The WitchWolf Queen

Chapter 12

Elara's POV

The study was not what I had expected.

I was not entirely sure what I had expected. Something imposing, perhaps. Something that announced itself the way the rest of the mansion announced itself, with the weight of old money and older power and the accumulated consequence of generations of people who had always been important. A room that made you feel the distance between what you were and what it was.

This room did not do that.

It was large, certainly. The ceilings were high and the windows were tall and the morning light came through them in long clean angles that fell across a floor of dark wood worn smooth by what must have been a very great deal of time. There were books. Not decorative books, not the kind that line shelves in important rooms to suggest that important people live in them. These were books that had been read, their spines creased and their heights uneven and their arrangement on the shelves bearing the organic disorder of a collection that had grown by use rather than by design. Some of them were stacked horizontally on top of others. One shelf had given up any pretence of organisation entirely and simply held its contents in a cheerful pile.

There was a desk. There were two chairs arranged near a fireplace that was burning low and well. There was a window seat with a cushion on it that had been slightly flattened by use. There was a cup on the corner of the desk with something dried at the bottom of it that suggested it had been put down some time ago and not yet collected.

It was a room that was lived in.

I was still taking it in when I became aware that the woman who had shown me through had closed the door behind me, and that I was therefore alone in the room, and that the room was not, in fact, empty.

He was standing at the far window.

His back was to me, or mostly to me, one hand resting on the window frame, looking out at whatever the eastern grounds of the mansion showed at this hour. He was dressed more plainly than he had been at the ball, dark trousers and a shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows in the manner of a man who had been doing something that required his sleeves to be rolled and had not yet done anything that required him to unroll them. His hair was the same, long and dark with the blonde at the ends of it that caught the light when he turned.

He turned.

"Miss Carter," Arthur Lingson said, and he smiled, and the smile was exactly what it had been at the ball, immediate and genuine and carrying in it no awareness of its own effect, which was the most disarming thing about it. "You found us without difficulty?"

"I followed the directions," I said.

"Good. Good." He moved away from the window toward the chairs by the fire with the easy, unhurried manner of a man in a room he was entirely comfortable in. "Please sit down. I've been standing all morning and I'm using your arrival as an excuse to stop."

I looked at the two chairs.

I looked at the room.

I looked at the door through which I had come, which was closed, and the second door at the far end of the room, which was also closed.

"Is your brother not—" I began.

"Not today," Arthur said, already settling into one of the chairs with the relaxed economy of someone who had sat in it many times before. He glanced up at me. "He sends his regards."

I stood for a moment more in the way I had of assessing situations before committing to them. Then I sat in the remaining chair, and the fire was low and warm beside me, and the morning light came through the tall windows, and Arthur Lingson sat across from me with his rolled sleeves and his easy posture and his expression of someone who found the present moment entirely satisfactory.

He looked different in daylight.

At the ball he had been something the candlelight had contributed to, something that existed in the context of an occasion, framed by music and ceremony and the particular unreality of a room full of people performing their best versions of themselves. This was the other version. Daylight and a worn chair and a cup someone had forgotten to collect. He looked younger, somehow, and older at the same time. The lines around his eyes were visible in the morning light. So was the quality in those eyes that the ballroom had suggested but not confirmed, the quality of a man who was considerably more attentive than he looked.

"Tea," he said. It was not quite a question and not quite a statement. It was the word deployed in the particular way of someone who already knew the answer and was extending the courtesy of asking anyway.

"Please," I said.

He reached forward and lifted the pot from the tray on the small table between the chairs and poured with the easy confidence of someone who did not require assistance to pour tea in his own study, which I noticed because it was not the thing I would have expected, which was a summons for someone else to do it.

He handed me the cup.

I took it.

"How do you take it?" he said.

"As it comes," I said.

He looked briefly amused. "No preference?"

"Life is full of things I have preferences about," I said. "Tea is not one of them."

He looked at me with the expression I had seen at the ball, the one that suggested I had said something he had not expected and that he was deciding whether to comment on it. He decided, apparently, to let it alone, and poured his own cup and settled back.

The fire moved between us.

The room was quiet in the particular way of rooms that are used to containing quiet without being diminished by it.

"This is your father's study," I said. I did not know why I said it. It was simply the impression the room gave, of belonging to someone slightly removed from the present.

Arthur looked around the room as though seeing it through my observation. "It was," he said. "We haven't changed much of it." He said this without apparent emotion but with something underneath it that I did not press on. "The books especially. He would have been difficult about the books."

"Would have been," I said.

"He died four years ago," Arthur said. Not heavily. Just plainly, the way he seemed to say most things, as though the truth of something was the natural shape of it and required no additional structure.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"Thank you." He looked at the shelves. "He was an extraordinary man in many ways. In some ways less so. The study is the best of him." He looked back at me and the expression had moved on, as expressions did with him, nothing lingered longer than he let it. "You live on the far lane, I'm told."

The shift was so natural I almost didn't notice it was a shift.

"The shorter one," I said. "Off the market road."

"Your family has been in the settlement a long time."

"My father was born here," I said. "His father before him."

"And your mother's family?"

"She came from the eastern settlements when she was young," I said. "She met my father and stayed."

He nodded. He held his cup in both hands and looked at me with the easy interest of a man at dinner rather than an Alpha King conducting a meeting in his study, and I had the first clear awareness of what he was doing, which was asking me questions in the tone of someone who was simply curious and not in the tone of someone who was collecting information, and I could not tell whether the distinction was real or performed.

"You grew up in the pack," he said.

"Obviously," I said.

The corner of his mouth. "I mean you went through your turn. Your wolves came in on schedule, no difficulties?"

"None that anyone told me about," I said.

"And your abilities? You found them manageable?"

I looked at him over my cup. "Is that what this is about?"

He looked back at me. His expression did not change. "What do you mean?"

"The letter said this was a private matter," I said. "It didn't say what the matter was. You are asking about my shift and my abilities within five minutes of sitting down and calling it conversation." I kept my voice even. "I am not complaining. I'm noting."

A beat of silence.

Then Arthur smiled, and this one was different from the previous ones, slightly less immediate, slightly more considered, the smile of a man who has been looking at something at an angle and has just looked at it straight.

"You're right," he said. "I am asking about your abilities." He set his cup down on the tray. "I am doing it conversationally because I find people answer better when they are comfortable, and I find people are more comfortable when they are not aware they are answering a question." He tilted his head very slightly. "I am apparently not as subtle as I thought I was."

"You're subtle enough," I said. "I've just been told very recently that I do a thing where I make large things small, and I'm trying not to do it in the other direction either."

He looked at me with the attentive quality again. "Someone told you that recently?"

"Someone who knows me well," I said.

He did not ask who. He picked up his cup again and looked at the fire.

"The reason I'm asking," he said, "is that at the ball, my brother and I noticed something."

I went still.

I did not do it visibly. I kept my hands where they were and my face where it was and my posture unchanged. But something inside me stopped moving in the way things stop moving when they suddenly need to pay very careful attention.

"What kind of something," I said.

He looked at me. "Are you aware of anything particular about yourself?" he said. "About the way you experience the pack land, the way your abilities function, anything that feels different from what you understand to be ordinary?"

I thought about what I knew about myself.

I thought about the things I had always known, the small accumulation of them over nineteen years, each one noticed and set aside and not examined too closely because examining them too closely produced questions I had no answers to. Healing that happened faster than it should. Hearing that reached further than other people's hearing in ways I had put down to attention rather than ability. The sense of things before they arrived, the low vibration of awareness that I had always had and had always assumed was simply what awareness felt like for everyone.

I thought about the question in my chest that had been wearing different clothes since I was old enough to have it.

I said: "Everyone notices things about themselves."

Arthur looked at me steadily. "That's not an answer."

"It's the answer I have right now," I said.

Another beat of silence. He held my gaze for a moment with the expression of a man who has found the edge of what the present conversation can give him and has decided not to push past it.

"Fair enough," he said. He picked up the pot. "More tea?"

And like that the moment was over.

Or rather, it was placed on a shelf. Carefully, deliberately, in the manner of someone who knew exactly where they had put it and fully intended to come back to it.

"Please," I said.

He poured.

We talked for the better part of an hour.

This was the thing I had not anticipated and that I was aware, even while it was happening, I would be thinking about for some time afterward. I had expected a meeting. I had expected the formal architecture of a meeting, the stated purpose and the questions and the stated conclusion and the door. I had not expected an hour that moved the way this one moved, unhurried and unannounced, the conversation going where it went without apparent direction.

He asked about the lane, and I told him what it was like.

He asked about my parents and I described them, briefly, and he listened in a way that suggested he was retaining it rather than simply waiting for me to finish.

He asked whether I had travelled beyond the settlement and I said little, and he asked where I had been and I told him, and he said he knew the eastern road and that the forest beyond the second crossing was something to walk through in autumn if you had the opportunity, and I said I had walked it once at the wrong time of year and missed it, and he said there was time.

There is time.

Said simply, easily, as though it were obvious.

I looked at him when he said it and he was looking at the fire, his cup in his hand, and his profile was the one I had studied at the ball, open and easy, the smile-lines at the corner of his eye visible from here, and I felt the particular thing I had not wanted to feel, which was that I liked him.

Not in the complicated way. Not in the way I had felt things about other people that I had spent energy not-examining. Just simply, cleanly: I liked him. He was easy to be in a room with. He was interested in the right proportion, present without pressure. He made the conversation feel like something that had chosen its own shape rather than something that was being managed.

And underneath all of it, quietly, persistently, the awareness of what he had said and then stepped back from.

At the ball, my brother and I noticed something.

Are you aware of anything particular about yourself?

I did not ask him again. I understood, without it being said, that he had offered what he intended to offer today and that the rest of it would come in its own time or not at all, and pressing him would produce only the polite deflection of a man who had decided the shape of this conversation and was not going to be moved from it.

So I sat and I drank my tea and I talked to an Alpha King about the eastern forest road and the autumn light in it, and I was confused, and I was a little charmed, and I knew I was charmed which was perhaps the most unsettling part, and the fire burned low beside us and the morning light moved across the floor in its long slow angles.

When the hour had finished itself, Arthur stood and I stood, and he walked me back through the way I had come with the ease of someone who knew every room they passed through well enough not to have to think about them.

At the small antechamber where the woman had first brought me in, he stopped.

"I appreciate you coming," he said. And the thing about the way he said it was that he sounded like he meant it, not in the formulaic way of courtesy but in the particular way of a person who has found the time worth their while and is saying so.

"Thank you for the tea," I said.

The corner of his mouth. "Come back," he said. "When you're ready."

I looked at him. "Ready for what?"

He looked at me with the attentive quality and the almost-smile and said nothing for a moment.

"For the rest of the conversation," he said.

He said it simply, as though this were obvious, as though we had simply paused something that was still in progress, and he opened the door to the outside and the morning came in again, cool and bright, and I went through it and heard the door close behind me.

I walked back through the pack settlement in the afternoon light.

The paths were busier now than they had been in the morning and I moved through them with my chin level and my pace steady and I was aware of the looks the way I had been aware of them on the way there, but from a distance, as though they were happening to someone else.

At the ball, my brother and I noticed something.

I walked.

Are you aware of anything particular about yourself?

The market road opened up ahead of me and the familiar shapes of the settlement arranged themselves on either side and the sounds of the neighbourhood came in from all directions, the ordinary working sounds of an ordinary afternoon.

I thought about the way he had set the question down after I had not answered it. The way he had reached for the pot and moved on. The practised ease of a man who was in no hurry because he had already decided that the hurry was not necessary.

Come back when you're ready.

For the rest of the conversation.

I turned onto the shorter lane.

Our house was where I had left it, modest and familiar at the end of the path, and the pear tree was leaning the way it always leaned, and somewhere inside I could hear my mother, the particular cadence of her movement through the kitchen, and the smell of something cooking had reached the front path.

I stopped at the gate.

I put my hand on the latch and stood there for a moment in the afternoon.

Something unusual. That was what he had said. They had noticed something unusual about me at the ball and they wanted to understand it better, and he had not said what the something was, and I had not pressed him, and now I was standing at my own gate in the late afternoon with my hand on the latch and the smell of supper coming from the house I had grown up in.

I thought about nineteen years of small things set aside and not examined.

I thought about my father in the wagon with his private smile.

I thought about nothing that tonight is the right time for, said with the gentleness of a man who had decided not on whether to say a thing but on when.

I opened the gate.

I went inside.

My mother was in the kitchen and she turned when she heard me and her eyes went to my face immediately and she read it the way she always read it, quickly and completely, and what she found there made her own face do something careful.

"Well?" she said.

"Arthur Lingson poured the tea himself," I said. "And the study has better books than most people's houses."

My mother looked at me for a long moment.

"Elara," she said, with the patience of a woman who had been keeping that patience on reserve for some hours.

"He said they noticed something," I said. "At the ball. He didn't say what. He asked about my abilities and when I didn't answer directly he changed the subject." I set my coat on the peg by the door. "He asked me to come back."

Silence.

"Come back," my mother said.

"When I'm ready," I said. "Those were his words."

My mother turned back to the stove. She adjusted the pot that did not need adjusting. She was quiet for a moment in the way she was quiet when she was organising something inside her, moving it into the right order before she spoke.

"Your father is in the garden," she said.

"I know," I said.

"He'll want to hear."

"I know," I said.

I went to the window and looked out at the back garden where my father was, as predicted, standing by the fence post again, though the fence post had been repaired days ago and there was nothing left to do to it. He was standing beside it with his hands in his pockets and his face turned up slightly toward the late afternoon sky.

He was not looking at the fence post.

He was thinking.

I watched him through the glass.

He was a quiet man, my father. Still water. I had always known this. But there was a difference between deep water and water with something in it, and I had been aware for days now, since the ball, since the letter, since the wagon and the lamp and the stairs, that my father's quiet had a different quality to it than it usually had.

Not troubled.

Not anxious.

Something more like waiting.

The way a room waits when it knows someone is coming.

I pressed my palm flat against the cool glass and watched him stand in the last of the afternoon light with his hands in his pockets and his face toward the sky, and the question that had been settling patiently in my chest since the night of the ball turned over once and resettled.

Inside the kitchen my mother moved the pot again for no reason.

Outside, the pack land held its own counsel in the fading light.

And in a study full of read books and an untidy desk and one forgotten cup, an Alpha King had placed something on a shelf and left it waiting.

Come back when you're ready.

I stood at the window.

I was not ready.

But I was beginning to understand that ready and not ready were not the question.

The question was something else entirely.

And somewhere at the back of everything I did not yet know, patient as stone, it was already waiting for me to find it.