The King's Second Heart

The Rejection

"By the laws of Ironbough Pack and by the right of the Alpha—"

Doran's voice carried.

He had been trained to make his voice carry across a courtyard since he was a boy. He spoke now in the slow careful formal cadence of a man reciting words he had practiced. He did not look at his wife. He did not need to. He stood at the front of the high table with his hands at his sides and his chin lifted, and he spoke into the silence of the courtyard like a man dropping stones into a still pond.

"—I, Doran Blackwood, Alpha of Ironbough, do hereby declare—"

Elowen sat in her green wedding gown and listened.

The grey ribbon on her left wrist was pulsing hot now, in time with the second heartbeat under her ribs. Boom. Boom. Boom. The calm woman's voice she had heard in her head a moment ago — Hadwen, be brave, we are nearly there — was gone. The two birds were still wheeling over the western tower. The pale blue sky was still pale blue. Doran's voice kept dropping its careful stones.

"—that the bond entered into between this Alpha and the woman called Elowen Vayne, daughter of Lord Henrick Vayne, four years past in this same courtyard, has not borne the fruit a great pack requires of its Luna—"

The pack-folk in the courtyard had gone perfectly still.

There were perhaps three hundred of them. Three hundred Lycans in their festival best, in the shadow of the great stone walls of Ironbough Manor, watching their Alpha put aside their Luna in front of all of them on the morning of the autumn feast. Some of them looked away. Some of them stared at their boots. Some of them, at the back, were craning forward to hear better, the way people crane forward at any public hurt. A few of them — not many, but a few — were watching Elowen with faces she could not entirely read. Pity. Embarrassment. Something else, in one or two of them, that might almost have been the small flicker of an old anger.

She did not look back at any of them.

She kept her eyes on the pale blue autumn sky.

"—and that the said Elowen Vayne has, through no fault of will but through the failure of her body and the weakness of her constitution—"

Through no fault of will, Elowen thought. How kind.

"—been unable to bear the weight of the duties that the Luna of a great pack must bear—"

The grey ribbon on her wrist was now so warm it was almost hot.

"—and that the future of Ironbough Pack requires of its Alpha a Luna who is whole, who is strong, who is fit to bear the heirs and to walk at the side of her Alpha as a Luna must walk—"

Selene of Silverbrook in the red gown was radiant. Elowen could see her without turning her head. The small triumphant set of Selene's shoulders. The careful demure tilt of her chin. The way her hands were folded at her waist with the perfect public modesty of a woman who has been told to look modest while her future is being arranged in front of her in front of three hundred witnesses.

"—therefore, by the right of the Alpha and under the witness of pack-law, I do here and now—"

Doran turned, finally, to face her.

He looked at Elowen Vayne in her four-year-old wedding gown for the first time since she had sat down in the Luna's chair an hour ago.

His face was flat. Not cruel. Not angry. Not even cold. Flat. The face of a man who had decided some time ago that the woman in front of him was not really a person and was now performing the small public ritual of confirming it in front of the only people whose opinion mattered to him.

He said the binding word.

It was an old word. An ugly word. A word in the older Lycan tongue that did not exist in any other context, that was never spoken aloud except when one Alpha needed to legally and publicly cut the marriage-cord between himself and a woman he no longer wanted, that had been used perhaps a dozen times in the long history of the great packs and never lightly. The pack-folk in the courtyard flinched when Doran spoke it. The witches at their fortune-table near the kitchen door rose to their feet at the sound of it. The musicians on the platform against the south wall had stopped playing some time ago and now they took half a step backward as a single body.

The word was meant to cut.

It cut.

Elowen felt the bond.

She had not known until that exact second that there was a bond. She had not felt the marriage-cord between herself and Doran Blackwood as a real physical thing in any of the four years they had been married. She had felt his coldness and his absence and his slow patient unkindness, and she had assumed those were what marriage to a Lycan Alpha was, and she had assumed there was no thread between them at all because there was no warmth.

She had been wrong.

There was a thread. There had been a thread the whole time. It was a small dark cord that ran from the centre of her chest to the centre of his, and she had not been able to see it or feel it because it had been pulled so tight against the back of her ribs that it had become part of her and she had stopped noticing it the way you stop noticing a stone in your shoe after you have walked on it for a year.

The binding word took the cord between its teeth and bit.

The cord snapped.

Elowen gasped.

The cord snapping was not painful, exactly. It was the opposite of painful. It was the sudden sharp release of a pain she had not known she had been carrying. It was like having a long thin needle pulled out of a wound she had not known was there. The breath went out of her in a small involuntary sound, and the courtyard heard it, and the courtyard misread it as the small involuntary sound of a sickly woman's grief, and the pack-folk who had been looking away from her looked away harder.

Selene stepped forward.

It was a small step. Just half a pace. Just enough to put herself within reach of the Alpha's right hand. Just enough that Doran, when he turned away from his now-former-wife, would find his new chosen woman standing exactly where she needed to be standing for him to reach for her and lift her hand and present her to the pack as the new Luna of Ironbough.

The choreography was perfect.

The two of them had rehearsed it.