The Alpha who was Meant to Kill Me

Chapter 3

Alec finished his lecture to the soldiers about keeping my identity buried, then turned to me with a grin that told me the worst was about to start.

He placed the helmet on my head himself.

"You know," he said, tapping the brim. "You're going to have to address me as Your Highness. Or my liege. Oh. How about my king? I like that one."

"I think I just vomited in my mouth."

"Little bird, you have to keep up the façade. You're just a soldier."

"You're enjoying this."

"When do I ever?" He winked as his horse moved into a trot.

I hauled myself up into the saddle, grumbling. "Don't let it go to your head. I'll play my part, but you play yours. I'm not your sweet princess to get all protective over. If I skin my knee, if I take a fall, don't freak out."

"Would I do that?"

"Yes."

He tossed me a crooked smile and nudged his horse into the line.

A quiet settled over the column as we rode. Hooves hammered a steady rhythm, soldiers murmured to each other now and then, and I let the peace of it soak into my skin. My first morning beyond Aderian's border, and the world had not ended. The sky was still a sky. The trees were still trees. My wolf turned sleepy circles beneath my ribs and seemed, for the first time in a very long time, almost content.

Then we passed through a village.

Two women crossing the lane caught sight of our banners and dropped their heads and scurried out of the road as if we carried plague. A child was yanked back into a doorway. Shutters closed.

My chest tightened. At home my people waved. My people came to the road. I had never seen a village turn away from royalty like it was turning away from fire.

Alec caught my face before I could school it.

"These haven't always been peaceful times," he said quietly, bringing his horse closer to mine. "Darien made some mistakes, in the beginning. It's going to take him time to earn back their trust." His frown was sympathetic in a way I was not sure I could match. "He's a good man, little bird. He's making it right. Changing hearts doesn't happen overnight."

"I can't believe a good man would be capable of instilling that kind of fear in his own people."

"Grief and confusion can swallow someone whole. Especially a young Alpha thrown into a kingship he wasn't ready for. Each person carries it differently."

I bit my lip and rode on.

I did not know what it was to lose a mother. I had never known mine, not her voice, not her laugh, not her hand on my forehead. Alec and Darien had both come into their crowns young, both orphans of a kind, and that was something I could not truly imagine. My father was still mine. My kingdom was still his to carry.

I glanced at my own future and felt it bare its teeth at me.

I had never drawn the Shadow Gladius. I had never shifted. I had never been the thing the prophecy said I was. Twenty-five years I had lived in the same castle as that blade, and twenty-five years I had refused to touch it with more than the pads of my fingers. It was not a sword a person owned. It was a sword that owned a person back. Barnabus, the old seer who had named me the night I was born, had called it a blade of shadow, and whatever that meant, I had no interest in learning it the hard way. Barnabus had vanished into the world before I could ask him anything useful, anyway. The prophecy he left behind was the kind of riddle that made grown men go pale.

Will she save the world or destroy it.

What if I was the answer nobody wanted?

No. We are not having this conversation, self. This is my first real adventure and I'm going to enjoy it.

I pursed my lips and sat taller in the saddle.

Maybe Alec was right. Maybe I could cut Darien a little slack.

Maybe.

***

We made camp as the light faded. Leo had picked the spot with quiet care, a clearing ringed with a dense tree line, clear sight lines to the road, no cover for an ambusher within a bowshot. A Beta's eye for terrain, Alec had told me once. I believed him now.

An arm curled around my back and guided me away from the circle the soldiers were laying their blankets in.

"You're with me," Alec said.

I did not argue. He trusted his men. He did not trust his men with me, which was sensible of him. He walked me to a large tree at the edge of the firelight, set his own blanket down, and motioned for me to put mine a few feet from his.

I unstrapped the black sheath from my back and set it down beside my pack with the care you give something that might bite.

The sheath looked like nothing. That was the first lie it told. It looked like a plain black leather scabbard, scuffed at the mouth where centuries of hands had touched it. But if you stared at it long enough in firelight, you started to notice that the shadow it cast did not quite match the shadows of everything else around it. The shadow moved when the flame did not. The shadow was a little darker than a shadow had any business being.

I laid down on my side, put my back to it, and watched Alec instead. He had his eyes closed and his forearm flung over them like he had been exhausted for a month.

"Alec?"

"Hush, little bird. I'm trying to sleep."

"You've always been a grump when you're tired."

"Good night, little chirping bird."

"Good night, Alec."

I smiled into the dark and closed my eyes.

***

I stood in a field I did not know, and the field was burning.

The grass was charred black. Ashes rose on a wind that had no direction. I could smell smoke in my hair, in my teeth. The sky overhead was starless and shot through with low red light, and a handful of crows cut through it, black against black.

A sword hung from my hand.

The blade was not steel.

It was made of something that looked like night poured into the shape of a weapon. The edges of it bled smoke into the air, and where the smoke drifted it drank the firelight out of the world, so that the burning field around me got colder and quieter wherever the blade moved. When I turned my wrist, an afterimage of shadow trailed the blade like the tail of a comet. It was beautiful. It was terrible. It was the first time I had ever seen it outside its sheath, and some deep, buried piece of me whispered that I had held it before.

That I had been holding it a very, very long time.

A tear slid down my cheek and struck the ground. It bloomed red in the ash.

I looked down at myself and found a dark chest plate battered and scored, splashed with blood. My own, maybe. Someone else's, maybe. Both.

I walked to the lip of the rise and looked down into the valley below.

Thousands. Thousands of men lay in the valley. Thousands of broken wolves, bodies stiff in shift or half-shift, throats open, armor cracked, banners burned. My knees struck the earth before my mind caught up. My eyes moved without my permission across the field, across the dead, across the dying, until they stopped on a helmet with the sun of Adonis stamped on its brow.

No.

Alec.