Claimed by the Wolf King

Small Mercies

The afternoon before the elders' gathering passed slower than any Sera had endured since the crash, weighted with the particular dread of a conversation she suspected would change everything and could postpone but not avoid.

She spent it, at Kade's suggestion, learning the den's daily rhythms in a way she hadn't let herself before, less a hostage cataloging her captors and more, uncomfortably, a woman trying to understand a life she was starting to imagine might one day be partly her own. Ottilie put her to work sorting dried herbs in the infirmary, muttering the whole while about idle hands and royal softness, though there was a fondness to the muttering Sera suspected the healer would deny if asked directly.

"You've got a decent memory," Ottilie observed, watching Sera correctly separate feverfew from yarrow on the third try. "Most nobles I've met couldn't tell a healing herb from a garden weed if their lives depended on it, which is a poor state of affairs for people whose lives frequently do."

"My mother insisted on practical education. She said a queen who couldn't recognize poison in her own wine deserved whatever came of the ignorance." Sera set aside another bundle, and found herself smiling at the memory despite everything, her mother's sharp, pragmatic voice reaching her from a childhood that felt, in this den full of wolves, impossibly far away. "She died when I was twelve. Sometimes I wonder what she'd make of all this."

Ottilie's busy hands stilled for a moment. "Losing a mother young leaves a mark that doesn't fade, whatever anyone tells you about time healing it. I lost mine before my first litter was born. Wolf or human, some griefs don't know the difference."

"Do you have children, Ottilie?"

"Three, grown now, scattered across two other packs through marriage bonds. My eldest mated into the Ashgrove pack two valleys east, visits twice a year if the weather holds." Ottilie's weathered face softened in a way Sera hadn't seen from her before. "Not so different from your own world, I'd wager. Mothers worrying after children who've built lives too far away to visit as often as they'd like."

"I hadn't imagined wolves marrying between packs. I assumed you all simply, I don't know, stayed within your own borders."

"We're not so different from Everfell's own nobility in that regard, Princess. Alliances, bloodlines, the occasional marriage arranged more for politics than affection. We've been managing our own version of your court intrigues for a good deal longer than your kingdom's crown has existed, whatever the old ballads taught you to expect of us." Ottilie handed her another bundle of dried lavender, the same flower Sera had knelt beside in the garden only a day before. "Your Alpha's a good man, whatever else you might think of the rest of us. Better than his father in some ways, harder on himself than he ought to be in others."

Sera looked up at that, something in Ottilie's tone catching her attention. "You knew his father."

"Served this den since before Kade was born, girl. Delivered him myself, screaming loud enough to wake three neighboring valleys, if the stories are to be believed." A rare, genuine smile crossed Ottilie's face. "His father was a good Alpha, strong, fair, well loved by this pack. But he carried grief like a stone in his chest long before the poachers finally killed him, some old sorrow he never spoke of even to his own healer, and I've watched Kade carry that same weight since the day he took the title. Does my heart good, seeing him laugh again these past few days. Haven't heard that sound from him in years."

The observation settled somewhere warm and unexpected in Sera's chest, and despite every instinct her upbringing had cultivated toward careful emotional distance, she found herself wanting badly to ask Ottilie more, about Kade's father, about the grief the older woman had mentioned so casually, about whatever old sorrow had marked an Alpha Sera had never met but was starting, through his son, to understand in fragments.

"What happened to his father? Truly, I mean, beyond the story about poachers."

Ottilie's expression shuttered, not unkindly, but with the caution of someone deciding a story isn't hers to tell. "That's a tale for Kade to share, if he chooses to, not for an old healer to spill over an afternoon of herb sorting. Some griefs belong to the people who carry them." She softened the refusal with a gentle pat on Sera's shoulder. "Ask him yourself, when the time feels right. I suspect he'd rather hear the question from you than have you learn it secondhand regardless."

They worked in companionable silence after that, and as the afternoon light shifted toward evening, Sera found herself unexpectedly at peace in a way that unsettled her more than any of the fear she'd carried since the crash. She'd spent nineteen years surrounded by courtiers who valued her only for the alliances her marriage might secure, and here, in a den full of wolves she'd been raised to fear above all else, she'd spent an afternoon sorting herbs with a woman who spoke to her like an equal, who shared grief and memory freely, who asked nothing of her except careful hands and honest conversation.

It should have terrified her, how easily she was starting to imagine a life within these walls. Instead, watching the lantern light catch the drying herbs in gold and green, she found the thought settling into her chest with a quiet, dangerous comfort she wasn't at all sure she wanted to examine too closely.

Kade found her there as the sun began its final descent, lingering in the infirmary doorway with an expression she was starting to recognize as his particular brand of careful hesitation, the look of a man weighing words before he commits to them.

"The elders are ready for us," he said. "Rosalind wants us in the council hall within the hour."

"Should I be frightened of whatever they're about to tell me?"

Kade considered the question with the seriousness it deserved, and Sera appreciated, not for the first time, that he never offered her the easy reassurance a lesser man might have reached for instead.

"I think you should be prepared," he said finally. "Whether that requires fear, I honestly couldn't say. I don't fully know the story myself, only fragments, and I suspect what we're about to hear will change how both of us understand everything that's happened between us these past four days." He offered his hand, and she took it without hesitation, a small gesture that had become, somewhere in the space of a single terrifying week, entirely unremarkable between them. "Whatever it is, we'll hear it together."

"Together," Sera repeated, testing the word's weight, and found, walking beside him toward the council hall and whatever history waited within it, that she meant it a good deal more than she'd expected to when the day began.