The King's Second Heart

Carried Away

"My king. My king."

Garrick said it twice.

He said it the second time louder. He said it the way you say a man's name when the man is walking away from you toward something neither of you understand, and you need him to stop, and he does not stop.

The king did not stop.

Garrick was the Beta of the king's personal guard. He had ridden at Vaelor of Velmoria's right hand for nineteen years. He had been a small dark-haired boy of eleven when Vaelor had been a small dark-haired boy of twelve, and the two of them had grown up in the same wing of the same palace and had learned to ride and to fight and to sit a council session under the same tutors, and Garrick knew Vaelor's face the way a man knows his own brother's face. Garrick had seen that face in joy and in grief and in fury and in the small careful boredom of state suppers, and Garrick had seen the small particular look that came over it on the morning twenty years ago when they had brought the body of the king's older brother in from the western road and laid him on the great stone table in the great hall of the palace.

Garrick had not seen that look on Vaelor's face since.

He saw it now.

He saw it now and he could not move.

The king was crossing the courtyard of Ironbough toward the woman in the green wedding gown lying in the dirt at the foot of the high table, and the king's face had the small impossible look of a man who had just been struck across the cheek by a god, and Garrick — who had opened his mouth to ask his king what are you doing, what is happening, what do you see — closed it again, because Garrick had been Vaelor's Beta for nineteen years and Garrick had learned, in that time, that there were one or two moments in any man's life when even a Beta could not interrupt and live with himself afterward.

This was one of those moments.

So Garrick sat very still on the back of his own horse and watched.

The two witches in the deep blue robes were no longer sitting still. They had dismounted before Garrick had even noticed them moving — the older one first, then the younger — and they were walking forward in the king's wake in the small careful hurry of two women who had been trained to follow their king at a distance and who could see that the distance, this morning, needed to be very small. They were whispering to each other in the old tongue. Garrick did not speak the old tongue. Most living men did not. The two witches' voices were urgent and low and Garrick caught one word of it that he did not need to know the old tongue to recognize, because he had heard the witches use the same word in the king's chambers six months ago when they had first told the king about the dark thing they had been tracking, and the word had stayed with him.

The word was the witches' word for impossible.

The king reached the centre of the courtyard.

He stopped one pace short of the woman in the dirt.

He did not touch her at first. He did not speak. He looked down at her — at the small thin face turned upward to him, at the dark hair fanned across the cold cobblestones, at the grey ribbon tied with three small tight knots around her left wrist — and the look on his face was the look of a man who had just walked into a room he had been forbidden to enter for twenty years and had found, sitting on the bed, the person he had been told was dead.

He went down on one knee in the dirt of the courtyard of Ironbough Pack.

The pack-folk in the courtyard made a small soft collective sound. It was not a word. It was the sound three hundred people make when they are all watching the same impossible thing and have all forgotten, at the same instant, that they are supposed to be afraid.

The king of Velmoria did not kneel for anyone.

The king of Velmoria had just knelt, in the cold dirt of an autumn courtyard, beside the rejected wife of an Alpha he had ridden five days from the capital to drag back in chains.

He was looking at her face.

He spoke to her for the first time.

"What is your name?"

His voice was very low.

It was nothing like the voice the pack-folk in the courtyard had been imagining in their heads when they had thought, in their small private moments over the years, of the king of Velmoria. They had been imagining a voice that was big and certain and slightly cold. They had been imagining the voice of a king on a coin. The voice the king of Velmoria spoke in now was small and rough and almost broken, and it was the voice of a man asking the most important question of his entire life and being afraid of the answer.

In the dirt of the courtyard, the young woman in the green wedding gown looked up at him.

She did not know who he was.

She knew his face from the silver coins, the same as everyone else, but the face on the silver coins was not the face that was kneeling above her in the cold autumn morning. The face above her was the face of a man, not a king, and the man's eyes were the colour of rain on slate, and the man was looking at her as if she were the only thing left in the world.

Her mouth shaped the word Elowen.

No sound came out.

She tried again. Her lips were dry. Her throat was empty. The fall from the high table had taken everything she had had left, and the great calm grey-eyed presence inside her chest had stepped back into the small careful dark behind her ribs after lifting her face for one impossible second, and there was no breath in her body for speaking.

The king nodded.

He nodded the way you nod to someone you have understood without needing them to finish speaking.

"Elowen," he said.

He said the name softly. He said it the way a man says a name he has just been given as a small precious thing that is going to be his to keep.

He slid one arm under her shoulders.

He slid the other under her knees.

He lifted her against his chest as easily as a man might lift a child.

She was so light he flinched.

The flinch was very small. Garrick saw it from his place on his horse. The witches saw it. Even Selene of Silverbrook on the platform of the high table, who was watching all of this with a face that had gone past horror into a flat numb wondering, saw it. The king of Velmoria, who had been a warrior for twenty years and who could lift a man in full armour and carry him off a battlefield without losing his stride, had just lifted the rejected Luna of Ironbough Pack out of the dirt of her own courtyard, and his arms had registered the weight of her, and the weight of her had been so small and so wrong that the king had flinched.

He stood up.

He stood up with Elowen Vayne cradled against his chest in the green wedding gown, and her dark head fell against the place where his collar met his throat, and her right hand fell limp across his arm, and her left hand — the hand with the grey ribbon tied around the wrist — curled, very slightly, into the front of his coat.