The WitchWolf Queen

Chapter 11

Elara's POV

The letter arrived on a Tuesday.

I know it was a Tuesday because my mother did the washing on Tuesdays and she was in the back garden with her arms in the basin when the messenger came, and I was the one who answered the door, and I was still holding the letter when she came in through the back and found me standing in the middle of the kitchen not moving.

She looked at my face first, the way she always did, reading it before she read anything else. Then she looked at my hands.

Then she looked at the letter.

It was not a remarkable piece of correspondence to look at, physically. A standard size. Good paper, the kind with a weight and texture to it that announced itself before you had read a single word. Sealed at the back with dark wax pressed into the shape of something I did not immediately recognise, an emblem I had to tilt toward the window light to see clearly.

I tilted it.

Two wolves, facing each other across a crown. Below the crown, a single word in the old script that I had learned in childhood lessons and not used since, worn smooth by its own age.

Lingson.

My mother made a sound.

It was a small sound. It was not a word. It was the kind of sound a person makes when something they were not entirely expecting has arrived and their body has responded before their mind has had a chance to manage it.

"That's—" she started.

"Yes," I said.

"Is that—"

"Yes, Mother."

She crossed the kitchen in four steps and stood beside me and looked at the seal in my hand. Her hands, still slightly damp from the washing, came up and then stopped themselves just short of touching the letter, hovering for a moment in a way that was almost comical and was also not comical at all.

"Open it," she said.

"I know," I said.

"Elara."

"I know." I turned the letter over. Looked at the front. My name was written there in a hand I did not recognise, precise and clean, the letters formed with the particular consistency of someone who wrote many letters and had long ago stopped thinking about how they formed their letters. Just my name. No other address. As though there had been no uncertainty about where to deliver it.

Elara Carter.

I broke the seal.

The letter was not long.

This was somehow the first thing that struck me about it. I had half-expected something formal and elaborate, the kind of correspondence that announces its own importance through sheer volume, that uses many words to say a simple thing because the institution it comes from is accustomed to being ceremonious about everything.

This was not that.

It was seven lines. Eight, if you counted the sign-off. The handwriting was the same throughout, the same precise and unhurried hand as on the outside.

I read it once standing at the kitchen window.

Then I read it again.

Miss Carter,

Your presence is requested at the Lingson Mansion at two o'clock in the afternoon, three days from the date of this letter. Please come to the eastern entrance and give your name to the attendant on duty.

No preparation is necessary beyond your attendance.

The Alpha Kings request this meeting as a private matter and ask that the contents of this letter be kept between yourself and your immediate household.

Regards,

On behalf of the Alpha Kings of the Last Growl Pack

That was all.

No explanation. No indication of subject or purpose or what a private matter meant or what any of it meant. Just a time and a date and an entrance and a request that had been written in the tone of a request but that both of us standing in that kitchen understood was something other than a request.

My mother had been reading over my shoulder.

When I lowered the letter she was very still.

I turned to look at her. She was wearing her washing clothes, her hair pinned back, a small damp mark on her sleeve where the basin had splashed. She was looking at the letter in my hand and her expression was doing something I could not immediately categorise because it was not one single thing. It was several things sitting in the same space at the same time, trying to occupy the same room without jostling each other.

Hope was the loudest of them.

But underneath the hope there were other things. I could see them moving, quieter and less certain, and I did not look at them too long because looking at them too long would require me to name them and I was not ready to name them.

"Three days," she said.

"Yes."

"Two o'clock."

"Yes."

She pressed her lips together. Her hands came together in front of her in the position I knew, the one she took when she was containing something. "They want to see you."

"Apparently," I said.

"The Alpha Kings want to see you," she said, and this time the words had a different texture, like she was turning them in her hands, testing their weight.

"The letter doesn't say which one," I said. "It says both."

"It says on behalf of both," she said.

"Which means it could be either," I said. "Or neither, and a steward has questions about the ball invitations or something administrative that I accidentally—"

"Elara," my mother said, and the single word had the patient, particular weight of a woman who had been listening to me make small things out of large ones for nineteen years and had decided not to entertain it today. "Do you genuinely believe the Alpha Kings summon girls from the pack neighbourhood for administrative matters?"

I looked at the letter.

"No," I said quietly.

She looked at me for a moment with the bright, careful eyes that missed nothing. Then she turned and went to the doorway and called my father's name.

He came from the garden where he had been doing something with the fence post that had been leaning for the better part of the month. He came in through the back with dirt on his hands and the mildly interested expression of a man who has been called in from the garden, and he looked at my mother's face, and then he looked at mine, and then he looked at the letter I was holding.

My mother told him what it was.

He did not react the way she had reacted.

He crossed to where I was standing and I gave him the letter and he read it. He read it with the quiet thoroughness he applied to most things, his eyes moving through the lines at an even pace, and when he reached the end he went back to the beginning and read it again.

I watched him.

He read it twice and then he stood there with it in his hands for a moment longer than the twice-reading required.

"Dad," I said.

He looked up. His face was composed. It had the particular composure of my father's face when my father had decided something about his composure, which was different from his ordinary composure, which was natural, which required no effort. This was the other kind. The kind that was the result of a decision.

"Three days," he said.

"Yes."

"Eastern entrance," he said.

"That's what it says."

He folded the letter. He did it carefully, along its original creases, and handed it back to me.

My mother was watching him with the particular attention she reserved for the moments when my father was doing the thing he sometimes did, which was to know something and not say it, and which she had varying success at getting him to undo.

"Well?" she said.

"She should go," he said.

"Of course she should go," my mother said. "I am asking what you think it means."

My father looked at her. Then he looked at me. His green eyes were steady and his face was still in the way I had noticed in the wagon, the night of the ball, with the small private smile that I had seen and not understood.

"I think," he said, choosing each word with the slowness of a man walking across unfamiliar ground, "that it means the Alpha Kings are men who are not in the habit of doing things without reason."

"That tells us nothing," my mother said.

"It tells us what we know," he said. He looked at me again. "Go, Elara. Go and see what they have to say."

I looked at him.

"That's all?" I said.

"That's all," he said.

And he handed the letter back and went to wash his hands at the basin and that was the end of it, or at least the end of the part he was willing to give us, which was not the same thing, and I knew it was not the same thing, and his hands moved through the water in the basin with the perfect steadiness of a man who was thinking about something entirely other than washing his hands.

The three days were the longest three days I could recently remember.

The neighbourhood knew by evening of the first day.

I don't know how. I had told no one. My mother, to her considerable credit, had told no one. My father had told no one because my father told no one anything as a general principle of his existence. But somehow by the time the sun had moved to the afternoon position the particular quality of the murmur outside our lane had shifted again, deepened, the way it had the morning after the ball but more so, more charged, and when I went out briefly to the market I felt the eyes the way you feel weather, not dramatically, not in the form of anything explicit, just the low-grade awareness of being something that rooms have an opinion about.

Maret from next door was at my door by the following morning.

I let my mother answer it.

The second day was quieter but only because the first day had burned through the initial urgency of it and what remained was something more settled and more thoughtful, the kind of talk that had slowed down enough to start asking questions rather than simply repeating the fact of the thing. I heard these questions at a distance, through windows, through walls, through the particular way Kairo looked at me when I visited in the afternoon and she handed me my tea and said nothing because she was waiting for me to say something first.

I didn't say anything first.

She let it be.

We sat in her warm room and drank our tea and she talked about other things, ordinary things, the small news of the neighbourhood and a problem with her mother's garden and a book she had been reading, and I let her talk and I was grateful for it in the deep and specific way you are grateful for something that asks nothing of you when everything else is asking a great deal.

On the third morning I woke before the house was up.

I lay in the grey pre-dawn and listened to the pack neighbourhood sleeping its final minutes and I looked at the ceiling and thought about nothing, or tried to, and had the usual result of trying to think about nothing, which was to think about everything with slightly more focus than usual.

Two o'clock.

The eastern entrance.

No preparation is necessary beyond your attendance.

I had been turning that line over since I first read it. There was something in it that I could not entirely account for. It was a reassurance in the form of instruction, and the fact that someone had thought to put it there meant that someone had thought about what I might be anxious about and had tried to address it. Which meant that someone, somewhere in the process of composing this letter, had thought about me.

Not about a candidate. Not about a pack member. About me.

Or perhaps I was making small things into large ones in the other direction.

I got up.

My mother helped me dress.

She did not say she was doing this. She simply materialised in my room after breakfast with a consideration in her eyes and her hands already in motion and I let her because it was easier and because there was something in the help that was not only about the dressing, that was the way her hands worked, the small and automatic tenderness of a woman doing the thing she knew how to do when there was nothing else she could do.

She chose the dark green. Not the ball gown, the everyday green, the one that sat well on my shoulders and did not announce itself too loudly.

"Understated," she said, half to herself, smoothing a fold that did not need smoothing.

"It's just a meeting," I said.

She gave me the look that indicated she had heard this category of sentence from me many times and had decided not to dignify it.

She fixed my hair. Not elaborately, just the way she sometimes fixed it when she wanted it out of my face and neat without looking like I had tried too hard. Her hands moved through it the way they had since I was small, familiar and careful.

When she was done she stood back and looked at me.

Her face did the thing it sometimes did, the thing I had no name for, the thing that was between pride and tenderness and something older than either of them, something that lived in the part of a parent that watches their child become a person and feels the whole of their life up to that moment press against the present all at once.

She smoothed my collar.

She didn't say anything.

"Mother," I said.

"I know," she said. "I know." She straightened up. "You look like yourself. That's all I wanted."

My father was waiting at the bottom of the stairs.

He was dressed in his good coat, which surprised me until I understood he was simply marking the occasion in the way he marked things, quietly, without being asked, without explaining himself.

He looked at me when I came down.

"All right?" he said.

"All right," I said.

He nodded. He opened the front door for me and the morning came in, cool and clean and in possession of the particular bright quality of a morning that has decided to be clear, and I stepped through it and onto the front path and turned back.

Both of them were in the doorway.

My mother had her hands folded in front of her. Her chin was at the angle I knew, the reasonable angle, the angle that was doing a great deal of work. Her eyes were bright.

My father was simply there. Steady and present and still, and his face was gentle and his expression was the one I could not read, and he held my gaze for a moment and then he nodded once, a small definitive thing, the nod of a man who has confidence in something he is not explaining.

"Go on," he said.

I went.

The pack mansion was twenty minutes' walk from our lane on a direct route through the settlement and I walked it alone, as the letter had required, as I had told my mother I would, ignoring her suggestion of sending a message to ask whether she might accompany me to the gate at least.

The settlement moved around me as I walked through it. People noticed. I had accepted by now that people would notice, that for the foreseeable future I would be a thing the neighbourhood noticed, and I had decided the most functional response to this was to look straight ahead and keep a steady pace and give no expression that could be interpreted as confirmation of anything.

The pack mansion came into view as I crested the last rise of the path.

I had seen it before, obviously. It was not invisible. It sat at the elevated end of the settlement in the way that powerful things often sat, raised above the general level by design, its stone face and its towers and its grounds arranged to be seen from most of the approaches to it. I had grown up with it on the horizon the way you grow up with any landmark, familiar in the way of things that have always been there, noticed but not examined.

I examined it now.

In the morning light it was something different from what it had been at night. The candlelit golden version of it from the ball had been a thing of atmosphere and warmth and the particular unreality of an occasion that was already dreamlike at the edges. This was the daylight version. Solid and old and completely without any interest in how it appeared to the person approaching it.

The eastern entrance was a smaller gate than the main one. A guard was posted to the right of it, a man in the pack colours who looked at me with the particular trained neutrality of someone who looked at everything with trained neutrality.

"Your name," he said.

"Elara Carter," I said.

He looked at something on the small table beside him. Found whatever he was looking for and looked back up at me.

"Follow the path to the right of the main garden," he said. "You'll come to a side door set into the grey stone. Knock twice."

He stepped aside.

I went through the gate.

The path he had described was quiet and edged with low hedge and ran alongside the eastern wall of the mansion's outer garden, and I walked it with my hands loose at my sides and my breathing deliberate and my thoughts in approximately the state of a room that someone has tidied in a hurry, not actually organised, just sufficiently presentable.

No preparation is necessary beyond your attendance.

I thought about the letter.

I thought about what I knew, which was: two men had asked me to accept a contract and I had refused it and that should have been the end of any formal relationship between myself and those two men and this building, and it had not been the end, because three days ago a letter had arrived and I was now walking along a path made of pale stone toward a door set into grey wall, and I did not know why.

I thought about what I felt, which was harder to account for and less useful.

I stopped in front of the door.

Grey stone, as described. Iron handle, weathered. Two hinges, old but maintained. The door of a place that was accustomed to quiet arrivals, to people who came to this entrance rather than the main one, who were expected but not announced.

I raised my hand.

I knocked twice.

The sound of it was absorbed by the thick stone on all sides of me, two short sounds and then nothing.

I lowered my hand.

I stood there in the cool morning air, on the pale stone path, in front of the grey door of a building that belonged to men I had rejected and who had nonetheless sent for me.

The door opened.

A woman stood on the other side. She was middle-aged and wore the house colours and had a composed and professional face and she looked at me with the same trained neutrality as the gate guard, except that her eyes were kinder than his.

"Miss Carter," she said. "Please come in."

I came in.

The door closed behind me.

I stood in a small stone antechamber, well lit, simply furnished. There was a bench along one wall and a table with a vase of something green and living on it, and two doors leading further into the building, and the woman who had let me in was already moving toward the left-hand door.

"This way," she said.

I followed.

And whatever the morning had been until now, with its bread and its careful dressing and its mother's hands and its father's nod and its twenty minutes of pale stone path, it became simply the space before what came next. I could feel the transition in the stone under my feet and the air around me and the particular quality of quiet that was not silence but was the hush of a place that was waiting for something.

The woman stopped before another door. She knocked once. She opened it without waiting for an answer and stepped aside.

"Miss Carter," she said again, and this time it was for someone else's benefit, and she gestured for me to go through.

I breathed in once.

I went through the door.