THE ALPHA'S DAUGHTER

THE ALPHA'S DAUGHTER Chapter 1 The Morning of Eighteen On the morning I turned eighteen, three people told me not to be nervous, which is how I knew everyone in Ashgrove was nervous for me. The first was Tam, who arrived at my window before dawn with a paper bag of warm cinnamon knots and her boots muddy to the ankle. She had climbed the trellis again. She was a plain human with no wolf to catch her if she fell, and I had told her a hundred times to use the door. "You're doing the thing with your jaw," she said, sitting on the sill. "I'm not doing anything." "You're clenching like you're about to bite the world." She held out a knot. "Eat. You can't turn into a legend on an empty stomach." "I'm not going to turn into a legend." "You're going to turn into a wolf," Tam said, "which around here is the same thing, if your name is Thorne." I took the knot. The sugar stuck to my fingers. Outside, the Marrow Hills were still blue with the last of the night, and down the slope I could see the pack's lamps burning in the long hall, where the women had been cooking since midnight. The Calling was a feast before it was a ceremony. That was the way of Ashgrove: no one faced a hard thing hungry. The Calling happened once for every child of the pack, in the season they turned eighteen. They stood at the Stone Table on the Hollow Hill under the full moon, and the Cord woke in them. That was our word for it. The Cord was the thread that ran from the Alpha's heart into every wolf of the pack, and when it tightened around a young person's ribs, the Second came up out of them like a swimmer breaking the surface. Bones, fur, breath, hunger. Then a howl to tell the valley that another had joined it. I had watched forty-one Callings. I had stood at my father's side for all of them, small and then taller, in a dress and then a good jacket, and I had learned to hide my envy under my manners. Tonight would be mine. "Your father wants you at breakfast," Tam said, brushing sugar from her lap. "The second person to tell you not to be nervous will be him. Try to look surprised." "He's never once told me not to be nervous." "He'll say it with his eyebrows." She was right. When I came down the stairs, my father was already at the head of the kitchen table with a mug going cold between his hands, and when I sat, he looked at me for a long moment, and his eyebrows did what they did. Garrick Thorne was the Alpha of Ashgrove and of the six lesser packs that had sworn to us across the Marrow Hills. He was broad in the way that made doorways seem narrow. His hair had gone iron at the temples, and his hands were scarred across the knuckles from things he never explained. Wolves lowered their eyes when he walked into a room. I had never once seen him raise his voice. "Elara," he said. "Father." "You slept?" "Some." "Good." He turned the mug a quarter turn. He was looking at the table, not at me, which was strange. "Whatever happens tonight, you are mine. You understand? Whatever happens." I laughed, a little breathless. "What do you think is going to happen?" He held my eyes then, and I saw something cross his face too quickly to name. It might have been fear. I told myself it was pride, because that was the thing I wanted. "Eat something," he said. The third person to tell me not to be nervous was my cousin Isolde, and she did not use the words, exactly. She found me on the porch after breakfast, leaning against the rail in a green dress that fit her like it had been sewn on. Isolde had turned eighteen fourteen months before me, and her Second was a lean silver-grey thing that ran faster than anything in the valley. She never let me forget it kindly. "Big night," she said. "So I hear." "Everyone's saying you'll be something extraordinary." Her smile was very white. "The Alpha's only daughter. His blood, his wolf. They've been waiting eighteen years to see what you turn into." "They can wait a few more hours." "Oh, they will." She tilted her head. Her eyes were the pale gold of all Thorne wolves. Mine were brown. Everyone said mine would change when the Cord woke. "I just hope it's not too much pressure, that's all. It would be dreadful if you turned out to be ordinary." "Isolde," I said, "I'm going to go and be nervous somewhere else." "Do." She pushed off the rail and touched my shoulder in passing, light as a moth. "For luck." I stood there until my hands stopped shaking. Down in the yard, a handful of young wolves were dragging long tables into rows, laughing, tossing a ball of twine between them. One of them, a tall figure at the edge of the group, wasn't laughing. He was carrying a coil of rope on his shoulder and watching the hill. I didn't know his name. He was new, a lone wolf who had come out of the northern passes at the end of winter and been taken on as an outrider, on probation, the way strays always were. I had seen him twice. Both times he had been looking somewhere else. Both times I had the odd feeling that whatever he was looking at, it was me. He glanced up now, straight at the porch, and did not look away. Then Tam shouted my name from the gate, and the morning rushed back in. There were dresses to be fitted and ribbons to be argued over and a hundred small kindnesses I did not deserve yet. By midnight, I thought, I'll be one of them. I believed it completely. That is the part I still cannot forgive myself for. I believed it the way you believe the floor will hold.