The King's Second Heart

What Selene Saw

"Get up."

Selene's voice cracked across the platform of the high table.

She had been silent since the king had ridden out. The pack-folk in the courtyard were still silent. The small child at the back of the crowd had been hushed by its mother. The autumn wind had begun to come up across the open western gates and was lifting the corners of the festival cloth on the high table in a small dry rattling sound. The musicians on the platform against the south wall were standing in their festival best with their instruments at their sides like men who had forgotten how to use their own hands.

Doran Blackwood was still on his knees.

His face was still the colour of old paper. His chest was rising and falling in small fast shallow breaths. He had not yet looked up at her.

"Doran. Get up."

He did not move.

Selene of Silverbrook stood three paces from him on the platform of the high table with her hands pressed flat against her own stomach and her own breathing very carefully steady, and she looked down at the man at her feet and she felt her future tilting under her boots in the slow terrible way the deck of a ship tilts in the moment before it lists.

She had eight years of work invested in this morning.

She had eight years of letters and small careful visits and the small careful arrangement of mutual friends and the small slow patient courting of a married Alpha by a woman who knew exactly what she wanted and exactly how long she was prepared to wait to get it. She had spent the spring of the year she had turned seventeen kissing Doran Blackwood for the first time in a stable at her own father's pack-hold in Silverbrook, and she had spent every season since the spring she had turned seventeen building toward the morning of this autumn festival, the morning of this morning, the morning when her sickly rival was supposed to be put aside in front of three hundred witnesses by the man Selene had been carefully shaping into her own husband for eight years.

Eight years.

She had given the man on his knees in front of her eight years.

She had earned this morning. She had fought for this morning. She had walked into the great hall of Ironbough four days ago in her best red gown and she had let the pack of Ironbough see her standing close to its Alpha, and she had walked into the courtyard of Ironbough this morning in her finest red festival gown and she had stood beside the Alpha's chair on the platform of the high table where everyone in the pack could see her, and she had been ready — ready, ready in the bones of her body, ready in the blood under her skin — to be named the new Luna of Ironbough by sundown.

And the king of Velmoria had ridden personally into the courtyard.

The king.

The king who did not ride out into the western packs. The king who had not been seen on the western road by any living Alpha in fifteen years. The king who had been a name on the small silver coins of Selene's childhood and a face on the great banners of state suppers and a small distant rumour of the capital, and who was now apparently a real living man with a real living face who could sit on a real living horse and carry away the woman Selene had been planning to spend the rest of her own life replacing.

Selene had not been told.

In all the careful letters between Doran's hand and her own over the eight years, in all the small whispered conversations in the dark corners of pack-feasts and the careful coded messages and the sweet promises against the back of her neck in the long hours after, there had not been one word about a king who might one day ride into the courtyard of Ironbough Pack and pick up the rejected Luna out of the dirt and carry her away as if she were a piece of treasure pulled out of a river.

Selene had not been told because Doran had not known.

Selene was beginning, very slowly, in the cold autumn morning on the platform of the high table with her hand pressed against her own stomach, to understand that.

The man on his knees in front of her had been keeping a secret from her — but the secret was not the kind of secret a faithless mate keeps from his lover. The secret was the kind of secret a man keeps when the secret is also being kept from him, and he does not yet know it. Doran Blackwood, Alpha of Ironbough, had had no idea that the woman he had married four years ago in the same courtyard he was now kneeling in had ever been anything to anyone other than a sickly Vayne girl with a delicate constitution and a bad heart.

The look on the king's face had said otherwise.

The look on the king's face, when the king had walked the cobblestones of the courtyard of Ironbough toward the half-dead woman in the dirt and gone down on one knee in front of her, had been the look of a man who had just been given back something he had been mourning for twenty years.

Selene did not know what.

Selene did not need to know what.

Selene only needed to know that the small story she had been telling herself about Doran's rejected wife — a sickly Vayne girl, an embarrassment, a piece of furniture, no real obstacle, no real person at all — had been the wrong story, and she had been making her plans on the wrong story for eight years, and she had just been outmaneuvered, in front of an entire pack, by something she had not known was on the board.

The king of Velmoria had been on the board.

The king of Velmoria had been on the board the whole time.

She drew in one slow careful breath through her nose.

Then she did the thing she had been raised by her own father in her own pack-hold in Silverbrook to do in moments exactly like this one. She put the small terrified personal woman away inside her chest, very carefully, the way you put a fine glass cup into a velvet box, and she snapped the lid of the box closed, and she lifted her chin, and she became the public Luna of Ironbough she had been on her way to becoming, because she had not yet been formally named the Luna and she could not be formally named the Luna with a half-dead Alpha at her feet and a stunned silent courtyard staring up at the platform of the high table, and the only way out of this morning was through.

She turned to face the courtyard.

"People of Ironbough."

Her voice was steady. It was loud. It was the voice of a young woman who had been trained from the time she could walk to address a courtyard from a high table, and she pitched it now to carry to the back of the crowd, the way her father had taught her to pitch a voice when she was fourteen years old.

"People of Ironbough Pack — your Alpha is unwell. The morning has been a strange one for all of us. The king of the realm has done us the great honour of an unexpected visit, and has chosen to take into his personal care the woman who was Luna of this pack until an hour ago, and we are all of us grateful for the king's mercy in lifting the burden of her sickness from this house."

The pack-folk in the courtyard stared up at her.