The King's Second Heart

Ysolde (2)

Ysolde finished combing the last small tangle out of her hair and set the bone comb on the bedside table and folded both her hands in her lap and waited, in the small steady patient way Ysolde apparently waited for everything.

After a long quiet moment, Elowen heard her own voice ask, very small:

"I do not — I do not know who he is. I know the name. Everybody knows the name. But I do not — I have never met him. I have never been in his presence. I do not understand why a king would — would do any of this. For me. I am not anyone. I am the rejected wife of a small western Alpha who is going to be a footnote in his own pack's book by the end of the month. I am twenty years old and I have done nothing in my life that any man in this palace would know about. There has to be a mistake somewhere. There has to be a — a confusion of names, or a confusion of houses, or a—"

"My lady. There is no confusion."

"How can you know that?"

"Because I was in the lower courtyard yesterday morning when the column came in, my lady. I saw him carry you up the great stair myself."

Elowen looked at the small careful Lycan woman sitting on the edge of the bed.

"And?"

Ysolde was silent for a moment. She seemed to be choosing her words.

"And I have worked in this palace for six years," she said finally. "I came up from the lower city when I was seventeen. I have seen the king of Velmoria walk past me in corridors perhaps two hundred times in those six years. I have served at three state suppers where he sat at the head of the high table. I have seen him bring back captured enemies from the eastern border in chains. I have seen him receive the foreign envoys from the south in his own audience hall. I have seen him laugh, once, at a small careful joke his Beta made over wine. I have seen him angry. I have seen him bored. I have seen him tired. I have seen the king of Velmoria in many lights in this palace, my lady, and I have never — never — seen him carry a woman in his arms anywhere for any reason, and I had not believed that I would ever see it, and I saw it yesterday morning at the western gate. He came in through the gate and he came up the great stair and he did not look at any of us standing along the wall, and he did not let his Beta or any of his witches try to take you out of his arms, and his face was the face of a man who had brought home the only thing in the world that mattered to him, and he laid you in this bed in this room himself, and he gave the orders that you were to be cared for, and he walked out, and he has not come back yet."

Ysolde paused.

"My lady. I do not know who you are. I do not know what you are to him. The household does not know either. The whole king's wing has been talking of nothing else for three days. But I know what I saw at the western gate yesterday morning, and I know that there is no confusion of names or houses. He came west for you. He carried you home. He has not been able to sit still in his own chambers since he laid you down. Whatever this is, my lady — whatever you are — it is not a mistake."

Elowen looked at the small Lycan woman in front of her.

She did not know what to do with any of the words she had just been given.

A small soft knock at the chamber door saved her from having to find out.

Ysolde rose from the edge of the bed in one quick smooth movement and crossed the room to the door. There was a low quiet exchange of words. Ysolde opened the door wider and another young woman of the household — a woman Elowen did not see clearly — passed through a heavy silver tray covered with a clean white cloth. Ysolde took the tray and closed the door and brought the tray back across the chamber to the bedside.

"Breakfast, my lady. The kitchens have been keeping it warm since the second hour after dawn, waiting for you to wake."

She lifted the white cloth.

There was soft warm bread on the tray. There was a small dish of fresh butter the colour of pale gold. There was a small clay pot of dark honey. There was a small bowl of stewed apples in their own juice with a thin curl of cream on top. There was a tall cup of warm milk with the small careful spices of cinnamon and clove sprinkled on its surface in a pattern.

Elowen had not been able to keep down a full meal in months.

She did not say so. She let Ysolde tear the warm bread into small pieces for her, and butter the small pieces, and feed them to her one at a time, the way Ysolde had brought the small sips of water. Elowen ate them slowly. The bread was the softest thing her mouth had ever held. The butter was sweet and clean. The honey was the colour of dark wood and tasted like a meadow in late summer that she had not stood in since she had been a child.

Her stomach took the food.

It took the food the way dry earth takes rain — not greedily, not in alarm, but in the small slow opening of a thing that had been waiting a long time to be filled, and now finally was being filled, and was grateful.

Ysolde fed her perhaps a third of the bread and half of the apples and most of the warm milk before Elowen could not take any more. When Ysolde set the silver tray aside on the small table by the bed, Elowen was warm from her hair to her toes for the first time in years.

Ysolde tucked the soft coverlet up around her shoulders.

"I will not be far, my lady. I will be in the chair by the window. If you need anything in the world, you have only to whisper my name and I will be at your side. The royal healer will come to see you this afternoon. The king has asked to be informed when you are well enough to receive a visitor."

"A visitor."

"Yes, my lady."

"How long until then?"

Ysolde smiled the smallest most reassuring smile.

"As long as you need, my lady. As long as you need."

She crossed the chamber and sat back down in the high-backed chair by the tall window and picked up her mending. The small soft scrape of needle through linen began. Outside, somewhere in the far distance, a bell rang the mid-morning hour.

Elowen lay in the impossible soft bed under the painted vaulted ceiling with her hand pressed flat over the centre of her own chest, and she felt the second heartbeat go boom boom boom in its calm patient rhythm under her ribs, and she felt warm bread and warm milk in her stomach for the first time in months, and she felt the small impossible knowledge that the king of Velmoria had carried her here in his own arms.

She closed her eyes.

She did not yet know what any of it meant.

She knew only that for the first time in four years, no part of her body was hurting, and no part of her mind was bracing for the next blow, and there was a young woman in a chair by the window who was going to be in the chair by the window every time Elowen opened her eyes for the rest of this afternoon, and Elowen Vayne, who had not allowed herself to fall asleep in any room with another person in it for four years, fell into the deepest sleep of her life with her cheek pressed against the soft pillow and the second heartbeat going steady and warm in her chest.