Seven Names Under The Bed

**Elara's POV** The lock clicked, and I counted. Fourteen links ran from the cuff on my wrist to the bedpost. I slid my thumb over each one. Rough, greasy, worn smooth by hands that came before mine. Fourteen. I went again, because a number that never changes is the closest thing to company I've ever had. Still fourteen. Out in the hall, the pack's footsteps went down the stairs. Slow at first, then not slow at all. By the end, somebody was almost running. I didn't blame them. The climb had taken most of the day. Nobody spoke. Snow squeaked under our boots, and my breath hung in front of me like a ghost trying to keep up. My mother's cousin walked ahead with the rope wrapped around his fist. He hadn't needed it. Where would I run? Every door in the valley had been shut to me for years. Elder Osric came last, holding the lantern, keeping its light turned from my face. Halfway up, I slipped on ice, and three people reached for me before they remembered who I was. Their hands drew back. I caught myself on a rock. "Careful," Osric told the air. At the castle gate, he cleared his throat. "It's an honor, girl." Then he studied his boots until he was gone. An honor. In eighteen years, nobody in my valley had called me anything but Hollow. I remember the morning I turned ten. Every child there felt their wolf wake by that birthday. Some woke screaming. Some laughed. Mara, the baker's girl, ran three laps around the well before breakfast, wild with it. I stood in the yard with my hand flat on my chest and waited. I told myself it was only late. I waited that whole day, and the next, and the one after. By the end of the month, the other kids had stopped using my name. By the end of the year, the grown-ups had too. Nobody was cruel. That would have been easier. They just looked past me, the way you look past a window. Inside the castle, a gray-faced steward had led me down a hall that smelled of wet stone. He walked me to this room, this bed, and worked the cuff around my wrist with hands that shook. "Don't pull on it," he'd said. "It only hurts you." He hadn't said sorry. He'd wanted to. I watched him swallow it. Now I sat on a mattress as wide as a wagon, heaped with furs that stank of old smoke. The hearth had burned down to a red smear. Cold came up through the floor and found my toes. The cuff was heavier than it looked, and it pulled my arm toward the post whenever I forgot it was there. Something breathed in the corner. It was slow and rough, like a saw pulled through wet wood. The hair rose along my arms. I pushed my back against the post until the carving bit into my spine, and I tried to think the plain thought. This is it. The elders had told me the king ate whatever they brought him. They'd said it kindly, the way you tell a child the well is deep. I waited for claws on stone. For the rush of a body. Nothing came. Only the breathing, with a wheeze at the end of every pull, like a man who had run a long way and couldn't stop. I looked at the door. Useless. I looked at the window. Barred. My thumb was already sliding along the links again, and I hadn't told it to. Fourteen. Fourteen. Then a foot scraped the floor. Bare skin on stone, and the sound of it made my mouth go dry. A shape leaned out of the dark and the last of the firelight caught it. Tall. Sleeves torn off at the shoulders. One hand flat against the wall, fingers spread, gripping it like the stone was the only thing holding him up. He was shaking. That was what I hadn't planned for. Not teeth, not claws. A shake that ran through his arms and down his ribs, and a muscle in his jaw that jumped, and jumped, and jumped, as though he were biting down on something that wanted out. He came no closer. He stayed at the edge of the light, like a stranger who has knocked on a door he has no right to open. Heat rolled off him. I felt it from across the room, dry and prickling, and my scalp went damp even with the floor still freezing my feet. The air smelled of scorched cloth. A drop of sweat ran off his chin and hit the stone with a tiny hiss. Kaelen. The Ashen King. The name mothers used to end an argument. Eat your greens or the Ashen King will come for you. I'd heard it in my cradle. I had built him a face in my head, and it had fangs. The real one was young. Younger than I'd guessed. Black hair stuck to his forehead, and hollows sat under his cheekbones like thumbprints. His eyes were the dull gold of a coin that's been handled too much. They found mine and held them. I knew hunger. I had watched wolves circle a fallen deer, and I'd watched my own pack look at me at supper, wondering whether I'd earned the bread. This wasn't that. This was a person at the bottom of a well, looking up. I forgot to breathe. His mouth opened. Closed. His hands, I noticed, had gone behind his back, tucked out of sight like a child hiding something broken. The shake got worse. A sound came out of his chest, low and cracked, and he swallowed it back down. I wanted to say something clever. I'm good at that. When I can't be strong, I can at least be quick, and the pack had learned to leave me alone once I started asking questions they couldn't answer. But nothing came. My throat had shut like a fist. So we stayed like that, him in the dark, me on the bed, a room's length of hot air between us and the fire dying down to a few coals. Somewhere in the walls, a pipe ticked as it cooled. Somewhere below, a door boomed shut. He took a step. Only one. His bare foot came down on the stone as carefully as if the floor might give way. I pulled my knees up. The chain dragged and rang. The sound was much too loud. He flinched at it. Not me. Him.His whole body jerked away from the noise, and for one strange second I thought, he's afraid of the chain.Not afraid of what it held. Afraid of what it meant. Then he looked at me again, and the thing in his face nearly undid me, because I knew it. I had worn it myself. It's the look of someone waiting to be told they're too much. His lips parted. The words came out so quiet I almost missed them, a whisper cracked down the middle and scraped raw at the edges. "Please don't be afraid of me."