The WitchWolf Queen

Chapter 10

Elara's POV

I was back home before noon.

The lane had not quieted down appreciably in my absence. If anything it had settled into a more comfortable rhythm of itself, the way gossip does once it has moved past the initial urgency and found its cruising speed. People were no longer stopping in the middle of things to discuss it. They were simply discussing it while continuing to do the things they had been doing, which was in some ways worse, because it meant it had become ordinary conversation. Background noise. The kind that would be there for days.

I went in through the front door and took off my coat and hung it on the peg and went to the kitchen and found my mother had gone out and left bread on the table and a note beside it that said she had gone to see Mrs. Alvit about some wool and would be back before supper, written in her particular handwriting that was small and upright and left no room for ambiguity.

My father was in his chair in the front room with a book. He looked up when I came through. He had the settled quality he always had, like a man who had been exactly where he was for as long as he needed to be and expected to remain there.

"Good walk?" he said.

"Kairo's," I said.

He nodded and looked back at his book, and that was the entirety of it. This was one of the things I loved about my father. He occupied the same amount of space in a room whether the room was full of conversation or empty of it. He did not require the exchange of words to be present.

I went upstairs.

I changed out of my morning clothes and sat on the edge of my bed and looked at the window, which showed me the familiar view of the back of the Aldren house and the small patch of garden between us and the pear tree that leaned toward our side of the fence as though it had been intending for years to cross over and had simply not gotten around to it.

Ordinary things.

All of it ordinary, and all of it carrying the particular quality that ordinary things carry the morning after something has shifted, which is the quality of being almost but not quite the same as they were before. Like a painting someone has moved slightly on the wall. You cannot say precisely what is different. You simply know the painting was not there.

I lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling.

Gaius.

I pressed my eyes shut.

I was doing it again. I had done it at Kairo's, staring into the fire while she watched me with those careful eyes, and I had done it on the walk home, and I was doing it now, and I was going to stop doing it because there was nothing useful to be gained from turning a name over and over in your mind when the man it belonged to was an Alpha King of a powerful pack and you were the girl from the modest house on the narrow lane who had rejected his contract and would not be receiving another.

That was the truth of it and I knew the truth of it and knowing it should have been sufficient.

I was still looking at the ceiling when the knock came at the front door.

I heard my father answer it.

There was a brief exchange of voices below. My father's, low and unhurried, and another voice that I recognised from the first word of it even through the floorboards, even muffled by wood and distance.

I sat up.

I heard my father say something that involved my name, and then footsteps, and then my father's voice at the bottom of the stairs saying, "Elara. Someone to see you."

I came downstairs.

Kieran was standing in the front room.

He was not doing anything in particular. He was just standing there, his coat still on, his hands easy at his sides, his hat in one hand, looking at the small print above our fireplace that my mother had gotten from a market stall some years ago and that none of us had ever looked at closely enough to describe. He turned when he heard me on the stairs and the look on his face arranged itself into the expression he wore most naturally, which was open and warm and completely without performance.

"Morning," he said.

"Morning," I said.

My father looked between us once with the mild attentiveness of a man noting something for no particular reason. Then he said, "I'll be in my chair," and went back to his front room in the way he had of removing himself from situations without making the removal noticeable, as though he had simply remembered somewhere else he needed to be.

Kieran watched him go and then looked back at me.

He had brown hair that was slightly disordered from the wind, the way it always was unless he had made a specific effort, which he usually hadn't. His eyes were green, a particular shade of green, not like mine exactly, mine were darker, his were the colour of glass in sunlight, and they were currently doing the thing they sometimes did, which was to be considerably more present than the rest of his face.

He was smiling. But the eyes were doing something the smile wasn't.

"I heard you had quite an evening," he said.

His voice was easy. The kind of easy that is practised rather than native, that a person learns because it serves them, because it keeps rooms from becoming things they don't want rooms to become.

"Sit down," I said, because he was standing there with his hat in his hand and it made the room feel like he was leaving when he had only just arrived.

He sat. I sat across from him in the chair my father usually kept, and the room resettled around us, and I looked at him in the ordinary light of an ordinary morning, this person I had known for most of my life, and felt the particular mix of things I always felt when I looked at him, which was warm and complicated and best left where it was.

"How are you?" I asked.

"I'm well," he said. He set his hat on his knee and turned it slightly in his hands, a small and absentminded motion, the kind a person makes when their hands need somewhere to be while their mind is occupied elsewhere. "I'm not the one people are talking about this morning."

"People are talking about everything this morning," I said. "That's what people do."

"They're talking about one thing specifically," he said.

"They're dramatising one thing," I said. "It was a dance, Kieran. An Alpha King offered his hand and I didn't refuse it in front of his entire pack because I do have some sense. That is the full extent of anything that happened."

Kieran looked at me.

He had a particular quality when he looked at you, Kieran. It was not the assessing quality that some people had, the kind that made you feel like something being measured. It was more like attention. Pure and uncomplicated attention, the kind that is simply the result of a person who is interested in you finding you in front of them.

"I know," he said simply. "I'm not here to make it into something it isn't."

I looked at him. "Then what are you here for?"

He considered this. He turned his hat once more on his knee. "I wanted to see that you were all right," he said. "The morning after something people are talking about can be a particular kind of unpleasant. Even when the talking is mostly good." He paused. "Especially, maybe, when the talking is mostly good."

I felt something ease slightly in my chest that I hadn't known was tight.

"It's loud," I admitted.

"Your lane is always loud."

"It's a different kind of loud today."

He nodded like he understood this without needing it explained. "Your mother must be pleased," he said, and he said it without any particular edge, just lightly, the way you say a true thing that doesn't need dressing up.

"She's doing her best to be reasonable about it," I said.

He smiled, a proper one this time, and it changed his face the way it always did, something opening up in it, something that had no sharpness anywhere in it. "That sounds exhausting for her."

"It's taking everything she has," I said.

He laughed, briefly, a real laugh, and the sound of it in the small front room was a familiar thing, the kind of familiar that lives in your chest before you are aware of recognising it.

The laugh settled and what came after it was a quieter quality of air.

I looked at my hands in my lap.

He looked at the print above the fireplace again, the one he had been studying when I came downstairs.

"I didn't congratulate you," he said. The word came out with a slightly different texture than the others that had preceded it. Controlled in a way the others hadn't needed to be.

"There's nothing to congratulate," I said.

"People are saying it's significant," he said. "The dance."

"People are saying a great many things."

"They're not wrong to, though." He looked back at me and his expression was still the open, warm one, still composed, still steady. "Whatever it was or wasn't, Elara, you went to that ball and the whole room paid attention to you. That means something even if you don't want it to."

I looked at him. "Since when do you sound like my mother?"

"Since your mother and I have always been right about you and you've always been the last to admit it," he said, and it was lightly done, just barely light enough to be a joke, and we both almost let it be a joke, and then the silence after it stretched by about two seconds too long and we both felt the two seconds.

I looked away first.

The fire in the small hearth had burned down to coals. The room was still warm but the active heat of it had subsided. I could hear the lane outside, the ordinary sounds of it, and my father turning a page somewhere in the next room.

"Are you settled?" Kieran asked.

I looked back at him. "What do you mean?"

"After the rejection." He said the word plainly, without flinching from it. "It's been weeks. I haven't asked. I should have asked sooner." He held my gaze. "Are you settled. Are you all right with how things are."

He meant himself. He was asking about himself, about the thing between us, about whether I had made peace with the choice I had made, whether it sat well or whether it was still a weight. He was asking it the way he did everything, directly and quietly, without requiring me to answer in any particular way.

I thought about the honest answer.

The honest answer was complicated, as the honest answers about Kieran always were. There was nothing about Kieran that was uncomplicated. He was warm and he was steady and he had known me since we were children and he had the particular quality of making whatever room he was in feel safe in a way I had never entirely been able to account for. He had green eyes that paid attention in a way most people's eyes didn't. He had a laugh that belonged in small warm rooms.

And I had made a choice.

And I had made it for reasons I stood by, real reasons, reasons that were mine, and I stood by them still, even now, even sitting across from him in the ordinary morning with the coal fire and my father turning pages in the next room.

"I'm settled," I said. "Are you?"

It was a question I had not meant to ask. It arrived before I could decide whether to let it.

Kieran looked at me for a moment.

Something moved through his expression and was gone before I could read it completely, the way a reflection moves on water when a cloud crosses the sun, present and then not present, and you were not entirely sure afterwards whether you had seen it or invented it.

"I'm working on it," he said.

He said it lightly. It was almost nothing. It was so briefly said and so quietly deployed that a person not paying close attention might have heard it as fine, as yes, as an uncomplicated answer.

I was paying close attention.

I did not say anything.

He did not say anything.

The room held both of our silences and did not favour either of them.

Then Kieran stood up.

He did it naturally, without ceremony, the way he did most things. He settled his hat and pulled his coat straight and looked around the room in the brief, encompassing way of a person taking leave of a place.

"Tell your mother I said hello," he said.

"She'll want to know why you didn't stay for tea."

"Tell her I had somewhere to be."

"Did you?"

He looked at me, and there was the almost-smile, the one that lived just underneath the actual smile and was in some ways more honest. "Not particularly," he said. "But it's a better reason than the truth, which is that I didn't want to answer her questions."

I felt the corner of my mouth pull. "She would have had several."

"She would have had many," he agreed. He looked at me for a moment more. Just a moment. The kind of moment that has weight in it, that is not simply the time between one word and the next but something more deliberate, a pause that chooses to be a pause. "Take care of yourself, Elara."

"You too," I said.

He nodded once and went to the front door and let himself out with the ease of someone who had been in this house many times before, and the door closed behind him with the quiet sound of a door that fits its frame properly, and I sat in the chair by the dying fire and did not move.

I heard his footsteps on the front path.

Unhurried. Even. The particular rhythm of Kieran walking, which I would have known anywhere, which had the same quality as everything else about him, steady and certain, like a person who had decided long ago where he was going and had not reconsidered since.

I got up and went to the window.

I wasn't going to. I was going to sit in the chair and let him go and not watch him go because watching him go was not a thing I needed to do.

I went to the window.

He was at the end of the front path. He turned onto the lane without looking back. His coat was dark against the pale morning and his hat was on and his hands were in his pockets and he walked the way he always walked, taking up exactly the space he needed and no more.

I'm working on it.

I pressed two fingers lightly against the glass and watched him until the lane turned and he went around it and he was gone.

The glass was cool against my fingertips.

I stood there a moment after he disappeared. The lane was its ordinary self again, people moving through it with their ordinary purposes, and the sound of it came through the glass in its muffled, everyday way.

I felt something.

I did not look at it closely enough to name it. I recognised this in myself even as I did it, the way you recognise a habit that has been with you long enough to stop surprising you. There were things I looked at and things I declined to look at and the line between them was not always what I would have drawn if I had drawn it deliberately.

I took my fingers from the glass.

I turned back to the room.

My father was standing in the doorway of the front room, his book in his hand, looking at me with his quiet green eyes.

He did not say anything.

I did not say anything.

Then he nodded once, almost imperceptibly, and went back to his chair, and the sound of the page turning came a moment later, and the house went on around me in its ordinary way.

I went to the kitchen to put the kettle on.

I thought about making tea.

I thought about Kairo's warm room and the fire and the cup I had held with both hands.

I thought about nothing in particular.

I thought about I'm working on it, said lightly, quickly, almost nothing, and the two seconds of silence that had lived underneath it.

The kettle began its slow climb toward boiling.

I looked out the back window at the pear tree, still leaning toward our fence, still intending to cross it someday.

Outside, the pack neighbourhood went on with its morning.

And I stood at the kitchen window and held the feeling that had no name yet, carefully, the way you hold something you haven't decided what to do with.