Marriage to the Alpha

Chapter5

Elara knew three things when she woke, and the first was that she was dead.

The second was that it did not hurt. She remembered a road, and boots, and a voice she knew saying her name almost tenderly. Then a long white pain. Then nothing. Now there was only a vast silver quiet, and she lay in it as if on water.

The third thing took longer. Something was holding her.

She turned her head and saw the thread. It was thin as a hair and bright as moonlight, and it ran from the center of her chest into the dark, trembling with some far-off effort. At the other end, very far away, someone was pulling.

“She is stubborn,” said a voice. “Your healer.”

Elara sat up. There was no ground, but she sat. A woman stood in the silver, if she was a woman: tall, wrapped in light that never quite settled, her face changing as Elara watched. Young, then ancient, then wearing her mother’s face at the very end.

“I know you,” Elara whispered. Her mother had sung to her of this. “You are the Goddess.”

“I am the one they pray to when no one else will answer.” Her smile was infinitely tired. “Lydia Marsh gave me her wolf to hold you here. Do you know what that costs a healer? She will never run again. She will never hear her pack.”

Elara pressed her hands to her mouth. “Lydia.”

She hardly knew her. A grey, gruff healer who had once pressed a jar of salve into her cracked palm in a palace kitchen and said only, “Those have worked.” It had been the smallest kindness. It had apparently been enough.

“The anchor holds. It cannot carry you home.”

“Then why am I here?”

“Because someone has to ask.”

The silence stretched. Somewhere beyond it, Elara thought she could hear a door closing in a corridor, and a woman’s voice saying so very sorry for your loss.

“You may stay in the silver and fade,” said the Goddess. “It is quiet here. No one will ask anything of you again. Or you may go back. But I do not return the dead for nothing.”

“What is the price?”

“Your wolf.”

Elara pressed a hand to her chest, and there she was, small and warm and breathing: the wolf who had run beside her through eleven years of silence, and had never once asked her to be anything but what she was.

“I would lose her.”

“You would. And you would keep every memory, which is a mercy and a curse.” The Goddess tilted her head. “There is also a choice. Let the past die with you. Walk back among the living as one who forgives, and keep what peace you can. Or take a king’s blood, as the price for what was taken.”

“A king’s blood.” The words tasted of iron. “Whose?”

“Two kings stand in your story. One wronged you. One never knew what you were.” The Goddess’s face went very gentle, and very terrible. “Which of them you choose is yours alone, and no one will tell you it was just.”

Elara thought of a heron on a locket lid, and a hand fastening a sapphire at her throat without once touching her skin. She thought of another hand, closing over that locket on a dresser. She thought of her father’s gate and the order nailed to it. She thought of Torin, her brother, who had laughed too loudly and loved too easily and had not survived the road.

She thought of her mother, singing.

She could stay. It would be easy. It would be like sleeping, and for one long moment she wanted it so badly her chest ached. Then she remembered a hand that had taken care not to touch her, and the wanting turned over in her chest, bright on one face and dark on the other.

“If I go back,” she said slowly, “will I forgive them?”

“That is not what I am asking.”

Elara looked at her hands. They had stopped shaking. It had been years since she had seen them still.

“Then I want to remember,” she said.

“The woman who comes back will not be the girl who died in the east corridor.”

“That girl waited,” Elara said. “That is why she is dead.”

The Goddess regarded her for a long time. Then she nodded, once, and it was the nod of someone who has seen this happen before and had hoped, this time, to be wrong.

“Go, then.”

She reached out and touched Elara’s breastbone. Something small and warm in her chest lifted its head, and looked at her, and Elara felt it say goodbye. It was very soft. It did not blame her.

Then it was gone, and the silence where it had been was the loudest thing she had ever heard.

The silver began to thin, like ice going out of a window. She felt herself begin to fall, very slowly, through it.

She woke to earth.

Wet earth, pressed against her cheek, and above it a ragged scrap of sky with the moon in it. Her throat was raw. Her ribs ached as though every one had been broken and set again. Someone was kneeling over her, weeping without a sound.

“Lydia,” she croaked.

The healer’s face was older than Elara remembered, grey with exhaustion. Her eyes went to Elara’s face and stayed there, as if afraid it would vanish. “You came back,” she whispered. “Goddess, you came back.”

“How long?”

“Eleven days.” Lydia pressed a trembling hand to her mouth. “They held a funeral. They buried an empty coffin in the Luna’s ground. Seraphina wore black, and wept very beautifully.”

Elara sat up slowly. “And Kael?”

Lydia’s silence told her before the words did.

“He did not come,” she said at last. “Not to the funeral. Not at all.”

Something in Elara’s chest, in the place where she had felt Kael, went very cold and very still.

“Good,” she said, and did not know whether she meant it.

She reached inward for her wolf and found only silence.

She stood up anyway.