The WitchWolf Queen

Chapter 8

Elara's POV

We found my father where my mother had predicted, standing at the far window with a glass of something dark held loosely in one hand, looking out at the night with the expression he wore when he was thinking deeply about something that he would probably never tell anyone. He was a quiet man, my father. Not the kind of quiet that was emptiness. The kind that was full and settled, like deep water. He had green eyes the same shade as mine and grey at his temples and the steady, unhurried quality of someone who had long ago made peace with the pace of the world.

He turned when we approached and his face arranged itself into the particular warmth he kept specifically for the sight of my mother and me in the same place.

"There she is," he said, meaning me. He always said that. There she is. As though he had been looking for me his whole life and found me and the finding of me had never gotten old.

"We're leaving," my mother told him.

"I expected so," he said mildly, and handed his glass to a passing attendant without looking, and offered my mother his arm, which she took with the ease of a woman who had been taking that arm for decades.

He offered me his other arm and I took it and we walked out together.

The night air outside the mansion was a relief I felt in every part of me.

After hours of perfume and candle smoke and the warm press of a room full of people, the cold was gentle and clean and I tipped my head back briefly as we crossed the courtyard and let it settle on my face. Above us the sky was very dark and very clear and full of stars that had no interest in anything happening below them, which I found privately comforting.

The wagon was where we had left it. Our driver, old Piers from three streets over who my father had borrowed the wagon from in exchange for two jars of my mother's preserved plum, was sitting on the box half-asleep with his chin toward his chest. He startled upright when he heard us and gathered the reins with the dignity of a man who had absolutely not been asleep.

My father helped my mother up first, then me, and then climbed up himself with slightly more effort than he would have liked, and settled onto the bench and pulled his coat together against the cold.

Piers clicked his tongue at the horse and we moved.

The mansion fell away behind us. Through the small rear window I could see its lit windows growing smaller, the warm gold of its light shrinking into the dark until it was just a glow among the trees, and then nothing.

The roads at this hour were quiet. Just the sound of the horse and the wheels and the occasional distant call of something wild beyond the tree line. The pack land at night had its own particular atmosphere, watchful and layered, full of things you heard at the edge of hearing.

I leaned my head against the side of the wagon and looked out the window at the passing dark.

My mother, across from me, had lasted approximately ninety seconds before she began again.

"The green dress was the right choice," she said, to no one in particular, with the air of someone taking stock. "I had my doubts about the lavender at first. I thought it might be too quiet. But quiet was right, as it turned out. You didn't need the dress to speak." She tilted her head slightly. "You have your father's colouring in candlelight. Has anyone ever told you that? The green of your eyes is entirely his."

My father said nothing, which was his primary contribution to most of my mother's monologues and which she had long since ceased to require him to improve upon.

"Thirty shillings," she said, in a slightly different tone, the tone of a woman recalculating an expenditure in light of new information. "Well."

"Mother," I said.

"I'm simply saying," she said.

"You're saying thirty shillings was worth it now that an Alpha King danced with me."

"I'm saying thirty shillings was an investment," she said, and there was a dignified pause, "and that investments sometimes return."

I looked at the ceiling of the wagon. "Nothing has returned. One man asked me to dance. That is the entirety of what happened."

"One man asked you to dance and the whole room stopped to watch," my mother said. "Elara. I was standing twenty feet away. I saw their faces. I saw the heiress of the Hunted Mellow pack watching from the side. Do you know what her face looked like?"

I absolutely did not want to know what her face looked like.

"She looked," my mother said, with the careful precision of someone delivering information rather than gossip, "like a woman who had come to a particular door expecting to find it open and found it otherwise."

I looked out the window. The trees moved past in slow dark shapes.

"I rejected the contract," I said, keeping my voice even. "Before the ball. You know I rejected the contract."

"I know you rejected the contract," my mother said, in the tone she used when she knew something and had chosen to temporarily place it in a drawer and close the drawer while she figured out what drawer to move it to permanently.

"Then you know that whatever you think happened tonight—"

"I know what I saw," my mother said, and there was no sharpness in it. Just the plain certainty of a woman who had watched more of life than I had. "And I know you, my love. I know what your face looks like when something has touched you and you have decided to stand very still and pretend it didn't." She leaned forward slightly. "You came through those doors different than you went out."

I felt the words land.

I kept looking out the window and said nothing.

My mother settled back and let the silence take it. She had always known when she had said the thing that mattered and when to stop speaking after it, which was one of the ways she was formidable and one of the ways I was most like her without knowing it.

The wagon rolled on.

I watched the dark land moving past and felt the evening settling into me in layers. The ballroom. Arthur's hand. The corridor. The portrait of two boys. The gold of his eyes in the candlelight and the way he had said his own name like a door closing.

I pressed my thumb against the inside of my opposite wrist, against the place where my pulse lived, and held it there.

You came through those doors different.

I did not know what to do with that.

I did not know what to do with any of it and that was the truest thing I could say, which was exactly why I was not saying anything at all.

My father was quiet for most of the ride home.

This was not unusual. My father was quiet for most of everything. But there was a quality to tonight's quiet that I became aware of gradually, the way you become aware of a sound that has been there for some time before you notice it.

He was looking out his window. His hands were folded loosely in his lap. His face was turned away from me so I could only see the edge of his jaw and the silver at his temple and the line of his shoulder in his good coat.

And he was smiling.

Not broadly. It was a small and private thing, barely more than a settling of his expression, something that had found its way there without ceremony and was not performing itself for anyone. It was the kind of smile that lives on a person's face when they are thinking about something warm and are not aware they are showing it.

I watched him for a moment in the shifting dark.

He didn't notice me watching. He was still looking at the night and whatever he was thinking about, he was content to think about it quietly, alone, in the particular way he had always been able to be alone with a thought in a room full of people.

I didn't say anything.

I looked at my father's quiet smile in the dark of the wagon and felt a strange and tender pull in my chest that I didn't have a name for. Something between love and unease. Something between warmth and the faint, cool awareness that there were things in this world that people who loved you were thinking about that they did not tell you.

He was happy about something.

And he had not said a single word all evening.

My mother began talking again about the dressmaker and whether she could recover any of the thirty shillings and whether Elara might have occasion to wear the dress a second time, and the wagon rolled on through the dark pack land with its horse and its wheels and its particular cargo of three people carrying very different things, and I watched my father's small and private smile until the wagon hit a rut in the road and shifted and the moment rearranged itself and his face went back to ordinary.

But the smile had been there.

I had seen it.

And somewhere in the part of me that had always reached for answers before it reached for anything else, a question settled quietly in, patient as a stone.

What do you know, Father, that you are not saying.

We got home shortly before midnight.

My mother declared that her feet had suffered enough and that she intended to sit down immediately and not stand up again until tomorrow, and she kissed my cheek at the foot of the stairs and went up.

My father lit a small lamp in the front room and moved around the familiar space in the comfortable way of a man in his own house at the end of a long evening, setting things back to where they belonged, turning down the lamp by the window, doing the small and habitual things that make a house know you are home.

I stood in the doorway and watched him.

"Did you enjoy the ball?" I asked.

He turned and looked at me with mild surprise, as though he had briefly forgotten I was there, which I didn't believe. "It was something to see," he said.

"That's not quite an answer."

He smiled. The proper smile this time, the one I knew, the one with the green eyes behind it. "Your mother enjoyed it."

"Mother enjoys anything that involves a dress and an occasion," I said. "What about you."

He looked at me for a moment. He had always looked at me like that, like he was measuring something, not unkindly, just carefully. As though he was always checking whether I was ready for the thing he might say next and adjusting accordingly.

"I think," he said slowly, "that this evening was more significant than any of us quite understood while it was happening."

I kept my face still. "Because of the dance."

"Because of several things," he said. He picked up the lamp and paused at the foot of the stairs. "Come to bed, Elara. It's late."

"Father."

He stopped.

"What aren't you saying?"

He turned and looked at me again in the lamplight. His face was gentle and fond and completely unreadable in the way that only the faces of people who love you very much can be.

"Nothing that tonight is the right time for," he said.

He said it without apology or evasion. Just plainly, the way he said most things, and with the particular quietness of a man who believed that the right time for something mattered more than the urgency to say it.

Then he turned and went up the stairs and the lamplight went with him and I stood alone in the dark front room of our modest house with the sounds of the night outside and my mother's footsteps settling above me and the distant, very faint call of a wolf somewhere beyond the tree line.

Nothing that tonight is the right time for.

I pressed my hand flat against the wall beside me and stood very still.

Outside, the moon was high and white and indifferent and full.

I thought about gold eyes in a candlelit corridor. I thought about a small and private smile in a moving wagon. I thought about the question in my chest that had been there for nineteen years, wearing different clothes each time I noticed it.

What is it that everyone in this family knows except me.

I stood there for a long time.

Then I went to bed.

I did not sleep for a very long while.