Rejected by the Alpha, Claimed by the Lycan King

Chapter 9: What She Is

Chapter 9: What She Is

My first morning in Ashenveil, I woke to snow.

Not much. A dusting, really thin white across the window ledge and the broken rooftops below. But it was spring. Snow in spring meant something, in wolf territory. It meant the land was making a point.

I dressed in the clothes that had been left folded on the chair by the fire — dark trousers, a long-sleeved shirt, boots that fit well enough. Someone had guessed my size with impressive accuracy. I suspected Oryn, who seemed like the kind of man who paid attention to practical details.

I went to the window.

Below me, Ashenveil was waking up.

I could see them the Lycans, moving through the roads and the ruins in the grey morning light. A woman carrying firewood. Two men talking outside the hall, their breath fogging in the cold air. A child I had not expected a child running between the stone buildings with a dog at her heels, laughing.

Forty-two people.

Forty-two people keeping an entire race alive by existing.

I pressed my forehead against the cold glass and let that settle into me.

A knock at the door.

I turned. "Come in."

The door opened. Vael stepped inside.

She had changed from yesterday she was dressed for movement now, dark fitted clothes, her silver-streaked black hair pulled back tight. She was carrying two wooden practice staves, one in each hand. She set one down just inside the door and held the other loosely at her side.

She looked at me.

I looked at her.

"Kael said you were trained," she said. "A Beta's daughter. You can track, fight, shift. Standard wolf education."

"Yes."

"Useless." She said it without cruelty, the way a doctor says that won't work. "Everything you know is built for a wolf's body. You are not just a wolf. What you have been doing your whole life is running a race wearing a coat that was not made for you." She tilted her head. "Today we find out what you look like without the coat."

I looked at the stave she had placed by the door.

I crossed the room. I picked it up.

It was heavier than it looked.

"Good," Vael said. "You didn't ask questions."

"You weren't asking for questions."

Something shifted at the corner of her mouth. "No. I was not." She moved to the door. "Come."

The training ground behind the north tower was a wide flat space of packed earth, ringed by a low stone wall. Old weapons hung on the wall swords, axes, things I did not recognise. The snow had not settled here. The earth was bare and cold.

Vael walked to the centre of the ground.

She turned to face me.

She attacked without warning.

She moved fast faster than Damon, faster than any wolf I had trained with, faster than I thought anything human-shaped could move. I got the stave up in time to catch the blow, but the impact ran up my arms and rattled my teeth. I stumbled back. She pressed.

I blocked. Stepped left. Blocked again. She was driving me backwards around the ring, relentless, each blow a little harder, a little faster, testing not just my defence but my legs under me, my breath, my composure.

I lost the composure first.

She knocked the stave out of my hands.

I hit the ground on one knee. The cold earth bit through my trousers. I breathed through my nose, two counts in, two counts out, the way my father had taught me before everything my father had taught me became something I did not want to think about.

Vael stood over me.

She was not even breathing hard.

"You are fast for a werewolf," she said. "You are strong for a Beta's daughter. Your footwork is good. Your guard drops on the left side when you are moving backward."

I picked up the stave.

I stood up.

She swung again.

I moved right instead of left.

The blow missed by an inch.

Vael stopped. She looked at me with an expression I was beginning to recognise the one where she was recalculating something.

"Good," she said.

We went again.

We went for two hours. By the end of it, my shoulders were on fire, my knees were bruised, and I had been knocked down seven times. But the last three times, I had gotten back up faster than the time before.

Vael finally stopped.

She lowered her stave.

She sat down on the low wall, which somehow managed to look elegant. She looked at me.

"You do not cry when you are hurt," she said.

"No."

"You do not argue when you are corrected."

"I was taught not to."

"Were you taught, or did you learn it the hard way?"

I met her eyes. "Both."

She was quiet for a moment.

"Kael told me what happened at your mating ceremony," she said. "The rejection. Your sister. Your father." Her voice was flat, but not unkind. "Lycans do not reject mates. It is not something we are capable of. The bond is total for us it is not a choice, it is not something you weigh against politics or ambition. When we find the one the Goddess made for us, we simply" She paused. "We stop. Everything stops. There is only that person."

I did not know what to say.

"Kael has waited five hundred years," she said quietly. "I want you to understand what that means, Aria. I have watched it. I have watched my brother sit in that hall alone for five centuries while everything we were crumbled around us. He did not break. He did not take a substitute mate out of loneliness. He did not stop hoping." She looked away. "He just waited."

The morning wind moved between us.

"Is that why you didn't want it to be me?" I asked. "Because you thought I wouldn't be worth the wait?"

Vael looked back at me.

"I was afraid you would be ordinary," she said simply. "I was afraid the Goddess had made him wait five hundred years for someone ordinary. I was afraid he would be kind to you and patient with you and never say so, and somewhere inside him he would know the wait had not been worth it."

She stood up from the wall.

She picked up her stave.

"Get your guard up," she said. "Left side. Again."

I raised the stave.

"Vael," I said.

She paused.

"Am I?" I asked. "Ordinary?"

Vael looked at me for a long moment.

"You got up seven times," she said. "Most wolves stay down after four." She settled into her stance. "Ask me again in a month."

We went again.

Kael was waiting at the edge of the training ground when we finished.

He was leaning against the stone wall with his arms folded, his long black coat moving in the cold wind. His silver eyes went from Vael to me to the bruises on my arms, the dirt on my knees, the stave still in my hand.

"How is she?" he asked Vael.

Vael walked past him without stopping.

"Unbroken," she said, as if that answered everything.

She disappeared around the corner of the north tower.

Kael looked at me.

I looked at him.

"Unbroken is good," he said.

"Apparently." I was so tired my bones ached. "She knocked me down seven times."

"I know. I counted."

I stared at him. "You were watching the whole time?"

"Of course." He said it simply, like it was obvious. "You were training for the first time in my kingdom. I was not going to be somewhere else."

Something about that hit me in the chest in a way I was not ready for.

He crossed the training ground toward me. He stopped close enough that I could feel the warmth coming off him. He reached out — slowly, so slowly and took the stave from my hands, setting it aside. Then he lifted my arm gently and looked at the bruising along my forearm where Vael's first strike had landed.

His jaw tightened.

"I'm fine," I said.

"I know." He did not let go of my arm. His thumb traced, very lightly, along the edge of the bruise. The bond hummed between us, warm and steady. "You will be faster than her in three months."

I laughed. I could not help it. "That is not possible."

"She is a better fighter than anyone in this kingdom," Kael said. "And you kept up with her for two hours on your first morning without ever running, without ever breaking your guard more than once." His silver eyes lifted to mine. "Three months. Maybe less."

I held his gaze.

There was something in his eyes that I was only beginning to learn to read. Five hundred years of patience, yes. But underneath it hunger. Not the wolf kind. Something older. Something that had been very carefully contained for a very long time.

"I'm going to need more food," I said.

He let out a breath that was almost a laugh.

He released my arm.

"Come," he said. "The hall will be serving now. And Oryn has been waiting since dawn to ask you eleven thousand questions about werewolf pack structure that he considers urgent."

"He seems like he considers most things urgent."

"He does. It is his finest quality and his most exhausting one." Kael held out his hand, palm up, the way he had in the Blackwood.

I put my hand in his.

We walked back through Ashenveil together through the broken city with its few thin columns of smoke and its forty-two surviving people and its five centuries of grief packed into its stones. The snow had stopped. A pale sun was pushing through the clouds, and where it touched the ruins, the black stone went almost silver.

For the first time since I had walked out of my father's house, I did not feel like I was running away from something.

I felt like I was running toward it.