My Queen
1779 Words
“My Queen.”
The words went through me like cold water.
I did not have a mouth to answer with. I had a muzzle, and four feet, and a body that wanted to run down a mountain and keep going, and somewhere under all of it a nineteen-year-old girl was screaming.
Lucian raised his head. The gold in his eyes had not gone out.
“Shift back,” he said. “Aria. Come back.”
No, said Lyra.
Lyra—
It hurt. I won’t go back in the dark.
“She won’t let you,” Lucian said — and I froze, because I hadn’t spoken. He read it off me somehow, off the set of my ears, the way you’d read a face. “The first shift always ends like this. She has waited nineteen years and she thinks going back means going away.” He rose, slowly, and he did not come closer. “Tell her she isn’t a room, Aria. Tell her she’s a lung. She doesn’t go away when you breathe out.”
…Oh, said Lyra.
And the world came apart and put itself back together, and I was on my knees in the wet grass with my own two arms in front of me, shaking so hard I could hear my teeth.
His coat landed over my shoulders.
He was already turning away, giving me his back, walking to the edge of the rock as if the valley had suddenly become fascinating. I got the coat around me. It went nearly to my knees and it smelled of leather and rain and the wolf he had just been.
“Say it again,” I said. My voice came out ruined. “That word. Say it again.”
“You know what you saw in the water.”
“I saw a wolf.”
“You saw silver.” He turned around. “White with the shine of a blade. There is one bloodline in the world that runs that color, and it is not the Frosts of Silver Crest. It’s the Lycan royal line. The old blood. The kings.”
I laughed at him.
It came out cracked and horrible and I couldn’t stop it, and I sat there in the mud in a strange man’s coat and laughed while he watched me with those steady gold eyes.
“I’m a Beta’s daughter,” I said. “I have no scent. I had no wolf for nineteen years. I heal like a human — I’ve had a scrape on my wrist for a month. Ask anyone in that valley what I am. They’ll tell you. Broken. Wolfless. A defect.”
“Yes,” said Lucian. “They will tell you that. They have been telling you that your whole life, and you built yourself around it.”
“Then—”
“No wolf until nineteen. No scent at all — not weak, absent. Slow healing.” He said them like a man laying out cards, one at a time, face up. “Aria. Those are not three defects.”
The mountain went very quiet.
“They’re three symptoms,” he said. “Royal blood sleeps. When it sleeps, it hides its bearer. That is what it is for.”
I sat in the grass and could not move.
Nineteen years.
Nineteen years of Diana’s mouth. Of Kane’s mother wondering aloud whether the Alpha could really take a wolfless bride. Of standing at the edge of the shifting field at seventeen with all the other girls gone into the trees, and my father not looking at me, and going home alone.
They hadn’t been describing what was wrong with me.
They had been describing a lock.
“Why would you kneel,” I whispered. “Whatever I am — you’re a court envoy. You don’t kneel.”
Something crossed his face.
“Not tonight,” he said.
“That is not an answer.”
“No,” he agreed. “It isn’t.”
And then his head came up, and he looked down the ridge, and the gold went out of his eyes like a door closing.
“Six of them,” he said. “Coming up fast.”
They came up out of the goat track in a spray of mud — four warriors, and Roran, and Kane Blackwood at the front with his shirt half-laced and his hair wild, and he stopped dead at the top of the rise.
He saw me first. In the mud. In another man’s coat.
Then he saw Lucian, bare-chested in the moonlight, standing between us.
I have never in my life seen a man’s face do so many things so quickly.
“Get away from her.”
“Alpha,” said Lucian, pleasantly.
“There was a howl.” Kane’s voice was hoarse. He hadn’t taken his eyes off me. “Half the valley heard it. A wolf on my ridge that I have never heard in my life, and every dog in Silver Crest gone mad, and I came up here with my warriors expecting rogues—” He stopped. Swallowed. “Aria. Why are you on this mountain in the middle of the night?”
I got to my feet. It took me two tries.
“Walking.”
“Walking.”
“I’ve been ill. The air helps.”
Kane looked at the churned mud. At the torn turf where Lucian’s claws had come down. At the tracks — and there were tracks, huge ones, silver hairs caught in the wet grass, and one of the warriors behind him had already crouched to put his hand inside a paw print and was looking up at the others with his mouth open.
I watched Kane decide not to understand.
It was fascinating, in a clinical way. He was a stupid man about exactly one thing, and that thing was anything that would require him to have been wrong.
“Come here,” he said.
“No.”
“Aria.” He took a step forward, and his hand came out of his belt pouch, and there was something bright in it.
The silver crescent.
He held it up between us in the moonlight, the way you’d hold out food to a strange dog.
“I’ve come to fix this,” Kane said.
And Goddess help me, I laughed again.
“I was wrong.” He said it loudly, so his warriors would hear it, because he never in his life said anything to only one person. “I have said it now. In front of witnesses. The border was won on your warning. Eight men breathe because you cut cloth two days before you had any right to know you’d need it. The pack talks of nothing else. My own Beta’s daughter, and I —” his jaw worked “— I let a pretty face turn my head.”
“Where is she tonight?” I asked. “Chloe. Where is your true mate tonight, Kane?”
“That was never—” He stopped himself. Started again. “The rejection was never accepted. Ask the priestess. There is a form, and the form was not completed, and I will petition her tomorrow to have it struck from the record.” The chain swung, catching the light. “Come home, Aria. Wear this again. I’ll have you crowned at the harvest.”
Wear this again.
Three months. That was the whole distance between a man dragging this chain off my throat hard enough to leave a welt, and a man standing on a mountain offering to put it back.
He had not apologized. Not once. Not for the fire — he didn’t know about the fire, and he never would; that was mine. Not even for the yard, for the laughter, for send the healer’s girl a cup of something warm.
He had come up a mountain to forgive me.
“You threw it on the floor,” I said.
“Aria—”
“You tore it off my neck and you threw it on the floor, in front of the pack, and my sister put her shoe on it.” My voice was very quiet and it carried all the way to the warriors. “I brought it back to you with my own hand. I put it in your palm. Do you know what I told you, Kane?”
His mouth was a line.
“Borrowed things ought to go home,” I said. “It went home. It’s yours. Keep it.”
Somebody among the warriors made a sound.
That was what did it — that small, strangled noise, that almost-laugh, on a mountain, in front of his men.
Kane’s face went white.
And he reached for the thing he had never once needed to reach for, because he was Alpha of Silver Crest and this was his ridge and I was his pack.
The power came out of him and hit me like a wall of water.
“ARIA FROST. COME. HERE.”
The Alpha Command.
Behind him, all four warriors dropped to a crouch and Roran staggered and even the trees seemed to bend, and every wolf on that mountain who belonged to Silver Crest bowed their head because their bodies did it without asking them.
And I stood there in the mud with my hands at my sides and felt it go through me and out the other side, like wind through an open window.
Nothing.
Not a flicker. Not a tug. It found nothing in me to hold on to.
I looked up at him and I did not move.
The silence that came after was the worst thing I have ever heard.
One of the warriors was staring at me. Then at Kane. Then at me again, and his hand had come up in the old sign — the sign the pack makes against things that aren’t right, the little crooked fork of the fingers, the one they make at black cats and at cold spots in the woods.
And at witches.
Oh, I thought, and something in me went cold and calm and very far away. There it is.
I’ve felt what that word costs. I’ve smelled the oil.
Kane made a sound like a man being strangled and came at me.
He never got there.
Lucian moved — not fast, exactly; inevitably, the way weather arrives — and he was between us with one hand flat on the Alpha’s chest, and Kane stopped as though he had walked into a wall of stone.
“She was never yours to reclaim,” said Lucian.
- Writer
