The WitchWolf Queen

Chapter 9

Elara's POV

I heard the neighbours before I opened my eyes.

This was not unusual. The houses in our part of the pack settlement were not built with the assumption that the people inside them would need not to hear the people outside them. The walls were thin in the way of houses that had been built quickly and practically and without any particular concern for privacy, and the lane outside was narrow, and the windows faced the street. Sound came through the way weather came through. You could not stop it. You simply learned to exist alongside it.

What was unusual was that the voices outside were not doing the things they normally did at this hour.

Normally, the morning sounds of the lane were the sounds of purpose. Old Maret from next door saying something short and practical to her husband. The milk delivery. The creak of the grain cart that came through at half past seven. Children being called in from somewhere by mothers who had already repeated themselves twice. These were sounds that moved. Sounds with somewhere to be.

The sounds I was hearing now were different.

They had stopped.

Not gone quiet, there is a difference. Stopped. The way conversation stops when it has found something worth standing still for, when the content of it is interesting enough to make the people having it forget they were on their way somewhere.

I lay in bed and looked at the ceiling and listened.

I could not make out words. Just the texture of it. The particular murmur of people telling each other something they had recently learned and had not yet finished deciding what to think about. The rise at the end of sentences. The pauses that meant someone was nodding. The occasional short sound that was not quite a laugh and not quite a gasp but lived in the territory between them.

I pressed the heel of my hand against my eyes.

I knew.

Of course I knew. I had known before I fell asleep, in the brief and restless hours I had managed, that this would be waiting for me in the morning. The pack neighbourhood was small and it had no shortage of people who had been at the ball last night or who knew people who had, and there was no version of events in which an Alpha King crossing the floor of his own ballroom to dance with an omega girl did not become the first and most interesting piece of conversation the following morning.

I had known.

I had simply hoped, in the way you hope for things you know are unlikely, that perhaps it would give me until after breakfast.

I got up.

My mother was already in the kitchen when I came downstairs. She was moving around the room with the energy of someone who had slept better than expected and woken with purpose, and there was bread on the table and the smell of something warm on the stove and she turned when she heard me on the stairs and looked at my face and then looked back at the stove.

She did not say anything.

This was, in its way, more alarming than if she had.

"How long has the lane been like that," I said.

"Since about an hour after sunrise," she said, with the measured tone of a woman who had clocked this and filed it and was now deploying it carefully.

I sat down at the table. "Who have you spoken to."

"I haven't been outside," she said. "I haven't needed to." She lifted the pot from the stove and brought it to the table and set it down and then sat across from me and folded her hands and looked at me in the way she had. "Maret knocked."

Maret from next door was the single most well-informed person on the lane, owing to the fact that she was also the person least able to be in possession of information and not use it immediately.

"What did she say," I said.

My mother reached over and cut the bread. She laid a piece in front of me. She arranged it very precisely parallel to the edge of the table.

Then she said, "She said there are people in this pack who have attended every large gathering at the mansion in living memory and have never in all that time seen either Alpha King ask someone to dance."

I looked at the bread.

"She said," my mother continued, in the same measured voice, "that the healer's wife was at the ball and that the healer's wife spoke to three other women on her way home last night and that by the time the sun came up this morning it had reached the far end of the settlement."

The far end of the settlement was twenty minutes' walk from where we sat.

"People are saying," my mother said, and she paused, and in the pause she was choosing her words with the specific care of a woman who had been awake for some time practising this, "that it would not have happened without a reason."

"The reason is that he was being gracious to a guest," I said.

"Elara," my mother said, and it was the tone she used when she did not intend to argue and did not need to, because the weight of what she was saying was doing all the work without her. "A man does not extend grace in front of his entire pack without meaning something by it."

I looked at the table.

I did not say: I met his brother in a private corridor afterwards and we walked together and he told me the pack was older than its own records and then said his name like closing a door.

I said: "I need some air."

My mother looked at me very steadily. "You just got up."

"I need different air."

She looked at me a moment longer. Then she looked down at the bread she had cut and said, in her ordinary voice, the one she used when she had decided to put something in the drawer and close the drawer, "Take something warm. The morning is cold."

The lane was worse than I had expected.

Not because anything dramatic was happening. No one was doing anything extraordinary. People were simply standing in the particular arrangements that people stand in when they are outside doing the ordinary tasks of a morning and have found something more interesting than those tasks to discuss, and they looked up when I came out of the door the way people look up when a sentence they have been telling themselves has suddenly acquired a footnote.

Old Maret was by her front step with a woman I recognised from the baker's. They looked at me. Maret's expression did the thing expressions do when they are trying very hard not to do anything at all, which is to say it did a great deal.

Two houses down, a man I did not know well was saying something to his neighbour with his back mostly to me, but his neighbour's eyes came to me over his shoulder and the man felt the shift of attention and turned.

I kept walking.

I kept my chin level and my pace steady and I looked at the end of the lane the way you look at a destination when you are committed to reaching it without incident, and I did not make eye contact with anyone, and I told myself that what was pressing against the inside of my ribs was impatience and not the other thing. The thing that was warmer and less manageable and that I had been not-thinking about since I stood in a corridor last night and heard a man say his own name and then watched the shadows take him.

I turned off the lane.

The neighbourhood thinned out as I walked and the sounds of it fell behind me in degrees, first the voices, then the general hum, then almost nothing, and I breathed in the cool morning air and let it settle me and kept walking until Kairo's house came into view at the end of the shorter lane.

It was a modest house. Most of the houses in this part of the pack settlement were. But there were flowers in the window box that Kairo had planted herself, because she was the kind of person who put flowers in window boxes, who noticed when things needed colour and added it quietly without waiting to be asked. The shutters were open. Which meant she was up.

I knocked.

She answered the door in the half-second interval between my second and third knock, which meant she had been awake for some time and was probably already at the window when she heard me on the path.

She opened the door and looked at me and then she did the thing she sometimes did when she was trying not to do the other thing, which was to pull the door open wider and step aside and say, "Come in," instead of saying the thing she was quite clearly burning to say. Which was everything.

I came in.

Her front room was warm. There was a fire already going and the smell of tea and something toasted, and the room had the particular comfort of a space that had been lived in softly by someone who cared about it. Kairo kept her house the way she kept herself, neatly, quietly, without performance.

She closed the door.

I sat down in the chair nearest the fire because I had walked without a coat despite my mother's advice and my hands were cold.

Kairo sat across from me and folded her hands in her lap and looked at me with an expression that was the most restrained version of an expression she was capable of producing, and it was still quite expressive.

"All right," I said.

"I didn't say anything," she said.

"You are very loudly not saying anything."

She pressed her lips together. Then she said, in a voice carefully calibrated to be even, "My aunt was at the ball."

I looked at the fire.

"She came by this morning," Kairo said. "Before sunrise. I was not expecting her before sunrise, Elara. She doesn't visit before sunrise."

"I see."

"She described," Kairo said, and now the evenness was beginning to develop small fractures around the edges, "an Alpha King. Walking across the floor. Through the entire middle of the ballroom. While everyone watched." She paused. "To you."

I watched a log shift in the fire.

"She said he put his hand out," Kairo said. Her voice was very careful now in the way of someone carrying something delicate. "She said you danced."

"We danced," I said.

The silence that followed that was not long, but it was thick.

"Elara," Kairo said.

"It was one dance."

"It was—" She stopped. She pressed her hands flat against her knees and looked at me with the large dark eyes that had always been too honest for her own good, too open, too intent on whatever they were focused on. "My aunt is the least dramatic person I know," she said. "She has seen things. She has been to thirty years of pack gatherings and she does not embellish and she doesn't invent, and she came to my door before the sun was up because she said she needed to know if I knew what was happening with you."

"Nothing is happening with me."

"She said the whole room stopped."

"People were surprised. It was a surprise. That's all it was."

"Elara."

"Kairo."

She looked at me.

I looked at her.

She was wearing an expression that I knew very well because she had been wearing versions of it since we were children, since we were small girls with cold hands in school courtyards, and the expression said, I have known you long enough to know the difference between what you are saying and what is true, and I am waiting for you to decide whether to let the gap between them be smaller.

I looked back at the fire.

"He danced with me," I said, and I worked to make my voice the same it always was, even and dry and faintly ironic, the voice I used when I was making something smaller. "Arthur Lingson put his hand out and I took it because refusing an Alpha King in the middle of a ballroom was not something I was prepared to do in front of that many people. We danced. It ended. That was the extent of it."

Kairo was quiet for a moment.

"Arthur," she said.

"Yes."

"You're calling him Arthur."

I opened my mouth and then closed it.

She had caught it. Of course she had caught it. She caught everything, Kairo, like a person who moved slowly through rooms and noticed everything the people rushing through them missed.

"That's his name," I said.

"Most people would say the Alpha King," she said. Not unkindly. Just with the quiet precision of someone identifying a thing for what it was.

I did not respond to that.

She let it be for a moment. She unfolded herself from the chair and went to pour the tea and came back with two cups and handed one to me and sat back down and cradled her own cup in both hands and looked at the fire.

The room settled around us.

The fire moved.

Outside I could hear the lane beginning its ordinary business, the sounds of the morning pack neighbourhood doing the work of a morning, and it felt very far away from this warm room and this fire and Kairo sitting across from me with her tea and her honesty and the infinite patience she had always had with my particular way of not saying things.

"Are you all right?" she asked.

It was a different kind of question than the others. Smaller. Quieter. Not asking about the ball or about Alpha Kings or about what the whole pack was whispering. Just asking about me.

I held my cup and felt the warmth of it through my palms and looked at the fire.

"I'm fine," I said.

She didn't push. That was Kairo. She asked and she listened and she did not push.

We sat in the warm room and drank our tea and the morning went on outside without us, and I stared at the fire and let it ask me nothing at all, and I told myself very firmly that I was fine, that last night was last night and it was behind me now, that I had danced one dance with one man and walked through one corridor with another and that neither of these things meant anything except what they were.

I told myself this.

And somewhere underneath it, quiet and persistent as a pulse, the thing I was not telling Kairo and not telling myself went on doing what it had been doing since I walked back through those ballroom doors last night.

Not the dance.

Not Arthur's hand or the watching crowd or my mother's lit-up hope.

The corridor.

The cold stone and the unsteady candles and the darkness between the sconces where a tall man had been standing so still I hadn't seen him until he spoke. The gold of his eyes in the thin light. The way he had moved through that hall with the particular certainty of a man who had never had to ask a room to accommodate him, because the room simply did.

The silence that was not empty.

Don't repeat it. I have a reputation to maintain.

And then the almost. The almost-wry thing at the corner of his jaw that was not a smile and that I had not been meant to see and that I had seen anyway.

And then the end. The double doors and the ballroom noise pressing through the wood and the moment when I turned to say something and he was already half-turned to leave, and I had said I don't know who you are, and he had paused in the dark.

Turned his head.

Just his head. Just the edge of his profile and one gold eye in the candlelight.

Gaius.

Said it the way no one in my experience had ever said their own name. Not like an introduction. Like a sentence. Like a thing that required no context and offered none. Like a word that had always existed and simply was.

And then the shadows.

And then the closed doors.

And then me, pressing my palms flat against the wood and pushing through, carrying his name into a room that was already too loud, and it had not gotten quieter since. The name. Not the room.

"Elara."

I blinked.

Kairo was looking at me.

"The tea," she said mildly. "You're going to burn yourself."

I looked down. The cup was tilted very slightly in my loosened grip. I straightened it. The tea was still hot but I had not burned myself. I had simply been somewhere else entirely.

"Sorry," I said.

She watched me with those honest eyes for a moment and said nothing.

"I'm fine," I said, which I had already said once and which had not improved in conviction on its second delivery.

Kairo looked at me for one more moment with the expression of a woman who had heard everything I had not said and was choosing, with great kindness, to leave it where I had put it.

Then she said, "My aunt also mentioned there was a second Alpha King."

The warmth of the fire suddenly felt very present on my face.

"She said he wasn't in the ballroom much," Kairo said, watching me with careful neutrality. "She said she caught sight of him once or twice. Mostly near the edges. She said most people didn't pay him much attention because his brother was the one doing the visible things." She paused. "She said he was the kind of man you felt before you saw him."

I looked at the fire.

I said nothing.

Kairo lifted her tea and drank and said nothing more, and the room was warm, and the fire moved, and outside the pack neighbourhood was busy with everything it was telling itself about last night, and I sat in my chair and held my cup and kept my face very still.

Gaius.

The name settled in my chest and stayed there, quiet and weighted and without permission, the way things settle when they have decided they belong somewhere and are not asking.

I drank my tea.

I did not look away from the fire for a very long time.