The WitchWolf Queen

Chapter6

The ballroom was too loud.

Not in the way that noise is simply noise, the kind you tune out after a while and forget is there. It was loud in the way that pressed against your temples and made the inside of your chest feel like a room with too many people in it. Music and laughter and the clink of crystal and the swish of expensive fabric and perfume layered over perfume until the air itself felt thick.

I slipped through the side door before I even made the decision to do it. My feet just moved and the rest of me followed.

The corridor on the other side was a completely different world.

The noise died the moment the door swung shut behind me. What replaced it was quiet so sudden and so complete that I stood still for a moment just breathing it in. Cool air. Stone floors. The faint smell of wood polish and something older underneath, something that had lived in these walls for a very long time.

I exhaled slowly.

My heart was still doing something irregular in my chest and I pressed a hand flat against my sternum as though I could physically settle it down. I told myself it was the dancing. The crowd. The overwhelming newness of being inside a place I had only ever heard described in stories whispered between pack children who had never been invited anywhere near it.

I told myself it had nothing to do with Arthur Lingson and the way he had looked at me on the dance floor.

I pushed off from the door and began walking.

The corridor stretched ahead of me, long and straight, lit at intervals by iron wall sconces that held candles burned low. The light they gave was warm and unsteady, the kind that makes shadows lean and shift, that makes painted faces on walls look like they might blink. And there were painted faces. Portraits lined both sides of the hall, one after another, each in an ornate frame that probably cost more than everything my family owned put together. Wolves in human form. Wolves mid-shift, caught by some artist in the moment between one thing and another. Names etched on small brass plates at the base of each frame that I was too far away to read clearly.

I slowed as I walked, not because I meant to, but because the portraits pulled at something curious in me. These were the people who had shaped this pack. Their histories lived in these frames. Whatever power lived in this pack land, its roots went back through the faces hanging in this hall, and I found I wanted to look at all of them.

I stopped in front of one midway down the corridor.

It was different from the others. Smaller, for one thing. The others were large and imposing, clearly commissioned to impress. This one had a quietness to it. Two boys sat side by side on what appeared to be a stone step, not a throne, not a commanding seat of any kind. Just a step. One of them was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his dark hair falling across his forehead and a smile on his face so bright and easy you could feel the warmth of it even through the paint. The other boy sat very straight. His hands were on his knees. His dark hair was shorter and his jaw was already set with a firmness that seemed too old for the face it belonged to. He was looking directly at whoever was painting him with an expression that was not unfriendly exactly, but was very, very serious.

They looked about ten years old.

I tilted my head and studied the serious-faced boy. There was something familiar in the jaw, in the set of the eyes, even rendered in oil and decades old. Something that had stood behind me in the ballroom not an hour ago and said, can I have this dance.

Arthur, I thought. The smiling one had to be Arthur.

Which made the serious one…

"That was painted the year our father decided we needed to be recorded for posterity."

I spun around so fast I nearly lost my footing on the stone floor. My hand flew out and found the wall and I steadied myself against it and pressed my lips together so that the small, undignified sound I had almost made did not actually escape.

There was a man standing in the corridor.

He had not been there a moment ago. Or perhaps he had and I simply hadn't seen him, because he was standing quite still against the far wall in the space between two sconces where the light thinned out and the shadows gathered, and he was dressed in dark clothes, and he had the particular quality of stillness that some people carry, the kind that makes them easy to miss until suddenly you cannot look away.

I looked at him now and could not look away.

He was tall. Taller than Arthur and Arthur was already a tall man. He had dark hair cut close and a jaw that could have been carved out of something deliberate. There was a scar along the left side of it, fine and pale, following the bone from just beneath his ear to the corner of his mouth. His eyes caught the candlelight from across the corridor and they were gold. Not brown that looked gold in certain light. Gold. The colour of something old and certain and not quite natural.

He was watching me with an expression I could not name.

I became suddenly and acutely aware of several things at once. That I was alone in a corridor I had wandered into without permission. That this man had been standing here in the near-dark watching me stare at a portrait of him. That my heart, which had almost settled, had picked back up again with considerable enthusiasm.

"I didn't know anyone was here," I said. My voice came out steadier than I deserved credit for.

"Clearly," he said.

It was not unkind. It was not kind either. It was simply an observation, delivered in a voice that was low and unhurried and gave nothing away.

I straightened my back. "I apologise. I was just…" I gestured vaguely at the portrait and immediately felt foolish for gesturing at anything. "I was walking."

"You were staring at that painting for quite some time."

"I was looking at it," I said. "There is a difference."

Something shifted very slightly in his expression. Not a smile. The territory just before a smile, surveyed and immediately abandoned.

"Is there," he said.

"Yes," I said. "Staring implies you have stopped thinking. I was thinking."

He looked at me for a moment. The candles between us shifted in some draft I couldn't feel and his shadow moved on the wall behind him.

"About what," he said.

I turned back to the portrait before I answered, because looking at the painting was considerably less unnerving than looking at him. "About the two boys in this painting," I said. "About whether they had any idea, when they were sitting here being painted, what they would become."

Silence.

I waited, still looking at the portrait. The serious boy with his hands on his knees and his jaw already set looked back at me and said nothing, which I supposed was consistent.

"They didn't," the man behind me said.

I turned around. He had moved. Not closer, but he was no longer pressed against the far wall. He was standing a few feet into the corridor now and the candlelight reached him properly and I could see him fully and I immediately wished I had more practice at keeping my face composed.

"The one on the left," I said. "That's you."

It wasn't a question. He didn't treat it like one.

"Yes," he said.

I looked back at the portrait one more time and then back at him and I searched for some trace of the ten-year-old boy with his rigid spine and his serious eyes. I found it in the jaw. And in the eyes. And in the particular way he was standing right now, hands loose at his sides, nothing tense in his posture but everything about him suggesting that he was entirely in control of this moment and had been since before I turned around.

"You haven't changed much," I said.

Something moved behind his eyes. "No one has ever said that to me before."

"I imagine most people don't tell you very much at all," I said. "To your face, anyway."

The silence that followed that was a different quality of silence than the ones before it. I became aware that I had perhaps said something that a person with more sense would not have said, to a person she had just met, in a corridor of a building she had been let into largely by accident.

But he didn't look offended. He looked, if anything, faintly curious. The way someone looks when they have turned over a stone expecting to find nothing and found something unexpected underneath.

"You were at the ball," he said.

"Yes," I said.

"I saw you dance with my brother."

I kept my expression even. "He asked. It would have been rude to refuse an Alpha King."

"Most people don't need to be told that."

"I wasn't told," I said. "I worked it out on my own."

He studied me. I had the distinct and uncomfortable feeling of being assessed by someone who was very good at assessing things and who had not yet reached a verdict.

"You wandered quite far from the ballroom," he said.

"I needed air."

"There's air in the gardens."

"I didn't know where the gardens were."

"You could have asked someone."

"I could have," I agreed. "But the corridor looked interesting and no one told me I wasn't allowed."

A pause. "No one told you because guests don't generally wander into the private halls."

"Then perhaps someone should put a sign up," I said, and then immediately pressed my lips together because there was composure and then there was whatever I was doing, and I wasn't sure they were the same thing.

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he pushed off from where he was standing and said simply, "Come."

He said it the way someone says a word they have never had to make sound like a request because it never has been one. Not harshly. Just with the absolute and unthinking certainty that what he said would happen.

I didn't move immediately.

He paused and glanced back, and there was something in that glance. Just a fraction of recalibration. Like a man who is used to a door opening when he approaches it and has just noticed this particular door has a different mechanism.

"I'll take you back to the ballroom," he said. "The way you came will take you through the kitchens."

I considered this. Then I considered the alternative, which was wandering this corridor alone until I found the kitchens by accident, and I said, "All right."

I fell into step behind him and then corrected to beside him because walking behind someone felt like a choice I didn't want to make.

He didn't comment on it.

We walked in silence and it was a strange silence, not empty or awkward but weighted, like a conversation happening in a register neither of us was speaking aloud. His footsteps made almost no sound on the stone floor for a man his size. Mine were considerably more audible and I was briefly annoyed at my own shoes.

I looked at the portraits we passed now from the other direction, their faces sliding by in reverse order.

"How old is the pack?" I asked, because the silence was starting to say things I didn't know how to answer.

"Older than the records that exist of it," he said.

"That's not really an answer."

"It's the honest one," he said. "The first written records we have go back four hundred years. What existed before that is mostly legend."

I looked at the portraits. Four hundred years of faces looking out of frames. "And before the legends?"

"Before the legends," he said, "there is only the moon."

I glanced at him. His profile in the candlelight was very still.

"That's almost poetic," I said.

"Don't repeat it," he said. "I have a reputation to maintain."

I looked at him sharply, ready for the cold, and found instead that his jaw was doing something at the corner that might, with significant generosity, be called almost-wry. It was so brief and so small that I wasn't entirely sure I had seen it at all.

I faced forward again and kept walking.

The corridor turned and widened and ahead of us I could hear the music resuming its reach, the murmur of the crowd, the whole warm and overwhelming noise of the ballroom growing closer. I could see light bleeding under a set of double doors at the end of the passage.

We stopped in front of them.

I could hear my mother's voice somewhere beyond the doors, asking someone how long the musical set would last, and the sound of it settled something in my chest that had been untethered since I slipped out.

I turned to thank him.

He was already half-turned to leave, one hand loose at his side, his face in profile again in the soft hallway light, and I realised with a jolt that I did not know his name. Arthur had given his. This man had said only my brother and come and four hundred years of pack history and I still had no name to put to the gold eyes and the quiet scar.

"I don't know who you are," I said.

He paused mid-turn. He was still for a moment in that way he had, like a man who is taking stock of something before he decides what to do with it.

Then he turned his head. Not his whole body. Just his head, slightly, so that I caught the edge of his profile and one gold eye in the candlelight.

"Gaius," he said.

And he walked away down the corridor without looking back, and the shadows closed around him like they had been waiting to have him back, and I stood in front of the double doors with the ballroom noise pressing through the wood and the name settling into my chest like something that had been dropped from a height.

Gaius.

The Alpha King.

The other one.

I stood there a moment longer than I should have. Then I pressed my palms flat against the doors and pushed them open and walked back into the music and the light and the noise, and I did not look behind me, and I told myself very firmly that there was nothing to look behind me for.

My mother found me in thirty seconds.

"Where have you been?" she asked, low and urgent, gripping my elbow. "I have been circling this room for twenty minutes. I nearly asked one of the guards."

"I was walking," I said.

She looked at my face. I kept it very still.

"You look strange," she said.

"I'm fine, Mother."

She studied me a moment longer in the way she always did, reading the spaces between things, looking for the sentence I had left out. Then the music swelled again and she looked toward the dance floor and forgot momentarily to pursue it.

I looked down at my hands.

I did not know why my pulse was still uneven. I had simply gotten lost in a corridor and been walked back. That was all. I had spoken to a man I did not know, in a hall I should not have been in, and he had told me a pack had existed before its own records and said the word come like it was the simplest word in any language.

That was all.

I pressed my hands together and lifted my eyes to the chandeliers and told myself to be sensible.

Across the room, through the turning bodies of dancers and the shifting crowd, I caught for just a moment a glimpse of dark hair and golden eyes before the crowd rearranged itself and the space closed and there was nothing there at all.

I looked away.

The music played on.