Wolfless

No Reason to Wait

For twelve days Rhys Draven ran an experiment on himself and lost it.

He set the rules the night of the verification, standing in his own rooms with the door shut. He wouldn't speak to her beyond instruction. He wouldn't be alone in a room with her. He'd keep four feet between them, which was the distance at which he could still think in whole sentences.

By the fourth day he'd learned that the house isn't built for a man running an experiment.

She brought the water at the sixth hour, because that's the arrangement for every collared servant in the wing and there is no version of the day where it doesn't happen. So every morning the heir of House Draven, first of his year in four disciplines, lay in the grey light listening to a girl come up the eastern stair, counting the steps, and despising himself with a thoroughness he found almost restful.

She was very good at it. That was what undid him more than anything else.

She didn't look at him. Didn't linger, didn't brush past, didn't do any of the thousand things he'd been taught since fifteen to expect from women who want something out of a house like this. She set the jug down, straightened the table, said "Sir" when spoken to and went out. There was nothing in it at all.

Except that when she crossed inside four feet the whole room tightened like a held breath, and twice he saw her hand shake on the jug handle, and once, on the eighth day, she stopped in the doorway with her back to him for the length of two heartbeats before she went.

He didn't sleep well. He had a fever without the temperature of one. His wolf, quiet under discipline for six years, was awake at all hours, and it wasn't restless. It was patient, which is worse. The patience of a thing that knows the door will open eventually.

On the eighth day he watched Corwin Ashe put her against the corridor wall with a hand flat on the collar, checking the screw, taking his time about it.

Rhys was thirty feet off with two Mereth boys asking him about pairings. He didn't remember crossing the distance. He had Corwin by the front of the coat before he arrived back inside his own head.

He let go straight away and said something about the wing being for the household. Corwin laughed and apologised and went, and everybody in that corridor went back to what they'd been doing.

Rhys stood there afterwards with his pulse going in his ears, doing the accounting of who had seen it. A Mereth boy. Two servants. And Corwin Ashe, who is stupid about nearly everything and has never once been stupid about who owes what to whom.

That night he went to his father and asked to have her reassigned.

He'd machined the request down to nothing. The wing is short of hands at the kennels. A Vale ward in the household is a provocation to the six houses. The girl can't lift, has no letters, and is a wolfless liability in the wing where the archives are kept. All of it true and none of it the reason, and standing in that room he understood that his father would hear the difference inside half a sentence.

Torvald listened with his hand flat on a stack of orders.

Then he said, "Yes."

Rhys waited for the rest of it.

There wasn't any. His father was already reaching for the pen (pleased, visibly pleased, the way he was pleased when a treaty came in under terms), and he said, without looking up, "The kennels. Tomorrow. I'll have the steward move her tonight, in fact. No reason to wait."

Every hair on Rhys's body stood up.

No reason to wait.

His father had ordered him, a fortnight ago, to find one girl among ninety and end her quietly. His father had put the collar in his hands in front of seven houses to see what he'd do with it. And now he wanted this particular ward out of the household wing and down into the kennel yards tonight, where the drains are, and the runs, and forty animals, and nobody above the rank of a stable hand.

A fever in a vault. A discipline that ran a bit long. That's a hard school.

"No," Rhys said.

The pen stopped.

"The wing is short," he said, and heard himself from some distance away, dismantling nine years of being the correct son. "I won't lose a pair of hands in the middle of the Trial season over a provocation nobody has actually made. She stays in my service. I withdraw the request."

His father looked at him for a while.

Then he smiled and put the pen down and said, "As you like," in the mild voice of a man who has just been handed something he wanted very much and hadn't expected this early.

Rhys got out of the room and along the gallery and stood at the rail with both hands on the cold iron, and worked out the size of what he'd done in the wrong order, the way you work out a fall on the way down.

He had refused an Alpha in his own study. He'd done it over a Vale ward, with a steward at the door and a clerk in the anteroom, both of whom would have repeated it by noon.

And his father had let him win.