The Rejected Heir Of Greywake

Chapter 2: Borrowed Courage

POV: Mera

"Hold still or I'm gonna stab you," Iyla said, pins between her teeth, working the laces up my back like she was closing a wound.

"You've been threatening to stab me since I was twelve."

"And I still haven't. Consider yourself lucky." She yanked the last lace tight, and I sucked in a breath. Her hands stopped. "That hurt?"

"No."

"Mera."

"It's fine." I pulled my sleeve down over the bruise on my forearm before she could get a good look at it, but she'd already seen. She always sees. Iyla's the kind of person who notices the thing you're hiding before you've finished hiding it, and then decides, every single time, whether it's worth making you talk about it.

This time she let it go. She just pressed her thumb, light, right over the sleeve where the bruise was, like she was marking the spot to come back to later.

"Who," she said. Not a question really. More like she was starting a list.

"Doesn't matter."

"It does to me."

"It was training. I fell wrong." That was half true. The other half was that Toren's cousin had "accidentally" put an elbow into my arm two days ago and laughed when I didn't make a sound, and I wasn't in the mood to say that part out loud, because saying it out loud makes it a thing that happened to me instead of a thing I got through.

Iyla didn't buy it. I could tell by the set of her mouth. But she also didn't push, because that's the deal we've had for years: she lets me keep my secrets as long as I let her keep an eye on the damage.

The room I share at the foster house doesn't have a mirror, so she'd brought her own, propped against the water jug. I looked wrong in it somehow. Same face I always have, dark hair, tired eyes, except tonight someone had put me in a dress the colour of dried blood and called it an honour.

"You don't have to go," Iyla said, quieter now, watching me in the glass instead of at me. "Nobody's Omega paperwork gets flagged for missing a ceremony."

"I have to go."

"Says who?"

"Says the part of me that's spent fourteen years trying not to get flagged for anything." I turned from the mirror because I didn't like what my face was doing in it. "Besides. It's one ceremony. I stand in a line, the bond does or doesn't do anything, and I go back to being nobody by morning. That's the whole thing."

"That's not the whole thing, and you know it."

I didn't answer that, because she was right, and I've never been good at lying to Iyla's face. I've gotten very good at lying to everyone else's.

Rook let himself in without knocking, the way he does, boots loud, grin already up. He's Unshifted, which means the Ashwood kids are supposed to be scared of him, and mostly are, and I've never understood why, because the scariest thing about Rook is his mouth.

"Look at you," he said, circling me once like I was livestock at auction. "Somebody cleaned up nice."

"Somebody's going to hit you."

"Violence, on ceremony night. Bold choice." He dropped onto the end of my cot, uninvited, same as always. "You nervous?"

"Why would I be nervous?"

"Because your hands are doing the thing." He nodded at them. I hadn't noticed I was picking at my own knuckles until he said it, and I made myself stop. "It's alright to want it, you know. The bond thing. Nobody's gonna think less of you."

"I don't want it."

"Uh huh."

"I don't."

"You've been staring at Vane Ashwood since we were fifteen, but sure, you don't want it," Rook said it easily, no bite in it, which somehow made it worse than if he'd meant to needle me. "I'm not judging. Man's got a jaw like he's permanently deciding whether to arrest someone. It's a look."

"I watch him because he's the alpha-heir. Everyone watches him."

"Sure." Rook grinned wider. "That's why you watch him."

I threw a boot at him. He caught it, which was annoying, because he always catches it.

Iyla wasn't laughing with us. She'd gone still by the window, arms folded, and when I glanced over, her face had that look it gets sometimes, like a door shutting fast enough that you only catch the draft of it.

"You alright?" I asked.

"Fine."

"Iyla."

"I said I'm fine." She unfolded her arms, made herself busy refolding a shawl that didn't need refolding.

"It's probably nothing," I said. "One of the registrars pulled me aside earlier, asked about my full name for the ledger. I told him Greywake, same as always, and he wrote it down like it was nothing, but you're doing that thing with your face right now. The thing you're doing right now."

"What thing?"

"The door-closing thing."

"I don't have a door-closing thing."

"You've had it since I said Greywake."

She looked at me a beat too long before she answered, like she was deciding how much of the truth to hand over. "I knew people in the old Guardian order, before your time. Before mine, really, but I heard the stories, sat at enough kitchen tables listening to the old ones talk when they thought nobody young was paying attention. Ceremonies like this one used to mean something different. Didn't always end kind."

"It's just a bond reveal."

"It's never just anything." She looked at me then, and something in it made my stomach drop before she even said the rest. "Whatever happens tonight, don't let it tell you what you're worth. A ceremony's a ceremony. It's not a verdict."

"Okay," I said, because I didn't know what else to say to that, and because some part of me the part I keep locked up tight, the part that's still seven years old, standing on a porch with a bag packed, watching a door close and a family's car pull away without me in it wanted, badly, for tonight to be exactly the verdict she was warning me off of. I wanted someone, once, to look at me and not be able to look away. I wanted to stop being the thing people forget in a room.

I didn't say any of that. I just nodded, and let Rook needle me about my hair until I almost forgot to be scared.

We walked to the Great Hall together, the three of us, torches already lit along the path, the whole pack moving toward the same place like water finding a drain. My dress caught on a branch, and I yanked it free. Rook cracked a joke I didn't hear the end of.

And underneath my ribs, low and sudden, something that had been sleeping my whole life opened one eye.

My wolf woke up before the ceremony even started.