The King's Second Heart

Bruises That Are Not Hers

The new bruise was on her ribs.

Elowen found it before the bell for morning prayer. She was sitting on the edge of her bed lifting her shift to pull it over her head and her hand stopped halfway because the dark shape under her left breast had not been there last night. She knew. She had checked herself last night. After what she had seen in the lit window of the study, she had stripped to her shift in the dark and ran her hands over every inch of herself, the way you check a child after a fall, looking for the proof of something.

There had been nothing then. There was a bruise the size of a fist now.

She lowered her shift back into place very slowly. Her hands were not shaking. That surprised her. She thought they would shake.

"One," she whispered. "Two. Three."

She counted them on her fingers under the blanket. The one on her forearm from yesterday. The one on her hip from three days ago. The one that wrapped around the back of her left calf like a belt. The smaller round one on the soft place above her collarbone. The two on her thighs. And now the new one on her ribs in the shape of a fist she had not been struck by.

"Seven," she said.

She had been telling herself for months that she was making it up. That she was clumsy in her sleep. That a woman in poor health bruised at the slightest touch. The healer had said so. Doran had said so. Even her own mind had said so, in its tired patient way, every time she found another one.

Tonight she was not so sure any more.

A knock at the door.

"My lady? A messenger from your father."

Elowen pulled her gown over her head before she answered. "Send him up."

The messenger was a thin nervous man in Vayne livery she did not recognize. He bowed without quite looking at her, the way her father's people had been bowing without looking at her since the first year of her marriage, and pressed a folded letter into her hand.

"Lord Henrick begs an answer at your earliest convenience, my lady."

"Tell him he shall have one before sundown."

He bowed again and left. Elowen did not break the seal until the door had closed.

The letter was short. Her father's hand was the same as always — small, careful, formal, the hand of a man who had stopped trying to write to his own daughter the way a father writes to a daughter and had begun writing to her the way one lord writes to another. He hoped she was well. He hoped the autumn had treated Ironbough kindly. He reminded her that the autumn pack festival was in a week's time and that the Vayne family expected her to attend, to represent the Vayne name with grace, to comport herself as be fitted a Luna of a great pack and the eldest daughter of an old house.

There was nothing in the letter about her health. There was nothing about whether she was happy. There was nothing about whether she was safe.

Elowen sat down at her writing desk and pulled out a fresh sheet of paper and dipped her father's pen in her father's ink and began.

Dear Father,

She got that far. Then she stopped.

She tried again on a fresh sheet.

Father — there is something wrong with me. There is something wrong with this house. Last night I saw a woman in—

She crumpled the second sheet and threw it into the small fire in her hearth.

She tried a third time.

Father, I am writing to ask you to come and take me home. I do not care what people will say. I am twenty years old and I am dying in this house and I—

The third sheet went into the fire too.

She watched the flame eat the paper. The little curling black edges of her own words turned to grey ash and floated up the chimney and were gone, the way every word she had ever almost said to her father had been gone for the past four years.

In the end she wrote, Dearest Father — I am well. I shall be at the festival. Your loving daughter, Elowen.

She sealed it with the Vayne ring her father had given her on her wedding day. She rang for the messenger. She sent him away with the lie.

When he was gone, she walked out of her chamber and down the long west corridor and into the manor library, because the library was the only room in the house Doran found boring enough to leave alone. The library smelled of old leather and pipe tobacco from a dead Alpha three generations gone. The fire in the library hearth had not been lit. She lit it herself, carefully, the way the old healer had taught her when she was twelve, and pulled a heavy book on hedgewitch herbs off the second shelf, and curled into the worn velvet chair by the window, and tried to read.

The words swam.

She had not slept properly in weeks. Her dreams had become strange. They were full of men dying in ways she had never seen — men in old armour, men in strange hooded cloaks, men kneeling in mud with their hands held out. She could not tell anyone about the dreams. There was nobody to tell.

She forced her eyes back to the page. The leaves of the bittersweet vine, when crushed and steeped in—

The library door, the books, the velvet chair, the autumn light through the window, all of it slid sideways at once. The book fell out of her hands. Elowen's mouth is filled with the taste of iron.

She was not in the library any more.

She was kneeling in mud. The mud was cold. It was night. There was a man on his knees in front of her with his back to her — no, she was the man on his knees, kneeling in the cold mud at full dark in a place she had never been, with her hands held out in front of her and her hands were a man's hands.

There was someone standing over her. She could not see their face. She could feel a knife at her throat. Not the threat of a knife. The blade itself, against the skin under her jaw, pressed there with the slow cold patience of a person who had already decided.

I never even saw you, she heard herself think. The voice in her head was not her voice. It was a man's voice, low and steady, and there was no fear in it. I never even saw who you were.

The knife moved.

The cold mud became wet and warm and smelled of iron and Elowen, who was not Elowen now, looked up at a sky she had never laid beneath in her life. The sky was full of stars. The stars were in patterns she did not know.

Tell my mother, the man's voice in her head said. Tell my mother. Tell my brother. Tell them—

Elowen came back into her own body in the velvet chair in the library with her nose bleeding and the book of hedgewitch herbs lying open on the floor at her feet. She gasped once, hard. The taste of iron was real. She put a hand to her face and her fingers came away wet and red.

"No," she whispered. "No, no, no — not here, not in the library, please—"

She stumbled out of the chair and across the room to the small side table where the writing materials were kept and grabbed a fistful of clean cloth and pressed it to her nose. She tipped her head back. She held very still until the bleeding slowed. She bent and picked up the book and put it carefully back on its shelf. She wiped the floor where two small drops of her blood had fallen. She did all of it on the trained reflex of a woman who had been hiding pieces of herself from the household at Ironbough for four years.

When the cloth came away from her face the last time, the linen was almost clean.

She sat down on the velvet chair again because her legs would not hold her any more. She put her face in her hands.

You imagine things. You always imagine things. The healer said. The Alpha said. You are delicate. You are dramatic. There was no man kneeling in mud. There was no knife. There was no sky full of stars you have never seen. You are tired. You did not sleep. You are sick and you are tired and you are sick and you are tired.

She said the small old prayer of her own self-comfort under her breath the way she had been saying it for years now. The prayer was: None of it is real. None of it is real. None of it is real.

The prayer had stopped working some time in the last week and she had not noticed.

She took her face out of her hands.

There was a girl in the library doorway watching her.

Elowen had not heard the girl come in. She did not know how long she had been there. The girl was perhaps fourteen — one of the newer kitchen girls, she thought, the one with dark brown hair and a small careful face. She was holding a tray. She was very still.

"I — forgive me," Elowen said. Her voice was steadier than she expected. "I did not see you there."

The girl did not answer.

The girl was looking at her with an expression Elowen could not name. It was not the polite blank face the rest of the household wore around her. It was not a pity, exactly. It was not fear.

It was the face you wore when you were watching a person and you knew something about that person they did not know about themselves yet.

Elowen rose from the velvet chair.

"What is your name?" she asked, very gently.

The girl swallowed.

"My lady, I—"

"Your name."

The girl opened her mouth.

And the library door behind her swung open the rest of the way, and one of the senior household women filled the doorframe, and the senior household woman saw the girl with the tray and snapped, "What are you doing standing in the doorway like a fool, move," and the girl flinched and the tray rattled and she was hustled away down the corridor without looking back.

Elowen stood alone in the library with the small fire dying in the hearth and the book of hedgewitch herbs back on its shelf and the taste of iron in her mouth that was already beginning to fade.

The expression on the girl's face stayed with her.

It stayed with her all the way back up to her chamber. It stayed with her through the cold supper she ate alone at her writing desk. It stayed with her through the long hours of the evening.

And just before she blew out the candle to lie down, Elowen finally found a name for the expression that had been on the girl's face in the doorway of the library.

It had not been pity.

It had been the way you looked at someone who was already, very quietly, being mourned.