Cast Out, Crowned

Chapter Eleven: What They Threw Away

Crownwood. Morning.

Aron hadn't slept.

He sat in the packhouse hall with his burned hand wrapped fresh, and he watched the grey light come up through the high windows, and he tried to build, in his head, a version of last night that he could tell the pack. Something he could stand on. Every version fell apart in the same place. The gold. The gold coming up out of a wolfless girl's skin on his own marking stone, in front of everyone.

The elders came at dawn, the way he'd summoned them, and they would not sit down.

"Twelve dead," old Marrenkept said. He didn't call Aron by his title, and Aron noted that, the way you note the first crack in a wall. "The things that came out of the trees. Twelve of ours dead on the ground, and the packhouse cellar full of wounded, and half of them won't shift again." He set his hands on the table. "You want to tell us what happened on our own ground last night, Aron. Because the pack is telling each other, and their version isn't kind to you."

"She hid it," Aron said. "The girl. She hid what she was for three years, in my house, and I, "

"You took her in." Marren's voice didn't rise. "You marked her. You cast her out with the old rite in front of the whole pack. And whatever she is, the moment you cut her loose she lit up like the sun and every hunter in the north came running to our doorstep." He let that sit. "So no. Don't tell us she hid it. You had a royal bloodline kneeling at your table for three years and you were too busy grinding her down to see it. That's what the pack is saying. And Aron... they're not wrong."

Aron's burned hand throbbed under its wrapping. He looked down at it, at the broken circle seared into his palm, the mark he'd tried to put on her, and for the first time in three years the warm sad face he wore for the pack wouldn't come. There was nothing under it to hold it up.

Selene found him an hour later, alone in the hall.

She'd already changed out of the north's grey. Traveling clothes now, plain, and there were two of her northern guards behind her carrying packs, and Aron understood before she opened her mouth.

"You're leaving," he said.

"I'm leaving." She stood across the table from him, unhurried. "There's no alliance here anymore, Aron. I came for a strong pack and a strong Alpha. I'm looking at a marked hand and a hall full of elders who don't say your title." She tilted her head, and there was almost pity in it, which was worse than anything. "You built all of this on the silver they paid you to bury her. Grain, trade, warriors, all of it. And it turns out the thing you buried was worth more than everything you built on top of it. You just couldn't see it, because you'd spent three years teaching yourself she was nothing."

"I could still find her." Aron heard the desperation in his own voice and hated it. "Bring her back. If she's worth that much, if her blood is, "

"You think she's coming back?" Selene laughed, short and cold. "You cut her from the bond and the name in front of a hundred people. You told her she was alone. And then she stood on your stone and burned your hand and walked off into the dark with a Lycan king." She shouldered her pack. "The hunters will find her before you ever do. And if by some miracle they don't, the last thing that girl will ever do is walk back through your gate." She turned to go, then paused. "You had her for twenty-three years, Aron. And the only thing anyone will remember about you now is that you were the fool who threw her away."

She left. He listened to her horses go, and then the hall was quiet, and Aron sat alone with his burned hand and the grey morning and the slow understanding of exactly what he'd done, arriving too late to be anything but punishment.

Out in the gathering ground, the pack was already telling the story. He could hear it through the windows, low and constant, the shape of it changing with every telling. The wolfless girl who was never wolfless. The gold. The Lycan. In a year it would be a legend, and in every version of it he would be the same thing.

The man who had a queen at his table and marked her as nothing.

The hut. The same morning.

Renna knocked a second time, slow and patient, and the sound of it went through the little stone room like cold water.

Fenric stood between me and the door, gold burning up both his arms now, and I had never seen him like this. All night he'd been the calm one, the still one, the thing the whole pack folded away from. Now there was something close to dread in the set of his shoulders.

"She opened a door sealed with your blood," I said, low. "You said that wasn't possible."

"It shouldn't be." His eyes didn't leave the door. "Blood wards read the old lines. Mine only opens for my blood." He went very still, and I watched a terrible thought arrive on his face. "Or for blood close enough to mine that the ward can't tell the difference."

The words landed in me cold.

"Fenric." My own gold was rising now, answering the tension in the room. "What are you saying."

Through the door, Renna's voice came again, warm and easy, and this time there was something underneath the warmth that turned my stomach.

"He hasn't told you yet, has he," she said, and I could hear the smile in it. "Oh, cousin. He's told you about the two hunted lines. The two royal bloodlines the hunters burned down to nothing." A soft, awful laugh. "Did he happen to mention that they were only ever hunted because of what happens when the two lines mix? Did he tell you why my family made the bargain in the first place?"

Fenric's jaw was tight. He wouldn't look at me.

"Ask him, Zaveria," Renna said through the door, using my name for the first time, and it was worse than the little cousin. "Ask him what his blood and your blood make together. Ask him why he came looking for the last daughter of the sealed line so very fast." The latch began to turn, gold flaring against gold as her power worked his ward open. "Ask him what he actually wants you for."

The door opened.

And Fenric still hadn't answered me.