Winter's Claim

Chapter Four: North

Frosthaven did not announce itself gently. The road changed hours before the territory did, the trees thinning into bare white fields, the air turning sharp enough to sting the inside of my nose with every breath.

Bjorn rode ahead of the small convoy for most of the journey, saying almost nothing, and I spent the silence memorizing the scars along the back of his neck and wondering what kind of life carved a man into something that hard.

"You're staring," he said, without turning around, on the second day.

I flushed. "I didn't realize wolves could hear that well from horseback."

"We can't," he said. "I felt it."

I did not have an answer for that, and he did not offer one either, and we rode the rest of that day in a silence that felt, somehow, less hostile than it had at my father's table.

Frosthaven's keep rose out of the ice like something carved rather than built, gray stone against gray sky, and the pack that gathered to watch us arrive did not bother hiding their opinion of me. I heard the word omega muttered at least three times before I had even dismounted, each time like an insult rather than a fact.

A woman stepped forward before Bjorn had finished speaking to his guards. Sharp-eyed, dark-haired, unmistakably comfortable in this territory in a way I would never be.

"This is her?" the woman asked, looking me over like livestock at auction. "The southern omega?"

"Mira," Bjorn said, a warning in the single word.

"I'm only saying what everyone's thinking." Mira's smile did not reach her eyes. "Frosthaven's Luna should be able to survive a winter here. Has she ever even seen real snow?"

"I grew up walking to see it every year my father allowed a trip north," I said, before I could stop myself. "I imagine that's more than most of your pack has seen of my kingdom's summers."

A ripple went through the gathered wolves, something between shock and reluctant amusement. Mira's expression flattened.

Bjorn's mouth did something that was almost, briefly, a smile before he smoothed it away. "Ingrid," he said, to a younger woman near the front, "show Aria to her rooms."

Ingrid, I would learn within the hour, was Bjorn's younger sister, and she studied me with the same wary assessment as everyone else, though something in her eyes seemed less settled about it than Mira's open hostility.

"You shouldn't have said that to her," Ingrid told me once we were alone in the stone corridor. "Mira's wanted my brother for years. You just made an enemy on your first hour here."

"She was already my enemy," I said. "I'd rather she just be honest about it."

Ingrid's mouth twitched, almost approving. "You're not what I expected."

"What did you expect?"

"Someone who'd cry the whole way here." She shrugged. "Viktor talked about the arrangement sometimes, before he died. Said the southern princess sounded soft."

The mention of Viktor's name settled between us, heavier than she probably intended. "Was he like his brother?" I asked.

Something shuttered in Ingrid's face. "No," she said. "Viktor talked more. Bjorn's carried the guilt of what happened to him for two years without saying a single word about it to anyone. You'll learn not to ask."

I did not press her further that first night, though I filed the information away carefully, because a man capable of that much silent guilt was clearly capable of far more feeling than he let on at a negotiating table.

That night, alone in a cold stone room at the edge of the world, I touched the scar on my collarbone and thought, for the first time since Damon's ceremony, not about what I had lost, but about what kind of man might be standing in front of me now instead.

I did not yet know that somewhere south of Frosthaven's borders, a rival Alpha named Silas Drake had already heard about the marriage, and had already begun deciding exactly how to use it against the pack that had just taken me in.