Rejected by the Alpha Who Chased My Scent

Two hundred wolves went down onto the stone when the doors opened. I stayed standing. I always stay standing. It is not courage, and I am tired of people deciding it is. An Alpha's command travels in the nose before it travels anywhere else, and mine has been shut since the day I was born. Nothing ever arrives. So I stood at the worktable with a bowl in one hand and flour to my elbows, and I was the only person in that hall still as tall as I came in. "Aldis. Get down." "I am up to my arms in dough." "Get down or I will put you down." "That would be a first," she said, and went down on one knee with her forehead on the stone like everybody else. I have watched that woman bow four times in my life. She does it badly and on purpose, the same way she does everything else. Then Ronan Thorne walked in. The kitchen had been told what to expect. Tall. Black coat. Alpha of Greyhollow, forty-one men, eleven miles of pass to hold. Nobody had told us what it would feel like when he came through the door. He came in quiet, and he came in slow, the way a man walks who has never once in his life had to run for anything. And I hated him before he said one word. I will tell you why, because nobody ever asks and I have wanted to say it for twenty years. I have run for everything I have. Every day of my life. I have run for bread and I have run for water and I have run for a place to stand, and this man walked into my hall at the age of thirty and took up the whole room without hurrying a step. He stopped in the middle of the hall. And then he turned his head toward the kitchen door. I want to tell this part exactly the way it happened, because by the next morning there were nine versions of it going round the kitchens and every single one of them was a lie. He crossed the hall. He walked past Osric Ashby, who had stood up to greet him with both hands out. He walked past Perrin Ashby in the green dress her father had bought for this exact afternoon. He walked past his own men and every servant in the house and two hundred people who had come in from the farms to watch an Alpha pick a wife. He walked past all of it. Ronan Thorne came to my kitchen doorway and stood in it. It is not a large doorway. He filled it anyway. And he looked at me. "You," he said. The hall had gone so quiet I could hear the fire. Anybody else in that hall could have told you everything about him by then. His soap. His horse. How he had slept. Whether he had eaten. Whether he was afraid. I got none of it. All I got was a coat with a loose thread at the cuff and a man who had not slept properly in days, and that is all I have ever got off anybody in my life. "Alpha Thorne," Osric Ashby said behind him, pleasant as a closed door. "You will not find your mate in my kitchen." Ronan Thorne did not turn around. "Then she is in your kitchen," he said, "and I am not finding her." Nobody laughed. Not one person out of two hundred, and that was how I knew how bad it was going to be. "Where is it coming from," he said to me. "I do not know what you are talking about." "I have been chasing this for seven years." His voice was low and even and there was nothing wrong with it at all. "It has come up twice in seven years. Both times I got there after it was gone. And now it is standing in a doorway in an apron, and I want to know what it is." He looked down at my hands. Flour to the wrist. A cut across the base of my thumb with a strip of apron wrapped round it that I had torn off that morning and not looked at since. Hands that belong to somebody who spends her life doing other people's work. "It is all over you," he said. "That is the flour." "It is not the flour." "Alpha Thorne," Osric Ashby said again, and this time he came forward, and I watched him decide something in the space of four steps. He has run this valley longer than I have been alive. He never says anything he might have to take back. So when he does say a thing plainly, you already know he has counted the cost and decided he can carry it. "Then we will do this properly," he said, loud enough to reach the back of the hall. "Tomorrow. A mating rite, before the whole pack, as it is written." The hall breathed in. "If your wolf is right," Osric said, "I will be the first man in this house to congratulate you. You may take her home to Greyhollow with my blessing and my wagons, and nobody in this valley will say a word against it." "And if your wolf is wrong?" "Then you will take my daughter and you will sign, and Greyhollow will have the north road, and we will never speak of this afternoon again." There it was. I had been standing in that doorway for one minute and I already knew exactly what I was. I was the thing that might get in the way of a road. "I am not a thing you can put in a ring," I said. The whole hall heard me. Osric Ashby turned his head, slowly, and looked at me the way you look at a chair that has just spoken. "You are a girl with no name and no line," he said. "In this house, that is closer to a chair than it is to a person. You will stand where you are put." "Aldis. Get her out of here." Aldis Peake came and took my arm and pulled me back into the kitchen and shut the door, and through it I could hear two hundred people start to talk at once. She did not let go of my arm for a long time. Her hand was like a vice and she was not looking at me at all, and to this day I believe she was holding on for her own sake and not mine. "You might have cost me my place," she said. "You might have let me stand there." "I did let you stand there. That was me letting you." She let go. "Do you have any idea what he is?" "I know what a road is worth." "You do not." She turned me round by the shoulder and she was not gentle about it. "Girl. Listen to me. Three Alphas in the histories have turned away from a mate at the ring. Three. Do you know what happened to them?" "No." "They never smelled anything again." She said it slowly. "Not woodsmoke. Not rain. Not their own children's hair. Sixty years, for one of them. The rest of his life with nothing in the air at all. That is what that man is going to do tomorrow in that hall, and he is going to do it for thirty men and a road, and you are going to stand in the middle of the floor and watch him do it." "Why are you telling me this." "Because I have fed two girls who went into that ring," Aldis Peake said, "and I could not do one thing for either of them. You are the third." She turned back to the range. "Do not make it three." I carried water all afternoon. I have never worked that hard in my life, and it was not the water. I want to say what I felt, because I spent the whole day pretending I was not feeling it, and I was bad at it. Everybody in that kitchen knew by noon. I could feel them not looking at me. I felt hope. That is the ugly part. That is the part I have never told anybody, and I am going to tell it now, all of it, without making it pretty. One man walks through a door and looks at me like I am the answer to a question he has been carrying since before I was grown. And I wanted it. I wanted it so badly that I stood over a pot I had already salted twice and thought: What if it is true. What if there is one person alive in the whole world who would know me with his eyes shut. Twenty years I had gone without that thought, and it took one afternoon to get all the way into me. And by the time that sun went down I could have hit myself for it. Twenty years I had kept that door shut. He walked through one hall one time and I had it standing wide open with the lamp lit in the window. Lise found me in the passage behind the hall before the evening meal. Lise finds everybody there. "Is it true," she said. "Is what true." "That he walked across the whole hall for you. Fenna says he went past the old man and past Perrin Ashby in her green dress and stood in the kitchen door and would not move." "He asked me where something was coming from." "What something." "I do not know. Something he lost." Lise put both hands flat on the wall like she needed the support. "He has been looking for it seven years," she said. "There is a song about it up at Greyhollow. My cousin's husband is from the north road and he says it is very sad." "What does he smell like," I said. She looked at me. "I do not know what anyone smells like, Lise. I have never smelled anything. Not once." She was quiet for a second. For Lise, that is a considerable event. "Then how would you even know," she said. "If it was him. How would you ever know." "I would not." "That is the worst thing I have ever heard." "I did not ask you for an opinion." "You are getting one anyway." She caught my sleeve. She is sixteen years old and she has never in her life had to be careful with me about anything, and she was being careful now, and that was worse than the laughing would have been. "If it is true. If you cannot. What happens to you." "I do not know." "Neve." "I do not know, and I am going to find out tomorrow, and I would rather do it with a full night's sleep." I took my sleeve back. "Get to the hall." She went. She looked back at me twice on the way down the passage, and I pretended not to see it, because if she had said one kind thing to me in that moment I would have sat down on the flagstones and howled. I ate and I could not tell you what. There was bread, I think. I could have been eating the table for all the good it did me. Ronan Thorne slept in the east wing. I know because the girl who carries the water told me. I know because I asked her, and then asked her not to remember that I had asked. Sometime after midnight I heard him come down into the yard. I got up and went to the kitchen window in my shift and stood at the edge of it, in the dark, where I could not be seen. I have been good at not being seen since I was small. He walked the length of the yard with his hands behind his back. Then he stopped, and tipped his face up, and stood there breathing for a long time. I did not know what he was doing. It took me until the following night to work it out, and when I did I sat down on the floor. He was saying goodbye to it. I went back to bed and lay there with my eyes open until the window went grey. At some point in the dark I made the decision I am most ashamed of, and I have never told a living soul, and I am putting it here so that at least one person knows. I decided I was going to hope. Tomorrow the whole pack was going to watch me reach for something. And I already knew, better than anybody in that valley, exactly what it looks like when a person's hands close on nothing.