The King's Second Heart

The King in the Courtyard

"Move aside. Move aside."

Nobody in the courtyard had said it.

The voice was inside Elowen's own head — the same calm woman's voice that had told her be brave, we are nearly there — and it was no longer calm. It was urgent. It was the voice of a woman who had been waiting twenty years for this exact moment and who could see, with the long inward sight of a witch dead two decades, that the moment was here.

Elowen lay in the dirt of the courtyard with her cheek pressed against a cold flat cobblestone and she could not move.

The pack-folk were laughing.

Not all of them. But enough. Enough that the small thin sound of it carried across the high table where her former husband was on his knees and across the platform where Selene of Silverbrook stood frozen with her hand on Doran's elbow, and across the cobbles to the place where the rejected Luna lay collapsed in her own wedding gown. It was the small embarrassed snigger of pack-folk who had been told for years that the Luna of Ironbough was a delicate pathetic thing, and who had now been given permission, for the first time in those years, to laugh at her openly in front of her face.

A few of them laughed.

A few of them did not.

Selene of Silverbrook was no longer smiling.

Selene was staring at the woman in the dirt at the foot of the high table with an expression that had nothing to do with triumph any more. Selene had been promised many things by her Alpha lover in the careful months of letters that had brought her to Ironbough, and the Alpha's wife is a sickly nothing had been the first and most important of those promises, and Selene had agreed to come to this festival on the strength of that promise, and Selene was looking now at the woman in the dirt and she was beginning, very slowly, to understand that she had been told the wrong story.

The woman in the dirt was glowing.

It was very faint. Selene could only see it because she was a Lycan and her eyes were sharper than human eyes and she was standing on the platform of the high table directly above where Elowen had fallen. The glow was coming up out of the green wedding gown. It was the colour of cold moonlight, and it was the colour of grey eyes, and it was the colour of an old witch's careful working that had been hidden for twenty years and was now letting go all at once.

Selene had not been told anything about a glow.

Selene took one small unconscious step backward away from the edge of the platform.

Then the western gates of Ironbough Manor began to open.

Nobody had touched them. The two great iron-bound oak gates of the manor's western entrance, which faced the road that came up out of the long valley toward the king's road in the far west, were closed and barred for the festival. They had been closed and barred since dawn, the way they always were for a festival, because pack festivals were for pack-folk, and uninvited visitors were turned away politely at the side gate.

The bar lifted itself.

It rose out of its iron brackets without any hand on it, and it slid sideways through the air, and it set itself down very gently against the inner wall of the gatehouse. Then the great iron-bound oak gates swung open, also without any hand on them, in the slow careful silence of two doors being held open by an invisible courtesy.

The courtyard noticed.

Not all at once. The man on the wine barrels noticed first. He turned his head toward the western gate and his face went the colour of old milk. The woman with the bread tray noticed second. The honey-cake old woman near the gate dropped her basket and the small gold coins inside it scattered across the cobbles and she did not bend to pick them up. The musicians on the platform against the south wall, who had been frozen in place since the binding word, finally let their instruments fall to their sides.

The laughing in the courtyard stopped.

It stopped the way a wind stops when a door closes.

Six riders walked their horses in through the open western gates of Ironbough.

They came in at a slow walk. There was no urgency in any of them. There was no warning. There was no herald. There was no banner. They came in the way a thing comes that does not need to announce itself.

Two of them rode at the front in the dark mail of war and the long black cloaks of the king's personal guard. Two more rode at the rear in the same dark mail. Behind the four warriors, between the two pairs, rode two women in deep blue robes, hooded against the autumn wind, with the small careful straight backs of women who had been trained for many years to ride next to a king without ever quite being seen by anyone watching.

In the centre of the six, on a war-horse the size of a small house, rode the man.

The horse was black.

The man was in black, and the silver of the king's wing was on the small clasp at his throat, and the small silver wolf of Velmoria was on the buckle of his sword belt, and he wore no crown and he did not need to wear one.

Every Lycan in Ironbough knew his face.

They had known it since they were children. They had grown up with his face on the small silver coins their mothers had sewn into the hems of their festival gowns for luck. They had seen his face on the great banners that came down from the king's road in the spring of the year of his coronation, twenty years before, when they had been small enough to ride on their fathers' shoulders to watch. They had seen his face on the sealing wax of the formal scrolls that came to Ironbough Manor twice a year from the capital. They had seen his face in the pale ghost of every painted portrait in every great hall of every great pack in the kingdom for two decades.

King Vaelor of Velmoria had ridden in person, without warning, into the central courtyard of Ironbough Pack on the morning of the autumn festival.

The pack-folk in the courtyard did not so much fall silent as unfall. The small embarrassed laughter and the small frightened murmuring and the small shuffle of three hundred pairs of festival boots on cobblestones all stopped at once, and the courtyard became very, very quiet, and the only sound left in the world was the slow heavy clop of six horses walking on stone in the cold autumn morning.

The king had not come to Ironbough to see a festival.

He had come for Doran Blackwood.

His witches had begun to feel the dark thing in the kingdom's western packs two years ago. The two women in the blue robes riding behind the king right now had been quietly walking the pattern of the dark thing for those two years, the way you walk the pattern of a snake-track in long grass, and six months ago they had told their king that the pattern came back, every time, to the Alpha of Ironbough, and the king had asked them very calmly whether they were sure, and they had said sure enough that the king might want to ride out himself, and the king had said fine then, and he had begun to make the small careful preparations for a personal ride into the western packs that nobody but the king and his Beta and his witches had been told about.

The king had ridden out of the capital five days ago with his small careful escort and no banner. He had ridden the western road. He had timed his arrival for the morning of the autumn festival because the morning of the autumn festival was the one morning in the year when an Alpha could be reliably found in his own courtyard with all of his pack around him, and the king had not wanted to give Doran Blackwood the small chance of running into the woods.