Ash and Ember

CHAPTER FOUR Festival Season

The pack functions better when everyone knows their place. I know mine perfectly. The question , and it is a new question, a question that is only three days old and already changing the shape of things , is whether I'm going to keep it.

The festival preparations start before dawn. I'm in the kitchen by five, assigned by my mother the evening before with the specific efficiency she uses when she wants to make sure there's no room for discussion. Scrub the flagstones. Prep the serving trays. Polish the cutlery. Set the tables in the hall before the Ironmoor delegation arrives.

The hall I'm not permitted to sit in. The tables where my sister will eat.

I focus on technique. It's a system I've developed over years , when the situation won't change, change what you're attending to. The proper angle for flatware placement is forty-five degrees from the plate edge. The correct napkin fold for a formal occasion is a bishop's mitre, though nobody will care or notice. I care. I notice. Precision is the only dignity available to me right now, so I take it.

Sophie is beside me, moving through the prep work in near-silence. This is its own language between us , she's not quiet because she has nothing to say. She's quiet because she's decided the things she wants to say would not help me right now and she loves me enough to hold them in.

I understand the effort that takes. I don't tell her I understand. I hand her the stack of serving cloths and she takes them without comment and we work.

My mother appears at the kitchen door mid-morning with the headscarf and an expression that has already decided this conversation is over before it starts.

"The Ironmoor delegation will be attending." She crosses the kitchen. I stand still while she ties it , brisk, efficient, already looking somewhere past me. "I don't want anyone asking questions about your hair. Stay in the kitchen during the main ceremony. Come out for clearing. That's all." A final adjustment to the knot. "You understand."

Not a question.

"Yes, Mother," I say.

She leaves. I stand in the middle of the kitchen with the headscarf tight across my hair and I look at the wall for a moment, and I think about Nara saying more and about the warmth in my sternum and about the word evidence, how I've been turning it over since the night outside the portrait.

I meet Sophie's eyes.

She says nothing. Very carefully, with great precision, says absolutely nothing. Her expression is neutral in the specific way that means she is experiencing a level of fury she has decided not to subject me to.

"Don't," I say.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were about to."

"I have many thoughts," Sophie says, turning back to the trays, "that I am keeping entirely to myself out of love for you."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome. How do you feel about the bishop's mitre fold for the napkins?"

"I already did those."

"Of course you did." She picks one up, examines it. "These are perfect, you know. They won't notice."

"I know," I say. "I did them anyway."

The festival happens without me.

That is the most accurate way to put it. I am present in the building, I can hear every moment of it, I watch most of it through the c***k in the kitchen door , the same c***k, the same angle I've been using since I was eleven. The hall looks different for the Founding Festival. More candles. Banners in Blackrock black and silver. The Ironmoor delegation in their deep green, clustered near the eastern wall, being attended to with the careful energy my father reserves for people whose opinion he needs.

He gives a speech about bloodline pride. He is good at speeches , measured, authoritative, the voice of a man who has never once doubted that the room should be listening to him. He talks about the Blackrock legacy and what it means to carry it forward and how the strength of the pack is in its roots, in the purity of what they've preserved.

I scrub a pan and think about Phoenix-Wolf bloodlines older than his recorded history and keep my face very blank.

Leon receives a commendation. Combat scores, training excellence, the packmaster reading his times off a list while Leon stands in the centre of the room with his shoulders back and his chin up, absorbing the applause with the ease of someone who expected nothing less. My times are in that list. Not attributed to me , just absorbed into his record when my name was removed from the board. I have done the arithmetic. I know exactly how much of that commendation belongs to me.

I dry a dish and put it on the rack and pick up the next one.

Selena dances with Alpha Caine of Ironmoor , he is older, broad-shouldered, with the deliberate movements of a man who understands the politics of a dance floor. My father watches from the edge of the room with the expression he gets when things are going according to plan. Selena is luminous. She was built for exactly this kind of evening, for being seen and admired and moved correctly through the right rooms, and some part of me that I've never been able to fully extinguish thinks: she's genuinely good at this. Whatever else is true.

I look away from her.

And then I see the couple by the far wall.

Not young , somewhere in their thirties, maybe, both of them in plain clothes compared to the rest of the hall. Not dancing, not talking to anyone. Just standing close together, the woman's shoulder against the man's arm, both of them watching the room with the relaxed attention of people who arrived somewhere they were going together and don't need to perform for anyone. He says something low. She tips her head toward him to hear it, and then she laughs, and he watches her laugh with this expression on his face like,

Like she's the most interesting thing in the room.

Not the spectacle of her. Not what she looks like or who she's related to or what she can do for him. Just her, specifically, as a person he has chosen to stand beside at this particular festival in this particular hall, and he is not looking anywhere else.

Something aches in my chest.

I don't name it. I look away, pick up the cloth, go back to the dishes. There are always more dishes.

By midnight the hall is emptying. I clear the tables , quickly, efficiently, invisible , and Sophie and I finish the last of the washing in near-silence while the final guests filter out through the main doors. When it's done we take what's left of the stolen honey cake and sit on the back step in the cold, listening to the bonfire in the courtyard settle.

Sophie sits close enough that our shoulders touch. She's been doing that for years, the shoulder contact , not drawing attention to it, just present. Warm. I don't know if she knows how much it matters.

"You were watching that couple," she says.

"I was watching the room."

"The Greylake pair. Against the far wall. For about four minutes."

I peel a piece of cake. "I didn't know you were timing me."

"I was watching you watch them." She's not teasing. Her voice is gentle in a way that means she's being careful. "The way he looked at her."

I don't say anything.

"You're allowed to want that, you know," Sophie says.

"Want what."

"Someone who looks at you like you're worth the looking. Like you're the reason they came into the room."

"Sophie."

"I'm just saying,"

"Stop." It comes out flatter than I mean it to. "Please."

She stops. An ember drifts up from the bonfire, orange against the dark, and I watch it rise and disperse. I think about what my grandmother said three nights ago. About fire being inheritance. About the word more.

"I don't want that," I say. I mean it to come out settled , a closed door, a finished sentence. Instead it comes out sounding exactly like what it is: a sentence I don't quite believe.

Sophie is quiet for a moment. Then she says, very softly: "Okay."

"Okay?"

"Yeah. I'm just going to sit here and be wrong about that, then. Very comfortably. At complete ease with being wrong." She breaks off a piece of cake and holds it out. "You want the rest of this?"

I take it. I eat it. The bonfire settles lower.

Then, from behind us, the kitchen door opens.

"There you are." My father's voice. I turn. He is in the doorway with his formal coat still on, the speech and the commendation and the evening all still visible in his posture , the particular straightness of a man who has had a successful night and expects the feeling to hold. He looks at me. Not at Sophie. "I need you inside."

"The clearing is done," I say. "Everything's,"

"Not for clearing." He glances at Sophie, a look that says this conversation is not for her. Then back to me. "Alpha Caine asked about you."

The word lands in the quiet like a stone in water.

I keep my face very still.

"He saw you in the hall," my father says, carefully, watching me the way he does when he's calculating, "during the clearing. He said," A pause. Something moves behind his eyes that I can't read, something between calculation and something older than calculation. "He wants to meet you."

Beside me, I feel Sophie go completely still.

Alpha Caine of Ironmoor. Who is older. Who has power. Who spent the evening dancing with my sister while my father watched with the face he wears when things are going according to plan.

I think about what kind of meeting this is.

I look at my father's face and I understand, with a cold and sudden clarity, that I am not being introduced to someone.

I am being offered.