Marriage to the Alpha

Chapter3

By the week of the Moonrise Feast, the Silver Moon estate had grown a second skin of banners.

Blue and silver hung from every window. Carts of lanterns rolled up from the river villages, and wolves who had never heard of the Silver Moon a season ago arrived at the gate with bundles on their backs, asking whether it was true. A Nightshade Alpha. A maid for a Luna. Forty wolves had become fifty-eight.

“Is it true you can carry nine cups at once?” A boy of eight hung off the gatepost, grinning.

“Ten, on a good day.” Elara knelt on the front steps with a brush, because nobody else could be trusted to scrub them properly.

“Can you teach me?” He said it like a prayer.

She had braced for sneers. Instead, women pressed jars of honey into her hands, and an old wolf with one ear took her face between his palms and wept. The pack had decided its Luna was a legend. Nobody in the Silver Moon had ever had a legend of their own.

Not all of them did.

A shadow fell across the steps. Brenna, Marek’s granddaughter, was tall, with a warrior’s braid and a warrior’s jaw. “The Luna of the Silver Moon,” she said, “does not scrub steps.”

“This one does.”

“My grandfather wanted me in that chair. I have trained for it since I could walk.” Her smile showed no teeth. “You will pour for the King himself, they say. Practice not dropping it.”

She left. The brush in Elara’s hand had gone still, and she made herself start again.

Kael found her that evening in the long room where the women sewed banners. He waited until it emptied, then set a velvet box in her lap.

Inside lay a sapphire cut in the shape of a crescent moon, deep blue and old, on a silver chain worn thin by someone else’s years.

“It was my mother’s.” He said the word as though it were a stone he was carrying across a river. “Nobody has worn it since. I would like you to wear it tomorrow, in front of my father.”

Elara stared at him. “He will know it.”

“Yes.” For the first time she saw something hard and bright in his face, and it was not for her. “I want him to.”

“What was she like?” Elara asked, before she could stop herself.

He took longer to answer than she expected. “Loud,” he said, and nearly smiled. “She laughed with her whole face. Afterward the house was very quiet.”

“Kael—”

“I am not asking you to fight him. Only to stand beside me while he sees it.”

Beside. He said it as though it were a small thing, and it was not, because she knew who she was, and whose sister, and what she was standing beside him to hide.

“I’ll wear it,” she said.

Seraphina arrived the next morning in a carriage heaped with gifts. “For my neighbors,” she told the gate, laughing, and the pack, who had never seen a princess, surged forward as if she were weather.

Elara watched from the steps. Seraphina kissed a baby. She knelt in the mud beside the one-eared wolf and listened to a long story about a dead husband, her hand folded over the old one’s. She gave Marek a flask of brandy from the year his son was born. He thanked her, then turned the flask over in his hands for a long time, as if looking for the catch. By noon, Brenna was laughing at her jokes, and two of the women who had pressed honey on Elara that morning fell silent when she passed. By afternoon, the pack was saying “the Princess” the way it said “the Luna,” softly, with awe.

Nothing Seraphina had done was cruel. That was what turned Elara’s stomach.

“Let me help you dress,” said Seraphina from the doorway, at dusk. It was not a question.

Elara stood in her shift, the pale grey gown laid across the bed, the sapphire waiting on the dresser. She sat, and held very still. Seraphina took up the brush and drew it through her hair, long, slow strokes. It felt like being loved, and Elara hated how badly she wanted to lean into it.

“They adore me,” Seraphina said. “Isn’t that funny? I did not even try. And they will adore you, until they remember you were a maid.”

“Is that a warning, Your Highness?”

“It is a kindness.” The brush paused. “Old kings remember what they have buried, Ela. Be careful what you give them to remember.”

In the mirror her eyes met Elara’s, pleasant and unreadable.

“I’m wearing the sapphire,” Elara said.

“Lovely.”

She waited until Seraphina had gone, then stood with her hand at her collar. A crest can be seen through silk if the wrong person looks, and tonight everyone would look. For one night, she told herself, the safest place for it was out of sight. Then, for the first time in eleven years, Elara lifted the cord over her head. The locket lay in her palm, small and warm from her skin, its crest worn almost smooth. She set it in the jewel box on the dresser and closed the lid. Then she fastened the sapphire at her throat.

It felt like undressing.

She went down to the hall to see the high table laid. It took an hour, and for most of it she forgot the empty place at her ribs.

She was setting the last cup on the high table when the horns began.

They came from the road, long and deep, the call of a royal party, and the whole estate went still. She heard the pack run toward the gate. She heard Kael’s voice calling orders, steady and cold.

She could not face the King without it. She ran back up, just for a moment, just to hold it.

The jewel box sat on the dresser where she had left it. She lifted the lid.

It was empty. Her fingers closed on the lid and went cold.

The room smelled faintly, sweetly, of jasmine oil.

Outside, the horns sounded again, nearer. King Aldric had arrived.