifting her voice and saying what she had done, the words tasted strange and small in her mouth. When she tried to imagine stabbing Vanya while the pack watched, her hands trembled not with purpose but with longing for a gentler thing — for Gonzalo's nearness, for the warmth of the hearth after rain. The contradiction inside her was a maw with two tongues. She had no map through it.
A shadow broke across the rippled water. Nyssa's approach was not quiet, the healer's feet carried the hurry of someone who had spent too many nights without sleep. Liora did not look up until the hand reached for her shoulder.
The slap came without a warning that mattered. It landed across Liora's cheek like a bell, sharp and final. For a second everything went white at the edges, the slap bright as lightning. The taste of copper flooded her mouth and the stone she'd been holding clattered from her fingers into the river with a dull sound that she barely registered.
"You killed her." Nyssa's voice was a raw thing, brittle with accusation. There was not only anger in it but a tremor of grief that made the words quake. "You killed the child. A child? Liora, you are evil."
Liora kept her face turned toward the river. She did not rise. She did not clutch at her cheek. She let the wet air carry away the sting. A sound like a chuckle slipped out of her, small and humorless.
Nyssa's breath hitched. "You…how can you…" She pressed her palms to her own face as if to hold herself together. "How can you sit here and act like nothing happened? Do you understand what you've done? Do you understand what you've taken? The Alpha and Lina's only child!"
Liora's chest tightened and something like a smile, bitter and small, ghosted at the corner of her mouth. "You think I would boast?" she said quietly. Her voice had the calm of someone carrying a slow burning coal in her mouth. "You think I would stand here and sing of it?"
Nyssa's hands curled into fists. Her eyes were wet but hard. "Everyone says you wanted her gone and I know you hate her mother. You stood at his door. You held the blade. If I didn't stop you…you…" She spit the words out like poison. "You are a witch, Liora. A bitter loser who can't accept what she has lost. You want to see them suffer because you cannot have Gonzalo."
The word "witch" fell in the air and took up weight. Liora let it sit there between them, a stone on the water. She watched Nyssa's reflection quake with the ripples from a new stone, and for a moment it looked like a pair of eyes she had once trusted.
"I didn't kill her," Liora said. The words were almost inaudible, softer than the river's murmur. She did not look at Nyssa when she spoke, she let the sentence go out into the night as if it might find purchase on its own. There was no pleading in it, no defense rehearsed; it was not even an insistence. It was only the simple unadorned truth she had for herself. "There was no reason for me to do that."
Nyssa's laugh was a sound like knives. It had no warmth. "You expect me to believe that?" she demanded. "After everything? After the blade? After the pyre? You come here and tell me you are innocent? Liora, you wanted to kill Gonzalo, I tricked you to stop…do you know what the people say? They say the Moon cleansed us of you by giving them Vanya back. They say you are the one who could not hold what was yours, so you tried to take what was theirs."
"Belief is not proof," Liora replied. Her hands, damp with river spray, folded together in her lap. The river's light blue black surface reflected the moon in ridged shards. "You can believe what you will." Her voice did not rise, it held the steady tone of someone who had learned to live with accusation as atmosphere.
Nyssa's shoulders sagged with something that might have been pity and might have been exhaustion. "You are impossible," she said finally, the words low. "You are a wound that will not scab. You are poison, Liora. You want to punish them all for the life you think you lost."
Liora let out another short, dark sound that could have been a laugh or a sob. "You were there," she said. "You were there when I… when I did what I had to do. You know why I acted. But believe me, I didn't kill their child."
Nyssa's eyes went hard. "I know enough to know you were not meant to choose who lives and who dies like some capricious goddess," she said. "I know enough to know that when a child drowns, the hand that held the blade looks guilty whether it did a thing or not."
For a breath, the two women were simply women: one raw with grief and fury, the other folded inward like a book closed on an unfinished line. The r
iver moved between them, impartial.