Mated at Midnight

Chapter 2: The Trial

Dawn came the way it always came in Ironhollow, gray first, then cruel.

I was awake for it. I hadn't slept. When the bell rang for the Trial, I was already dressed in the gray wool of the tower servants, already at my post in the long gallery above the great hall, where the lesser staff stood to watch and to be seen watching.

They filed in below me. The whole court, the whole pack, the alphas of the low holds and their wives in furs, the council with their old men's faces and older grudges. And at the head of it all, the dais, the black chair, and Rhys.

He didn't look at the gallery. He never looked at the gallery. Three years, and that was the one mercy he gave me, the one he didn't know he was giving: in public, we had never met.

I clasped my hands and watched the doors.

The first candidate came in to horns. Princess Ysolde of the North Reach, tall as a door, gray-eyed, wearing a wolf's pelt like a coat and her family's blade like jewelry. She walked the length of the hall the way weather walks, and the crowd leaned back from her without meaning to. She was every inch a queen. The pack loved her on sight.

The second candidate came in silence, because the herald didn't know what to call her.

Mira.

My sister walked up the hall in our mother's blue, the color of the one nice dress our house ever owned, and she was so young, and so gold, and so afraid that I had to look at the floor.

She was seventeen. I had raised her for the first eleven of those years, when our father drank and our mother worked, and I had carried her on my hip through the winter the snow got into the grain store. She had been wolfed at twelve, the year I wasn't. The year everyone learned what I was.

I had not spoken to her in three years. She had been told not to.

The first trial was a hunt, the old way. The candidates ran the black wood at the edge of the mountain and brought back the first kill. Rhys rose to give the call.

And that was when it happened.

He stood, and the hall stood with him, and the bond under my ribs woke up.

It didn't pull. It flooded. For one second, three years of carefully stored strength poured out of him and into me, and my hand closed on the stone rail of the gallery, and the stone cracked.

Just the rail. A hairline split, gray dust on my knuckles, no one close enough to see. I held the rail and stared at my own hand and understood, for the first time in three years, exactly what I had been given.

The flip. The thing the old books called the rejected gift. When a bond is refused, the strength does not return to the maker. It goes down the line to the refused. All this time I thought the warmth I felt in the cold, the speed in my feet, the way I healed fast from a cut, all of it was the bond taking pity on me.

It wasn't pity. It was theft. I had been draining the King of Ironhollow for three winters, and neither of us had known it, and that was why he was fading, and that was why far from me he worsened, and why in the dark of my tower he could breathe.

I looked down the hall at him.

He was mid-speech, arm raised, king's voice ringing off the beams of his own house. And then he stopped. Dead stop, mid-sentence, in front of five hundred people.

His head turned.

Not to the candidates. Not to the council. To the gallery. Up, and to the left, and to me.

Across the whole hall, through the smell of furs and fear and morning, Rhys found me the way a hound finds a wounded thing, and I watched him do the arithmetic behind his eyes. The rail. My hand. The flood.

Something crossed his face that I had not seen there in three years.

Not hate. Not cold.

Hunger. The look of a starving man who has just smelled bread and knows exactly where it is kept.

"You," he said.

The hall turned to follow his gaze.

Five hundred faces, all of them finding me at once.