Water had been falling into the same basin in this courtyard for two hundred years, and Elijah Mikaelson stood in front of it at dusk listening to his brother wear a groove in the gallery above.
Klaus had been pacing for forty minutes.
The rhythm of it told Elijah everything about the evening he was going to have: nine steps to the corner, a pause, nine steps back, and every third circuit a hand coming down flat on the rail.
“Sophie Deveraux,” Klaus said, from the railing, without preamble, “thinks she can use my child as leverage.”
“She can.”
“She doesn’t understand what she’s provoking.”
“She understands perfectly. She’s a witch.” Elijah didn’t look up.
“They have been provoking us for three hundred years. What’s different is that this provocation carries something you want, and she knows it, and so do you.”
“The child is mine.”
“The child is a position on a board you refuse to read, because reading it would require admitting that other people also have moves.”
Klaus came off the rail and the turn was violence with nowhere to go.
Never at Elijah.
In a thousand years, never once at Elijah, because the one person Klaus had never put a hand on was the one person whose loyalty he had never been certain of surviving without.
The fury would find somewhere else.
It always did.
The city would pay for it inside the week and Elijah would bury what needed burying and Rebekah would watch from a balcony with the exhaustion of a sister who had spent a millennium waiting on a family that never arrived.
“She’s been at it since Tuesday,” Rebekah said from the balcony, on cue.
“The witch. She’s had three separate people watching this compound and she’s not even hiding them well.”
“Then she wants us to see them,” Elijah said.
“Or she’s incompetent.”
“She isn’t.”
Rebekah came down two steps and stopped, arms folded on the rail.
“Nik, I’ll say the unpopular thing. Let her have her ritual. Let her have her dead girls and her consecrated ground and whatever it is these people do out at Lafayette. We take the wolf girl, we put her somewhere with a door, and the whole leverage problem evaporates in an afternoon.”
“And the pack she’s living with?” Elijah asked.
“What about them?”
“They are the only faction in this city with a legitimate grievance against us and no power to press it. If we take a pregnant woman out of their camp by force, we hand them a cause. Grievance is survivable. Cause is not.”
“You always talk like the city’s a chessboard.”
“The city is worse than a chessboard, Rebekah. On a chessboard the pieces don’t have opinions.”
“You know what I think?” She came the rest of the way down and stood on the bottom step so she could look at him level.
“I think you’ve been running this same play since Rome. Find the reasonable party. Give them something. Take the blame when Nik ruins it. And you’ll run it here, and in fifty years there’ll be a different city and a different reasonable party and you’ll be standing in a different courtyard explaining to me that the pieces have opinions.”
“That is broadly accurate.”
“Doesn’t it exhaust you?”
“Yes.”
She hadn’t been braced for the yes.
He watched her adjust.
“Then why?”
“Because the alternative has been tried.” Elijah turned his cuff down.
“Twice, by me. Once for eleven years, when I decided this family was a wound and stopped attending to it. Do you recall what those eleven years produced?”
“You daggered me for nine of them, so no.”
“That is precisely what they produced.”
Always and forever.
The oath was a thousand years old and Elijah had been the one to speak it, not Klaus, who was its subject and never its author.
The speaking had been the first in a long line of promises the family had broken and remade across centuries and continents.
They had daggered one another.
They had gone decades apart and come back with the inevitability of a tide answering a moon no astronomer had ever charted.
The vow was stronger than the hatred.
The vow was where the hatred came from.
There were boxes.
That was the part outsiders never grasped when they heard the oath and found it touching.
Always and forever had been enforced, on four separate occasions, with an ash-wood dagger and a crate, and every one of them had been inside one at least once, and every one of them had come out and sat down to dinner with the person who had put them there.
A family capable of that could survive anything, which was the strength.
A family capable of that could therefore be persuaded to survive anything, which was the trap.
“The witches want the Harvest completed,” Elijah said.
“Marcel wants Davina Claire kept alive as his weapon against them. The wolves want their rights in the Quarter restored. Every player in this city holds a goal that cuts across yours. Kill Sophie Deveraux tonight and you lose the only faction currently offering you the thing you cannot take by force. The child’s safety. The mother’s cooperation. A door that opens from the inside.”
Klaus was silent.
It was the silence of a mind pricing patience and finding the number offensive.
“Then what do you suggest, brother?” The word came out as a weapon rather than an endearment, the claim staked by someone who had never once let Elijah forget what the vow bound him to.
“What is the honorable path through a city full of people who would kill my child before it draws breath?”
Elijah turned from the fountain and faced him across the stones.
Ten feet, and a thousand years, and nothing in the space between them but the oath.
“Patience. Negotiation. The slow work of an alliance that doesn’t rest on fear.” He let that stand a beat.
“Sophie wants the Harvest finished. We offer her Davina’s cooperation in exchange for Hayley’s safety. We gain a witch faction in our debt. Marcel’s grip on the Quarter loosens without a single body. The wolves watch us keep a bargain made with one of their own, and they remember it. The city arrives at an order that doesn’t require weekly bloodshed to hold.”
“And the girl in the attic?”
“Marcel loses his weapon. The Harvest completes without her death. I will find the mechanism.”
“You’ll find the mechanism.” Klaus’s mouth moved.
“You always find the mechanism.”
“She is a victim, Niklaus. Not currency. She deserves better than to be passed between factions until she’s spent.”
Rebekah made a small noise on the balcony.
“He’s going to say yes, you know. He always says yes to you and then does it his way anyway.”
Klaus laughed, and it was the laugh of a man who had spent a thousand years learning that the honorable road was the slowest route to every destination he had ever wanted.
“You’ve always been better at this than me,” he said.
“The diplomacy. The patience. The extraordinary belief that people can be trusted to honor their bargains.” He started back toward the upper floors.
“Do what you think best. You always do. But if your diplomacy fails, if Sophie crosses us, if the wolves turn, if this city decides against this family as every city eventually decides, I will do what I have always done. And you will be standing beside me while I do it.”
Threat, promise and covenant, in one sentence, delivered on the stairs.
Rebekah waited until his footsteps were gone off the boards above.
“He’s already got a name picked out,” she said.
“Did you know that? He hasn’t told anybody. He said it in his sleep.”
“Klaus doesn’t sleep.”
“No,” she agreed.
“He doesn’t.” She stayed at the rail a moment.
“Elijah. If it’s a girl, and he can’t keep her, he will burn this city to the waterline and call it grief, and you’ll be the one who has to decide whether to stop him.”
“I know.”
“Say you’ll stop him.”
“I’ll do what the vow requires.”
“That isn’t the same thing and you know it isn’t.”
“No,” Elijah said.
“It isn’t.”
She went in.
Elijah stood alone with the fountain keeping its two-hundred-year rhythm and the oath sitting heavier on him than it had in decades.
Always and forever.
The thing that held them together was the thing that kept them where they were.
Honor was the slowest weapon in his hand and the only one that had ever left a family standing after the killing was finished.
He would find a way through.
He always did, and the cost was always the same, and the cost was part of the vow, and the vow was part of him.
He took his phone out of his coat, found the number Sophie Deveraux had given him that afternoon, and walked out through the compound gates dialing.