The Alpha's Scentless Bride

CHAPTER THREE: Nineteen Weeks Earlier

They buried me on a Tuesday.

I watched from the back of my father's car, wearing my sister's dress, while he stood over an empty box and told four hundred people how much he had loved me.

It rained the whole time. It always rains in the Lowmarch.

We bury fast here. The ground holds water like a cupped hand, and nobody thought it strange that there was nothing to put in the box.

The river takes people. The river has always taken people.

I counted the mourners because I had to do something with my hands.

Four hundred and six.

I had lived in that house twenty-two years and I could not have named forty of them.

xxx

My father spoke for eleven minutes.

I know because I counted that too.

He said I had been a quiet child. He said I had been gentle with the dogs.

He said the Goddess takes the soft ones early because she cannot stand to watch the world get at them.

A woman near the back made a sound like something tearing.

She believed him. She stood in the rain and grieved for a girl she had never once spoken to, and she meant every part of it.

Cassia cried harder than anyone.

That was the part I had not been ready for.

I had braced for the arranged, photographable grief she had been practising since she was nine. Instead she stood at our father's elbow with her hair coming down and her mouth ruined, and she sobbed, and it was real, and it was for me.

She just was not going to do anything about it.

xxx

There was a stone.

Grey, waist-high, cut that morning by a man who worked through the night for extra money and did not ask who he was cutting it for.

My name was on it.

Twenty-two years, and that was the first time anybody had put my name into anything that would last.

Nobody looked at the car.

Four hundred and six people and not one of them turned their head, and it was not discretion. There was simply nothing in that car worth looking at.

There never had been.

I had spent my whole life being unlooked-at, and that morning it became official, with witnesses.

The dress did not fit across the shoulders. Cassia is taller than me.

And the smell of it. Goddess, the smell of it.

Four hundred wolves grieving in the wet. Grief has a scent and it is enormous. It filled that field until the air went thick as broth.

I sat in the middle of it and gave off nothing at all.

xxx

The night before, my sister ruined our family in under a minute.

We were in my father's study. I was not invited. I was carrying the tray, which is a different kind of invitation and the only one I have ever had.

Cassia stood on the rug in her travelling coat with her hands in her pockets.

"Are your trunks loaded," my father said.

"No."

He asked again. He asks things twice.

"I am not going north."

My stepmother did not look up from her book.

I set the tray down. I have very good instincts about when to become furniture.

xxx

The letter was face-up on the blotter.

I read it upside down while I set out the cups, the way I read everything in that house, because in twenty-two years nobody has once thought to turn a paper over when I came into a room.

Most of it was lawyers.

One line was not.

I am not interested in a portrait, a lineage chart, or an assurance. Send me your daughter.

No courtesies. No signature block.

Whoever wrote that had written it himself and had not softened it for anybody.

I have been collecting things I was not given since I was old enough to reach a keyhole.

It is the only property I have ever owned.

xxx

Cassia told him about the boy.

Not a wolf. A human, from the town by the mill. She said his name out loud in that room, which was the bravest thing she has ever done and the last brave thing she did for a long while.

Then she told him the rest, with one hand flat on her stomach.

My father went very still.

Alpha Marek Thorne had asked for a Duvarr daughter. The alliance that keeps the Riven South from eating itself was to be sealed with a mating.

My father had spent four months telling every pack between here and the mountains that his daughter would be delivered at the winter turn.

And here was his daughter. On his rug. Pregnant by a human. Not going.

He did the arithmetic out loud.

That is the part I remember. He worked through it like a man reading a ledger. What it costs to break an alliance. What it costs to be the pack that broke it. How long the Lowmarch lasts alone.

How long he lasts.

He got to the end and started again, and the numbers came out the same both times.

Then he turned around and looked at me.

I want to be honest about this.

For about a second and a half, before I understood, something in me lifted. My father looked directly at me and my whole body came up to meet it like a dog at a door.

That is the thing I would take back, if I could take one thing back.

xxx

I knew three things about Alpha Marek Thorne and all three came out of the kitchen.

That he took Ashvale at twenty-eight, in a war, and that the man he took it from was his own uncle.

That he had never taken a Luna, though he was thirty-four and had been asked to by everybody in the South with a vote.

And that nobody had seen him run in six years.

Our cook said that was pride.

The laundry woman said it was something that happened at Harrow Ford, and neither of them would say another word after that.

I have been listening to kitchens my whole life. It is where you go when nobody wants you anywhere else, and it is where everything is known first.

I never once thought any of it would have anything to do with me.

xxx

My father hit me twice that night.

Once for asking a question. Once for bleeding on Cassia's dress.

"Hold still," he said.

He had my sister in a basket. That is the only way I know how to say it.

Her hairbrush. A collar she had worn three days running. A nightdress. Something off her pillow.

Six months of her, saved up and carried down from her room by my stepmother, who had gone to fetch it before anybody said the plan out loud.

He worked her into my throat with his thumbs.

Behind my ears. The insides of my wrists.

He was gentle about it. I had not expected that and did not know what to do with it. He took his time.

And he did not once look at my face while he did it.

That is the closest my father has come to touching me since I was four years old.

xxx

Then he brought out the medicine.

For eighteen years I rubbed that oil into my own skin. Every week. With my own hands.

And every single time, I thanked him for it.

It is for my blood. That is what he told me the first time, when I was small enough to believe that a father crouching down to your height meant something good was coming.

There is a thinness in your blood, Thea. Your mother had it. It is why you are not like the others, and it is why you do not turn. Keep up with the oil and you will live a long life like anybody else.

He said it kindly. He has always said it kindly.

It is the only subject on which he has ever been kind to me.

So I did it. Sunday nights, in front of the mirror, for so long that I could no longer remember the first time.

Pulse points. Throat. Wrists. The back of the neck.

It goes on grey and warm and smells of nothing at all, which I used to think was strange for a medicine, and then stopped thinking about at all, the way you stop hearing a clock.

He put it on heavier that night than he ever had.

Twice over, and a third pass at the nape.

xxx

Then he set nineteen small jars on the table in front of me.

Grey glass, sealed with wax. The kind of thing you would store honey in.

He lined them up with the flat of his hand until the row was straight.

I watched his hands do it, because his hands are the only part of my father I have ever been able to read.

They were steady.

"One a week," he said. "Sunday. Not late. Not early."

Nineteen.

I counted them twice, which took no time at all.

Then I did the second sum. The one that mattered.

Nineteen weeks.

"And after," he said, "you will be Cassia Duvarr, and you will be Luna of Ashvale, and you will not come back here."

He straightened the row again, though it was already straight.

"There is a stone in the yard with your name on it. Do you understand what that means?"

I said that I did.

I did not. Not the whole of it. Not then.

xxx

Cassia came down as far as the third stair and stopped there.

She had been crying. She would cry harder in the morning, in the rain, in front of everybody.

"Thank you," she said.

Of all the things.

Not sorry. Not do not go. Not I will fix it.

Thank you. The way you thank somebody for taking your shift.

I looked up at her for a while.

She has our father's hands and her own mother's face, and about seven months before any of it stopped being theoretical.

"Name him after nobody in this family," I said.

She was still standing on the third stair when the door closed.

I have thought about that word more often than I have thought about the slap.

xxx

My father walked me out to the car himself, which was a first.

He held the door, which was another.

I got in wearing my sister's dress and my sister's smell and the face my father has never once been able to look at, and I put the box on my lap because there was nowhere else to put it.

"What happens when they run out?"

He shut the car door.

xxx

We drove north for a day and a half.

The Lowmarch is green because it is drowning. By the second morning the green was gone.

Black rock under thin soil. Pines growing out of it sideways, as though something down there is always pushing.

I sat with the box on my lap for four hundred miles and did not open it once.

I made myself learn my sister instead.

The way she stands with her weight on one hip. The way she says of course when she means no. The little laugh she does before she says something unkind, which is really a warning, and which nobody in my family has ever heeded.

Twenty years of material and a day and a half to study it.

By the time we came up the ridge road I could do about nine minutes of her before I ran out.

Then the trees opened.

Four hundred people were waiting in the yard, and every one of them turned to look at the car.

xxx

He was standing at the top of the hall.

I saw his hands first. I always do.

My father taught me that without meaning to. You can watch a man's face lie to you all day. His hands tell the truth about eleven seconds before the rest of him gets there.

Marek Thorne's hands were scarred across the knuckles. Both of them. Old breaks, badly set.

And they were completely still.

Not clasped. Not folded. Not doing any of the small restless things hands do.

Just hanging at his sides, quiet, like two things somebody had put down and left.

He came down the hall and the crowd made a lane for him without being asked.

That was not deference. Deference is loud.

That was water going round a stone.

He stopped an arm's length from me and looked me over the way you look at a delivery.

"You are shorter than your portrait."

Behind me, four hundred people held their breath at the same time.

I heard it. And something in me that had been standing very still for twenty-two years put its head up.

"Portraits lie," I said.

Marek Thorne smiled. Barely, and not kindly, and not for anybody else in that hall.

"So do brides."

xxx

He scented me at the door, because custom requires it.

I stood with my chin up and my hands loose and counted the stones in the floor.

And I felt him not find it.

That is the only way I know how to say it.

Half a breath, no longer. Something in him reached out expecting to close on a thing that was there.

And closed on nothing.

He drew back an inch. He came in again.

The hall changed. Not silence. Four hundred people are never silent. But the particular quiet of a room where everybody stops doing what they were doing at slightly different times.

I did not move. I did not explain. I did not breathe out.

The one thing I had worked out on the drive north was that whatever happened in that hall, the worst thing I could possibly do was be the first person to mention it.

He straightened.

Whatever crossed his face went away so completely that I began to doubt I had seen it.

"She is welcome here," he told the room.

Four hundred voices said it back.

xxx

There was an old woman by the side door, in a chair somebody had carried there for her.

She had put herself where she could see the length of the hall and the doorway at once, which is not where you sit if you have come for the food.

She was not watching the Alpha.

She was watching me.

xxx

He came to my door that night.

I heard him in the corridor. When I opened it he did not come in. He stood in the frame with his hands hanging still at his sides and looked past me at the fire.

"You will be shown the grounds tomorrow. Vale will do it." A pause. "Ask her whatever you like. She will not lie to you, which is more than I can promise about anybody else in this house. Including me."

"Thank you, Alpha."

He nodded. He turned to go.

Then he stopped, and he did not turn back.

"Everybody in that hall tonight was frightened of me," he said. "Every one. Fear has a smell, and it is the only thing I have smelled in a room for six years."

Down the corridor a door closed. Somebody laughed at something, a long way off.

"You stood close enough to touch me. You were not frightened. You were not relieved. You were not bored, or brave, or lying."

He turned his head, not quite far enough to look at me.

"You did not smell of anything at all."

He walked away down the corridor.

xxx

I did not sleep.

At two in the morning I got the box out from under the board, set a jar on the table and took the lid off, because I wanted to look at it in a room that was not my father's.

Grey. Warm. Smelling of nothing at all.

I did my wrists.

I did my throat.

I did behind my ears.

Then I reached back for the nape of my neck.

And stopped.

You cannot reach your own spine. Nobody can. Not the middle of it. Not the place where the neck goes into the shoulders. Not properly, and not for forty minutes, and not well enough that it holds for six days in a house full of wolves.

Eighteen years. Every Sunday. In front of a mirror.

And every single one of those Sundays, somebody else had done the back.

I sat in that room with a jar in my hand and worked out, for the first time in my life, what my father's hands had actually been for.

Four days to Sunday.

Four hundred miles from the only person who had ever touched me.

And nineteen weeks to find somebody in that house willing to put their hands on the back of my neck and never once ask what they were doing there.