The WitchWolf Queen

Chapter 7

Elara's POV

My mother had a particular way of standing when she was containing herself.

She would plant both feet slightly wider than necessary, as though bracing against something only she could feel coming, and she would fold her hands in front of her at the waist, and she would hold her chin at an angle that suggested she was being very calm and reasonable and that you should not for a single moment be fooled into thinking she was being very calm and reasonable.

She was standing exactly like that when I came back through the ballroom doors.

She was also approximately three feet from where I emerged, which told me she had been watching that door for some time.

"There you are," she said.

The words were quiet. The words were perfectly measured. The words were doing an enormous amount of work to contain everything that was not being said yet.

"Here I am," I agreed.

She looked at my face. I looked at hers. She had dressed carefully for tonight, her best yellow gown sitting properly on her shoulders, her grey hair pinned up in the style she only wore for occasions she considered significant. Her brown eyes were bright and alert in the chandelier light and her folded hands tightened very slightly against each other.

"You've been gone," she said, "for quite some time."

"I needed some air."

"There's air in the gardens."

I almost stopped breathing entirely because those were very nearly the exact words that Gaius had said to me not ten minutes ago in a private corridor of this same building, and the echo of it moved through me in a way that I did not examine.

"I didn't know where the gardens were," I said, which was what I had said to him too, and the repetition sat strangely in my mouth.

My mother studied me for a moment the way she had been studying me for nineteen years, which meant she was reading the spaces I left in sentences and looking for the word I had replaced with a smaller, safer word.

Then the music shifted into something slower and sweeping and the dancers on the floor rearranged themselves and a couple turned nearby and my mother's attention moved to the floor and I watched her remember what she had been holding since before I disappeared.

She turned back to me.

Her hands unfolded.

"He danced with you," she said.

She said it the way someone says a sentence they have been turning over in their mind long enough that the words have become very smooth, worn down to their essential weight.

I kept my expression neutral. "A lot of people danced tonight, Mother."

"Don't," she said, softly but with precision. "Don't do that thing where you make large things small."

I looked at her. She looked back at me and her eyes were lit with something I recognised immediately because I had seen it my whole life. It was hope. Not the small, careful, everyday kind that she carried around like something she was afraid to set down too hard in case it broke. This was the other kind. The kind that had gotten loose and was currently occupying her entire face without permission.

I felt something pull in my chest. A mixture of love for her and the particular gentle dread of knowing you are about to disappoint someone who deserves not to be disappointed.

"An Alpha King asked me to dance," I said carefully. "That's all it was."

"Elara."

"It was one dance, Mother."

"It was not one dance," she said, and she stepped closer and lowered her voice and the words came faster now, like something she had been holding behind her teeth and had finally been given leave to release. "It was an Alpha King walking across a full ballroom. It was him putting his hand out to you in front of every person in that room. Do you understand what people saw tonight? Do you understand what they are thinking right now, every person in that room who watched that happen?"

I glanced instinctively around us. The nearest cluster of guests was several feet away and absorbed in their own conversations, but I understood her quiet. Sound carried in stone rooms. Especially this kind of sound.

"They are thinking he was being polite," I said.

"They are thinking nothing of the sort," my mother said. "When an Alpha King singles out one girl in a room full of candidates and leads her onto his own floor, people do not think polite. People think chosen." She pressed that last word down carefully between us like she was laying something precious on a table. "They think chosen, Elara."

I was quiet for a moment.

Outside the windows of the ballroom the night was very dark and the candles inside made the glass into mirrors that showed the room back to itself, all moving light and spinning colour and the faces of people who had come here tonight with their own particular hopes packed carefully inside their best clothes.

"He was being gracious to a guest," I said.

"He has never danced with a guest before tonight," my mother said.

I looked at her. "How do you know that?"

"Because I asked," she said simply, as though this was obvious, as though she had not spent the last however many minutes I was gone conducting a quiet and efficient investigation among the other attendees. "The woman by the east window has attended three previous gatherings at this mansion. She said in all three she never once saw either of the Alpha Kings dance with anyone."

I opened my mouth.

She raised one hand very slightly, not a commanding gesture, just enough to ask me to wait.

"I am not telling you this to pressure you," she said. "I am telling you this so that you understand what happened tonight." She paused and looked at me with an expression that sat somewhere between fierceness and tenderness, the combination she had perfected across nineteen years of knowing exactly what I was like. "You may do with it whatever you choose. You always do."

There it was. The thing beneath the hope. The acknowledgement that she knew me. That she loved me in full knowledge of exactly who I was and how I moved through the world and that neither of those things had ever stopped her from hoping on my behalf anyway.

I felt the pull in my chest again and said nothing.

The orchestra shifted into a livelier piece and the floor filled with new movement and around us the ballroom went on doing what ballrooms do, being large and golden and full of people performing slightly elevated versions of themselves.

My mother looked at me for one more moment. Then she smoothed the front of her gown and said, in her ordinary voice, the one she used for everyday things, "Where is your father."

"I haven't seen him," I said.

"He was by the far window the last time I looked." She shook her head mildly. "That man could stand quietly in a corner at his own parade and be content."

Despite everything, I smiled.

She caught the smile and her expression softened in the way it always did when she caught me smiling when I hadn't meant to. She reached out and straightened the collar of my dress with the small, automatic tenderness of a woman who had been straightening my things since I was small enough to hold still for it.

"We'll find him," she said. "It's getting late."