Mated at Midnight

Chapter 3: The Deal

I did the only thing a servant can do in a hall full of wolves.

I served.

Rhys caught himself before the silence could turn into a question. "You," he said again, softer, and then, to the room, "the keeper of the east tower. Come down. The Trial will want hands."

Hands. I had hands. I came down the gallery stair with my spine straight and my heart going like a trapped bird, and I felt five hundred pairs of eyes learn my face. The king had called me down. The king never called anyone down.

He watched me cross the floor. He didn't watch the candidates. Princess Ysolde watched him watch me, and I saw the first crack open in her calm.

I poured wine.

That was the Trial from the inside. I kept the cups full while the hunters were given their horses and their horns and their time. I stood at Mira's shoulder and poured for my sister and smelled the lavender oil she'd worn since she was a girl, and neither of us looked at the other, because looking would have done it.

At the door, Ysolde caught my wrist.

"The king knows your name," she said. Quiet, pleasant, the way a knife is pleasant. "How does the king know your name?"

"I keep the east tower," I said. "I keep the rats out of it. The king dislikes rats."

She held me a moment longer, measuring. Then she let go, and smiled, and it was worse than if she'd hit me, and she rode out to hunt.

I was sent to the solar at dusk. I knew the room. I had stood in it once before, three years ago, the night of the Mating Rite, when the whole world was about to end and I didn't know it yet.

Rhys was alone. No steward, no guards. He stood at the long window with his arms crossed and watched me come in the way a man watches weather he has already decided to walk into.

"Close it," he said.

I closed it.

"Say what you want to say," I told him, "and let me go back to my tower."

"You cracked a stone rail this morning with your bare hand."

"It was old."

"You felt the bond flood when I stood up."

"I felt nothing."

"Wren." He turned. In the candlelight the scar through his eyebrow was the only line on his face that wasn't tired. "I have spent three years believing the bond was killing me slowly. Tonight I learned it has been feeding you. Every winter I faded and you got stronger, and I never once looked at why, because looking at you was the one thing I'd forbidden myself."

"Poor king."

He almost smiled. It didn't reach anywhere near his eyes. "There is a way through this that doesn't end with you on the stones."

I waited.

"Ysolde of the North Reach," he said. "She wants the crown and not the man. That suits her and it suits Ironhollow. When she is mated to me, the renewal bond will break, because no wolf can carry two mates. You will die of it. That part is true. But it does not have to be this season, or the next. If you do not pull. If you let me husband what's left, memory by memory, until the court is strong enough to survive my death instead of following it. Then I can give you a life instead of a grave."

"What life."

"A boat. A hold in the far south where no pack knows your name. Gold enough that you never serve again. You go, and you live, and I never have to look at you again." A pause. "It is more than either of us deserves."

The candle guttered. I thought about Mira at seventeen, riding back from a hunt she was born for. I thought about the stones, and the four hundred faces, and the one face I'd looked for and not found.

"All right," I said. "A boat. I'll hold the bond still. You finish your Trials."

"Swear it."

"You have my word."

His jaw moved. He knew, I think, exactly what my word was worth, and he took it anyway, because a drowning man takes any hand, even one that might hold him under.

"Go," he said.

I went.

I should have gone straight back to the tower. I didn't. I walked the long way, past the kennels and the old armory, because I wanted to look at the mountains one more time as a person who still had a plan.

Somewhere on that walk, the plan changed.

I don't remember deciding. I remember the cold. I remember the taste of iron. And then I remember coming back to myself in the kennel yard with my knees in the mud and the bell ringing the midnight hour, and something warm drying on my hands.

The bond snapped under my ribs. My hour began.

I looked down at my palms. They were red to the wrist. Not mine. The cuts across them were clean and even, the kind a blade makes when the hand holding it knows what it's doing, and the knife was nowhere, and the night between the solar and the kennels was a hole where nothing lived.

Boots on the gravel. Rhys, coming fast, cloak half on, face stripped of every bit of the king.

He stopped ten feet away and looked at my hands.

"Ysolde rode back from the hunt," he said. "Alone. She never reached the gate."

I couldn't find my voice.

"They found her at the river," he said. "There is a knife in her chest, and it is mine, and it is from the armory I just watched you walk past." His eyes came up to mine, and they were not cold and they were not hungry and they were the eyes of a man standing at the edge of a pit he has just realized he dug. "Tell me you didn't."

The bell finished its twelve.

And under my ribs, the thread began to tear.