The Wolfless Queen

Chapter 4

I walk into the conference room and the members of The Council are already seated.

It has been two weeks since the notice and I have had no luck finding Selene and Riven is the only one who had any information on Selene’s brother, Darius.

She said nothing about him really stood out to her except the fact that he was so engrossed with The Council and suddenly decided to pull out.

Lord Caspian bangs the gavel on the table to call everyone to order. The room goes silent. “We called this meeting to present our concerns to the Queen.”

I look up at him. I can tell what he actually means to say: We called the meeting to share our concerns about the Queen. “Go on,”

“Myself and the esteemed members of the council went around the kingdom and asked the people to share what they thought about your reign. They all shared the same concerns,” Lord Thorne starts. “‘How would you know how to lead them when you are not even one of them?’”

I look at him and he holds my gaze. I know he is not allowed to be biased but he made it sound like he doesn’t even believe in me at all.

He was the only one I was counting on to take my side. So if he is not, I am completely alone here. I have to fight for myself, by myself.

“I am one of them. My inability to shift doesn’t make me any less one of our people,” I place a hand a the mahogany table.

“I agree, but the people don’t think so. To them you are an outsider,” Caspian says.

From the way the other members are nodding, they obviously agree too.

According to my father, his great-grandfather founded this kingdom when he was exiled along with his pack. It was a wasteland and they had to build everything from the ground up and later on, other exiled packs joined them.

It was initially sort of like a refugee camp but as the people increased, the need for an official leader arose. They chose my great-great-great-grandfather for two reasons: they felt they owed it to him and he was already acting in that capacity as an unofficial leader.

My father didn’t tell me this but to me, those are the possible reasons.

Most of those packs were exiled for being different. Some because their wolves had fur colors that were against the norms. Some because they stood up to their leaders and thought differently from the others.

So basically Moonhaven is the kingdom of outcasts.

“So you are going to brand me as an outcast in a land full of outcasts and their descendants?” I raise an eyebrow in my mother’s signature power move.

She once told me that the message behind her eyebrow raise was: Can you believe how stupid you sound?

No one answers.

“I thought so too,” I look around the room and I think they are going to drop it until…

“At least get married,” Lord Jacobs says. I thought he wasn’t going to speak.

“And how will that change anything?” I ask.

“It will help the people to know that you gave someone by your side” He answers and all the other men grunt in agreement like cavemen.

“So The Council is not on my side,” I state. It’s not a question. It is a fact.

“The Council is neutral,” Lord Thorne says.

The entire situation is just ridiculous but Thorne’s disposition is shocking. A few days ago, he told me he was on my side and all of a sudden, he has switched up on me.

“I will not get married to a stranger just to make the people happy,” I make eye contact with all the men in the room. Which is everyone in the room.

“We just think the people will warm up to the idea of liking you if they think that someone like them is in love with you,” Caspian says.

On my bed that night, I try to figure out what he meant by “someone like them”. I have never actually felt like I belonged here.

I was homeschooled for the first 13 years of my life. Then my mother decided she wanted me to have a sense of normalcy. To be honest, she had very bad timing.

At first, I enjoyed being in school with other kids my age instead of sages. That was until the kids started getting their wolves. I was so excited, I would go back home and retell my friends’ stories to my parents word for word.

My mother would share my excitement but my father didn’t and when I told my mother, she said he wasn’t because he didn’t care but because he was too busy.

I was waiting patiently for my turn but it didn’t come. It still hasn’t. Then the other kids started making fun of me. It wasn’t really bad. Just name-calling.

I would be walking along the hallway and someone would scream “wolfless princess”. Later on, they decided I wasn’t fit to be a princess and just called me “wolfless”.

I didn’t tell anyone about it but one day my father found me crying in my room and held me while I told him everything. He didn’t tell me it was going to be okay and now I know it was because he couldn’t guarantee everything would be okay.

The very next day, I woke up and found my former teachers waiting to teach (read: torture) me almost like they never stopped coming. Like all I went through was just a bad dream, a very long one.

While my father was alive, no one ever mentioned my situation. But now that he is gone, it is almost like it’s all everyone wants to talk about.

There is a knock on my door.

I sit up on my bed. “Come in,”

Riven walks in with a thick binder in her hand. Her bun of grey hair is sticking out in all directions. She’s so overworked.

“The Council said to deliver this to you. They said it is a list of potential candidates,” She hands over the binder.

It is so heavy.

She looks at the binder, curiosity all over her face. “Candidates for what?” She finally asks.

I open it first to confirm my suspicion. On the first page are the words: “Potential spouses for Queen Seraphina”. Like they can be any more obvious.

“At the council meeting today,” I close the binder, “they told me I had to get married to someone so the people can like me.”

Riven sits on my bed and covers my right hand with hers. “And by someone they meant someone with a wolf right?” She asks.

I offer her a slight nod.

“Those conniving old men,” she says under her breath. “There has to be another way.”

I flip open the binder once again. The first candidate is the Lord Caspian’s second grandson. I am sure he tried so hard not to tell his oldest one to get a divorce or not to put his own name on here.

I turn the binder towards Riven and point at the image. Her laugh is so contagious that I have to join in too.

“He should have just come out to say it himself,” she says.

“Marry my grandson. That is the only way I would stop turning the people against you,” she does a weird impression of Caspian. I keep on laughing.

We keep flipping through the binder. Some of the candidates were from Wolfhaven while the others are princes of nearby kingdoms.

I do not trust any of the candidates because obviously, a lot of work was put into gathering information on them and if The Council nominates you, it means you are just a puppet and they’ll pull your strings however they like.

The only way I can get them to drop it is if I raise my own candidate and suddenly, Ceralen is the only one I can think of.