Rejected by Moonlight

Chapter Seven: The Envoy

I knew he'd come himself. I'd built the gate wide enough for it.

What I hadn't planned for was the weather. It came in that morning — a whiteout, forty-mile wind, the kind of thing that turns a nine-mile ride into a nine-hour one — and so instead of receiving the Alpha of Ironmoon in my hall in daylight with three hundred wolves at my back, I received him at dusk, half-frozen, with six men, because the alternative was letting them die on my doorstep and I had spent three years deciding not to be that.

I had my people take their weapons at the gate. Then I went and stood on the dais of a hall I had rebuilt with my own hands out of a burned Moonborn ruin, in grey and white, with my hair up, and I waited.

He came in with snow in his hair.

Three years is a long time. He was thirty now, and it had not been kind — there was grey at his temples that had no business being there, and he had gone lean in a way that looked like something being spent rather than trained, and there was a stillness on him that was no longer pressure with a lid on. The lid was gone. What was underneath was just tired.

He stopped in the middle of my floor and looked up at me and forgot, entirely, what he had come to say.

I watched him take in the hall. The dais. The banner. The three hundred wolves. The scar on my shoulder, bare above the line of my collar, because I had dressed that morning with a great deal of intention.

"Ivy," he said.

"Alpha Hale," said Old Bryn, from my left, with enormous pleasure.

Kael Draven closed his eyes briefly. Then he did something I had not war-gamed at all.

He went down on one knee on my floor.

A ripple went through my hall. Behind him, Torin made a sound of pure protest — an Alpha does not kneel to a neighboring Alpha, not ever, not in six hundred years of Northern law.

"Get up," I said.

"No."

"Kael —"

"You are going to tell me it changes nothing," he said to the flagstones, "and you'll be right, and I am still going to do it, because I have had three years and two months to decide how I would stand in front of you if I ever got to, and the answer I kept arriving at is not standing." He lifted his head. "I was wrong. Not mistaken. Wrong. I put my mate out a gate in a wind that kills men because I was twenty-six and terrified of a war I'd already lost my father to, and I dressed it up as arithmetic, and then I spent three years finding out that everything I told this pack about your weakness was —" he gestured, once, at the hall, the banner, the sealed gap that his own scouts had died trying to hold — "this."

The hall was silent.

"You froze," I said.

"Every night for a month."

"You bled."

"For three years." A muscle went in his jaw. "I know what the wither is. Harlow worked it out inside a week. Every wolf in Ironmoon knows their Alpha wears the pain of a girl he threw away and none of them can decide whether it's justice or a strategic vulnerability, and I have stopped caring which, because it is the only thing I have of you and I would not have traded it." He breathed. "I came to ask for a treaty. Greywall holds the gap. Ironmoon has grain and steel and you have three hundred wolves and no winter stores, and if you say no you will lose people in February."

"And you'll ask for the words. As a term."

"No."

That one I hadn't expected either.

"I will never ask you for the words," Kael Draven said. "They're yours. They were the only thing you had left when I finished with you and I have thought about that every day since, and if you keep them for sixty years and I wither in front of my whole pack, that is the correct outcome and I'll sign that too."

And then, from the small door behind my dais — the one that goes through to the family rooms, the one Marta had been told to hold shut, the one that a very determined two-and-a-half-year-old had apparently just discovered was not locked —

"Mama."

Elowen came out first, dragging a blanket.

Wren came out second, because he was slower and because he had stopped to bring his cup.

My son walked across the dais of Greywall in front of three hundred wolves and six Ironmoon warriors and his own father, and he put his arms up to me, and I picked him up, and he turned his face into my neck and then, being two, looked round to see who everyone was staring at.

Pale grey. Ringed dark.

I have never heard a sound like the one that went through Ironmoon's six men.

Kael Draven did not move. He was still on one knee. He looked at his son, and at his daughter, and at me, and his face did something that no Alpha's face should do in public, and when he finally spoke his voice was almost polite.

"Ivy," he said. "How."

"The watchtower," I said. "The anniversary of your father's death. Three months before the ceremony."

And I watched the strongest Alpha in the North work out, live, on his knees, in front of everyone, that the girl he had put out into the Wither with no cloak had been carrying his children when he did it.