The King's Second Heart

Festival Eve

"The Alpha will see you in his study. Now."

The senior household woman did not knock. She opened Elowen's chamber door with the same brisk authority she used to open the doors of pantries and storerooms, and she stood in the doorway with her hands folded at her waist and her chin slightly lifted, and she did not call Elowen my lady.

Elowen was at her writing desk. She had been trying to read a small book of devotional poems her mother had given her on her tenth name-day. She had been on the same page for over an hour. She closed the book very gently and set it aside.

"Now?"

"Now, my lady."

The woman did not move from the doorway. She was waiting to walk Elowen down to the study. Doran had sent her not just to summon his wife but to escort her, the way you escort a prisoner who might think about running.

"I shall need a moment to make myself presentable."

"The Alpha said now."

"Then he shall have me as I am."

Elowen rose from the writing desk. Her legs were trembling under her gown the way they had been trembling since dawn. She had not slept. She had not eaten. The face on the ceiling last night had not come back, but the memory of the grey eyes had stayed with her all day like a hand resting on her shoulder. The second heartbeat had been quiet since the moment the eyes had closed. So quiet she had half-convinced herself, in the cold morning hours, that she had imagined the whole thing.

She walked past the senior household woman without looking at her and out into the long west corridor.

The manor was full of strangers. Pack-folk had been arriving from the outlying farms all morning. Traders with carts had set up along the courtyard wall. There were musicians in the great hall practicing for tomorrow night. There were two small old witches at the gate selling charms — Elowen had seen them through the window when she had walked past it earlier. The whole great house at Ironbough hummed with the noise of an autumn festival the way a hive hums before swarming.

She walked through it all in a fog. The servants she passed in the corridors stepped aside for her with the practiced silence of people who had been told, in some quiet kitchen meeting before dawn, that the Luna of Ironbough was not going to be the Luna of Ironbough by this time tomorrow.

She knew. They knew. Selene of Silverbrook in the east-wing chambers knew. The whole house knew, and the whole house was being polite about it the way you are polite at a deathbed.

Doran's study was at the end of the long east corridor on the second floor, in the same wing where Elowen had seen the lit lantern through her shutters two nights ago. The senior household woman walked her to the door and stopped.

"He said you were to go in alone."

Elowen put her hand on the door.

She did not knock.

She opened it and walked in.

Doran was at his desk.

He was not in his Alpha's furs. He was in soft house clothes — a fine grey shirt unlaced at the collar, a dark coat thrown over the back of the chair behind him. There was wine on the desk. Two cups. He had set out two cups before she arrived. The fire in the study hearth was high and warm. The shutters were closed against the autumn afternoon.

He looked up when she came in and he smiled.

It was the smile he had given her the first time she had ever met him, when she had been sixteen and he had been twenty-four and her father had walked her into a great hall full of strangers and presented her to the Alpha of Ironbough as his future wife. It was the smile of a man who had decided, in advance, that he was going to be very kind to her this afternoon. It was the warmest expression his face had worn in her presence in three years.

It made the second heartbeat under her ribs go cold.

"Elowen. Come in. Sit. You look exhausted, my dear — please, sit down."

She sat. He poured the wine. He pushed one of the cups across the desk to her.

"Drink. You look as if you have not eaten."

"I have not."

"Then drink at least."

She did not touch the cup.

He sat back in his great chair and laced his fingers together over his stomach in the easy comfortable way he sat with his warriors after a good hunt, and he looked at her across the desk with the warm careful attention of a man who had been practicing what he was about to say for several hours.

"I have been thinking about you, Elowen."

She said nothing.

"I have been thinking about your health. I have been thinking about how hard the past few years have been on you. I have been thinking about how much this house demands of a Luna and how little of that demand you have been able to meet, through no fault of your own."

Through no fault of your own. The kindest sentence he had spoken to her in two years. The flat patient kindness with which a man tells a sick dog he is taking it for a walk.

"I have been thinking about the future of the pack."

"Have you," she said.

"Elowen — please. Do not make this harder than it needs to be." He leaned forward across the desk. His voice dropped into the soft confidential register he used when he wanted to be persuasive. "I have been thinking, and I have spoken to my senior councillors, and we are all in agreement. The pack has needs that your health does not allow you to meet. An Alpha's wife must be at the centre of her pack. She must be strong. She must give the pack heirs. She must be — she must be here, Elowen, in a way you have not been here for some time, and not because you have not tried."

"Heirs," Elowen said. The word came out very flat.

"Yes."

"You have not come to my bed in two years, Doran."

He blinked once. He had not been expecting her to say that. She had not been expecting to say it either.

He recovered fast. "And the reason for that, my dear, is precisely the difficulty I am trying to address. A man cannot ask his sick wife to bear the strain of what the pack requires."

"How kind of you."

"Elowen—"

"What are you asking me, Doran?"

He took a breath.

"I am asking you to understand," he said carefully, "that certain arrangements may need to be formalized at the festival tomorrow. For the good of the pack. For the good of everyone in this house. For your good, Elowen — you cannot tell me you are happy here."

He looked at her then with the warm patient face he was wearing for this conversation, and he waited.

He was waiting for her to nod.

He was waiting for her to bow her head and weep prettily and tell him that she understood and that she was grateful for his consideration and that she would go quietly back to her father's house and not make any small public scene about being put aside for a dark-haired woman in a red gown who had arrived from Silverbrook Pack three days ago.

He was waiting for her to make this easy.