Silverblood Mate

Chapter Six: What Grows in Safe Ground

Vantry land doesn't feel like Hollow Pine. It takes me nearly a week to stop flinching every time someone raises their voice near me, because here, raised voices mean laughter more often than warning.

Caius gives me a room in the east wing, small but warm, with a window that catches the morning sun instead of the cold north wind Aunt Odessa always kept me under. I don't trust it at first. I keep waiting for the cost to surface, the way it always did back home, the debt that gets called in when you least expect it.

It doesn't come. Instead, on the third morning, the pack healer, an older woman named Ione with silver in her braid and kind, tired eyes, comes to check on my hip and asks nothing about where I've come from beyond what I volunteer.

"Six weeks along," she says, hands steady over my stomach. Then she frowns. Presses again. Frowns deeper.

"What is it?"

"Nothing's wrong," she says slowly. "But I'm feeling two heartbeats where I expect one."

The room goes very quiet. "Twins," I say, and the word doesn't feel real in my mouth.

Ione nods, still frowning at her own hands like they've surprised her. "Strong ones too. Stronger than they should be this early." She glances up at me. "Has anyone in your family carried twins before?"

I think of my brother, the one I never met, born and lost in the same terrible night as our mother. I think of a bloodline no one ever told me about. "I don't know," I say, which is true, and also the only answer I have for most questions about myself lately.

That night I can't sleep. I sit by the window with my hand pressed flat against my stomach and the moon comes in low and silver, and under my palm, faint as a held breath, I feel warmth answer warmth. Twice.

Caius finds me in the garden most mornings after that, not because he's looking for me exactly, he says, but because the garden happens to be on his way to the training yard, which I don't believe for one second and don't call him on either.

"You're doing the counting thing again," he says one morning, watching me trace the same six paving stones back and forth.

"It helps."

"Helps with what?"

I almost lie. I've gotten good at deciding quickly what a question is really asking. His isn't asking for a performance. It's asking because he wants the real answer. "Staying calm when there's too much to feel at once."

He doesn't push further, doesn't tell me I shouldn't need to do that, doesn't look at me like I'm broken for needing it. He just falls into step on the seventh stone, matching my count without being asked, and something in my chest loosens that has been tight for so long I'd forgotten it was tight at all.

"Your Beta keeps looking at me strangely," I tell him a few days later, mostly to change the subject before I say something I'm not ready to say. His Beta, a broad man named Ferris, has been watching me across the dining hall with an expression I can't place.

Caius's jaw tightens, just slightly. "Ferris remembers the old records same as I do. Wolves with silver eyes. A line everyone thought was gone." He pauses. "He thinks you're dangerous."

"And what do you think?"

"I think you flinch when someone raises a hand near a door, and I think a girl who's spent her whole life being told she's a curse doesn't strike me as someone plotting to destroy two kingdoms." He looks at me directly. "I think you're something this world hasn't seen in a long time, and I don't think that's the same thing as dangerous."

I don't know what to do with being looked at like that. Nobody has ever looked at me and seen something worth keeping rather than something to be managed.

It's three weeks into my stay when the messenger arrives at the front gate at a dead run, and I know, before Caius even reads the note, that it's about me.

He reads it standing in the yard, and this time his face does change. A flicker of something sharp and unhappy crosses it before he smooths it back down.

"What is it," I ask, though some cold, certain part of me already knows.

"Thornecrown's tightened the search," he says. "They're not just asking pack Alphas to report anymore." He folds the note slowly. "The King has sent riders. Personally commissioned. They're checking border packs directly. Yours will be one of the first, since you were cast out this close to their patrol routes."

My stomach drops. "How close?"

"Two days out, maybe less."

Two days. I have two days before men loyal to Alaric Thorne come asking Caius Vantry, directly, whether he's harboring a woman with silver eyes from Hollow Pine.

"You should send me away," I say, before I can stop myself. "Before they get here. I won't put your pack at risk for."

"No."

"Caius."

"I said no." His voice isn't raised, but there's something in it that ends the conversation anyway. "You're carrying two lives inside you that didn't ask for any of this, and I am not putting a pregnant, injured woman back out on the road because a king with more pride than sense decided he wants to finish what he started."

I stare at him. "Why does it matter to you? What I am, what happens to me, why does any of this matter to you?"

He's quiet for a long moment, long enough that I think he isn't going to answer at all. Then: "Because someone should have asked that question a long time before now, and it seems like nobody ever did."

I don't have a response to that. I don't think there is one.

That night, Ione comes to find me with a strange look on her face, a worn leather book held against her chest like it might try to escape her.

"I found something," she says, setting it on the table between us, opened to a page with an illustration so faded I can barely make out the shape of it. A wolf standing in moonlight, eyes rendered in silver ink that hasn't faded at all, bright as the day it was painted. "Veilborn healers. The last recorded one lived nearly sixty years ago." She looks up at me. "The record says they could be recognized by exactly one thing beyond the eyes."

"What?"

"Their children," she says. "Veilborn women always carry twins. Every single time, without exception, going back six generations." She taps the page. "It's not chance, Wren. It never was."

Somewhere outside, faint but unmistakable, a horn sounds at the northern gate. The signal for approaching riders.

We both go very still.

"That's not Thornecrown's patrol route," Caius says from the doorway, already reaching for his coat, his face gone hard and focused in a way I haven't seen on him before. "That's the western road."

"Then who."

The second horn cuts across the first, three short blasts, and I watch every ounce of color drain out of Ione's face.

"That's the alarm for a hostile approach," she says quietly. "Wren, that's not a search party."

Caius is already moving for the door, calling for his Beta, and I'm left standing in the middle of the room with an ancient book open in front of me and two heartbeats fluttering under my palm, and the horns keep sounding, closer now, and closer still.