The King's Second Heart

The Rejection (2)

Elowen watched them with the small clear distant attention of a woman watching a performance through glass, and the second heartbeat under her ribs went boom boom boom in its slow patient rhythm, and the grey ribbon on her wrist was burning now, and she opened her mouth to say nothing at all because there was nothing in the world she could possibly have to say to the man who had just bitten through their marriage in front of three hundred of his pack-folk on the morning of the autumn feast.

That was when the other thing snapped.

Much deeper.

Much older.

It was a thing Elowen had not known was inside her. She had not known anything about it. It was not hers — it had never been hers — and it had been hidden inside her body the way a knife is hidden inside the handle of an innocent walking stick, sheathed and quiet and unnoticed for a long time, and the binding word had been a key in a lock the pack-law makers had never known was there.

The wolf-debt of Doran Blackwood let go.

Elowen did not know what was happening to her. She would not know for many days yet. She felt only that something inside her — something that had been with her for four years, riding her shoulders, pressing on her ribs, drinking her warmth, eating her sleep — let go all at once and left. It went out of her like a long held breath. It went out of her so fast and so completely that for one terrible second she thought she was going to fall through the floor of the world.

She did not know that she had been carrying four years of his sin for him.

She did not know that the small dark cord of the marriage bond had been a leash, and that the leash had been used by his own sickness to bleed off into her body every cruel and faithless thing he had done in the four years he had been her husband, so that he could keep his strength and his Alpha-shine and his easy laugh while she got the bruises and the fevers and the nightmares.

She did not know that the binding word he had just spoken had cut the leash.

She did not know that four years of his rot were now travelling, very fast, back up the broken cord toward the body it had come out of.

What she felt was the sudden enormous relief.

Across the high table, Doran Blackwood made a small wet sound in the back of his throat.

It was not a sound an Alpha was supposed to make in front of his pack.

His face went the colour of old paper. His eyes went very wide. His hand flew to the centre of his chest and his hand stayed there, and the flat blank Alpha's face he had been wearing since dawn slid sideways and broke, and the man underneath the Alpha's face was a man Elowen had never seen — a man who looked like every cruelty he had ever performed in his life had just been handed back to him in a sack.

He took one step backward.

His knees gave out.

He caught the edge of the high table on the way down. His fingernails scraped against the festival cloth. The wine cup he had been holding for the rejection toast clattered onto the boards of the platform and rolled. Selene of Silverbrook's perfect public face slid for the first time. She turned her head sharply toward him with the alarm of a woman who had not been told that her new mate might collapse at the most important moment of her year, and her hand darted out to catch his elbow.

In the courtyard, three hundred Lycans in their festival best stared up at the high table in stunned silence.

Their Alpha was on his knees on the platform of the high table on the morning of the autumn festival with his hand pressed to his chest and his face the colour of old paper, and he was gasping, and the woman in the red gown was bent over him with her hand on his elbow trying to drag him back to his feet, and the woman in the green wedding gown sitting in the Luna's chair beside them was upright. Untouched. Calm. Glowing, almost, in some small impossible way none of them could have named — as if the cold autumn morning sun had picked her out of the platform with a long careful finger and was holding her there.

The pack-folk in the courtyard stared.

Elowen felt the second heartbeat under her ribs roar.

It was not a heartbeat any more. It was a shout. The grey-eyed thing inside her chest that had been sleeping for twenty years and waking very slowly for the past several months threw its head back inside her body and opened its eyes, and the small careful glamour an old western witch named Mother Hadda had wrapped around the soul of a murdered prince and tucked into the body of a newborn girl twenty years ago — the small careful glamour that had let the soul hide there, quietly, all this time — finally tore through.

Something inside Elowen Vayne woke up.

She could not have told you what it was.

She could only feel it. She felt it the way you feel a great warm hand close around your own from underneath in the dark. She felt the hand take her hand and hold it, very gently. She felt a great patient calm presence step into the small terrified centre of her own self and stand there beside her, and she felt the presence say, in the calm woman's voice she had heard inside her head in the small green moment before Doran began to speak the binding word, I am here. I have always been here. Lean on me now.

And then the courtyard tilted.

The pale blue sky and the high table and the man on his knees and the woman in the red gown all slid sideways, and Elowen heard the small rushing sound a person hears in their own ears when their blood is going somewhere it should not be going, and her vision went grey at the edges, and she felt herself lifting out of the carved Luna's chair without quite meaning to, and her legs were not under her any more, and her green wedding gown was somewhere far below her knees, and the platform of the high table was rising up to meet her face very slowly and very quickly at the same time.

She fell.

She fell from the carved chair down the two shallow steps of the high table platform into the cold beaten dirt of the courtyard at the foot of the Alpha's seat. She landed on her side with her dark hair fanned across the cobblestones and her left hand flung out and the grey ribbon around her wrist still warm against her skin and her face turned upward to the pale blue sky, and the pack-folk standing in their festival best around the platform took one slow collective half-step forward and then stopped, because nobody at Ironbough was going to be the first one to lay a hand on the woman the Alpha had just rejected.

Elowen lay in the dirt of her own courtyard in her wedding gown.

She did not hear Doran's choked breathing on the platform behind her.

She did not hear Selene's sharp high voice telling him to stand up, you must stand up, the pack is watching.

She did not hear the small frightened wave of murmuring that began at the back of the courtyard.

What she heard, very faintly — so faintly she thought at first she was imagining it, the way she had imagined so many things in the past four years — was the slow steady sound of hooves coming up the western road outside the manor walls.

Many hooves. At a walk. Heavy hooves. Iron-shod.

She did not yet hear the sound of the western gates of Ironbough Manor opening, untouched, in front of those hooves.