The Alpha's Funeral Was My Wedding Day

Chapter 2

He carried me out of the ravine like I weighed what snow weighs.

I should have been afraid. Every story about the rogue lands ends the same way, and I was a wolfless woman being carried into them by a man the continent had buried. Instead I catalogued him, because cataloguing is what I do instead of panicking. Breathing even. Gait even. No limp, no favoring, no heat of fever through the cloak. A dead man in perfect health.

"You're staring," he said, without looking down.

"You have a scar under your jaw. Blade, not claw. Whoever stitched it pulled the thread too tight."

"She was in a hurry. People were trying to kill me at the time."

"They appear to have managed it."

Something moved under the hood. It might have been a smile. "I like you better cold. I suspect you're a great deal of trouble at room temperature."

The camp appeared out of the dark the way a knife appears in a hand, suddenly and already pointed at you. Torches. Lean-tos against a cliff wall. Thirty, maybe forty wolves, and every one of them stopped moving when he walked in. Not the stillness of respect. The stillness of prey that knows better.

A woman with a gray braid and a spear stepped forward. "You brought back a stray."

"I brought back a healer."

"She smells like Blackridge."

"She smells like the inside of a snowdrift, Iron. Move."

They gave me a fire and a bowl of something that had once been a rabbit. I ate it too fast and kept it down through discipline alone. The whole camp watched me do it, and I watched them back, and what I saw kept the food in my stomach better than discipline did. A boy with a badly set arm, months old, healed crooked. A man breathing shallow around cracked ribs. An old woman with a wet cough she'd stopped hiding.

No healer. Rogue camps don't get healers. Healers are pack property.

He sat down across the fire, and up close, hood back at last, the firelight finished what the moonlight had started. Silver eyes. Black hair gone too long uncut. Younger than a dead man should look, and the kind of face the Elders would have called moon-favored, which is Elder for a problem every woman in the territory is about to have.

"You know who I am," he said.

"I know who you were. Caspian of Thornmere. Crowned at nineteen. Poisoned at twenty-three, along with your entire line, by parties never found." I tore off a piece of the rabbit. "There's a wall in Blackridge with your name on it. I lit a candle under it as a pup. I want the copper back."

"You can owe it against my debt for the rabbit."

"Then we're both in debt. Bad start to whatever this is."

"What this is," he said, "is a bargain. So let's have it in the open where it can't rot." He leaned forward, elbows on knees. "You have a gift they failed to burn out of you. Don't." He raised one finger before I could speak. "They stripped your wolf. Your gift isn't your wolf. It's older and it's still in there, banked like a coal, and I could feel it from the top of the ravine. That's how I found you."

The fire cracked. I put down the rabbit.

Nobody knew that. Not the Elders. Not Kane. My mother's line kept the distinction quiet through four generations, because a gift that survives stripping is a gift packs would go to war to own.

"You felt wrong," I said. "Nothing survives a stripping."

"Then heal that man's ribs and prove me a liar."

"No."

"No?"

"You said bargain. So far I've heard what I have and nothing about a price. I'm cold, not stupid. Speak plainly or give me back my snowdrift."

The camp had gone very quiet around us. Later I'd learn that no one had told him no since the day he clawed his way out of that box, and the whole camp was waiting to see what he did about it.

He laughed. Short, real, surprised out of him.

"Five years," he said. "Your gift, in my service. You heal who I say. In exchange, my protection, for you and for the two you're carrying, against Blackridge, against Silver Moon, against anyone. My camp is your camp. My food is your food. Nobody touches you and lives."

"Ten years of protection. Five of service."

"Seven of protection."

"Seven, and the children are never part of any bargain. Not yours, not anyone's. They're not clauses. Say it in front of your camp."

The silver eyes held mine for a long moment. The gray-braided woman, Iron, had her hand around her spear, and I understood I'd walked to the edge of something.

"The pups are not part of any bargain," Caspian said, clearly, to the whole listening camp. "They're under my protection as if they were mine. Anyone who so much as counts them owes me an answer."

Breath went out of me that I didn't know I'd been holding.

"Then we have terms," I said. "Almost. One more."

"You're negotiating with the food still in your teeth. I admire it. What."

"Whatever you actually want me for. It isn't a rogue camp's coughs and crooked arms, a village herb woman could manage those. Nobody pays royal protection rates for feverfew. When the real request comes, and it will, I get the right to hear it whole before I answer. No pieces. No 'you never asked.'"

For the first time since the ravine, he went entirely still, and I saw the thing underneath the dry voice and the unhurried walk. Something old and banked, like my coal.

"Agreed," he said.

He pulled off his glove to seal it, and held out his hand across the fire, and that's when I saw what the ravine's darkness had hidden.

The back of his hand carried a brand. Not my brand, not a stripping. A crown, inverted, burned deep and long-healed. I'd only ever seen it in a book of old law, on a page the Elders skipped past quickly.

An execution mark. The seal packs burn into royalty before they kill them, so that even the body can never claim a throne.

Poison, the story said. Poison, the wall in Blackridge said, along with parties never found.

Bodies don't get branded by parties never found. Bodies get branded by law. By a tribunal. By packs acting together, with witnesses, in the open.

Someone had tried him, marked him, and put him in the ground. And every Alpha on the continent had agreed on the story of the poison, and lit their candles, and painted their walls.

Including Blackridge.

"You've gone quiet, little healer." His hand stayed open between us, steady, the inverted crown facing me like a dare. "Second thoughts?"

I thought about Kane's steady hands. I thought about five hundred wolves and not one voice.

I took his hand, brand and all.

"First thoughts," I said. "Just now arriving. Who signed it?"

His fingers closed around mine, warm as a fever, and when he smiled, the whole camp looked away, like it wasn't safe to watch.

"Heal my rogues," he said. "Grow strong. And when you're ready, little healer, I'll show you the signatures."