The Alpha King's Rejected Queen

Faster

Sera's POV~

I was about two hundred steps past the east gate, walking slowly for no reason I could have explained, when I heard someone running up the road behind me, and I knew who it was before I turned around, which is not something I should have been able to do.

I hadn't looked. I hadn't heard her call out. I just knew, the same way you know the sound of your own kitchen door, and I stopped walking and stood there in the dark with the stones cold through my shoes. I could hear her breathing. I could hear her heart going like a scared rabbit's. And the wind brought me flour and onions and the salty smell of someone who's been crying for a while.

"Sera! Sera, wait, I—" Nell came pelting round the bend with her face bright red and her hair sticking out in every direction. She was hugging a cloth bundle to her chest. When she saw me she pulled up so suddenly she nearly sat down. "You *turned around!* I hadn't even said anything!"

"I heard you."

"From all the way back there?"

"I don't know," I said, honestly. "I've been hearing all kinds of things."

Nell gave me a long look. Then she dropped the bundle in the road and grabbed me round the neck so hard I nearly fell over. She was shaking. She smelled like the kitchen, which meant she smelled like home, and that was what almost finished me. I hugged her back. For a while neither of us said anything.

"You walk really fast," she said finally, into my shoulder, "for someone who just got dumped by a king."

I laughed, and then I was crying, the quiet kind that just leaks out and doesn't ask permission. Nell held on and let me.

When we let go, she wiped her face on her sleeve and crouched to unwrap the bundle. She was in her bossy voice now, the one she uses when she's pretending not to be upset.

"Okay. I didn't have long, so don't judge. Half a loaf. Some cheese, the hard kind, it won't go off. A waterskin. My mittens, and if you die out here I want them back. And this."

It was one of the old paring knives from the scullery, the one with the cracked wooden handle. The blade had been sharpened so many times it was thin as a leaf.

"It's not much," Nell said.

"It's plenty." I took it, and it felt heavier than it should have.

"And this." She lifted out the last thing, folded into a tight square. "I remembered where Old Bess put it."

It was a gray wool cloak. I knew it before she'd unfolded it, though I hadn't seen it in years. It had been sitting in the attic in the trunk where the cook kept things nobody knew what to do with, and it was the cloak I'd been wrapped in when the border patrol found me under that fir tree. I was three. Somebody put it in a trunk and forgot about it.

Nell shook it out. It was old and one edge was torn, but the wool was thick and good, and when she put it around my shoulders it was warm straight away. It smelled of dust and cedar chips, and underneath that of something else. I couldn't have said what. It was like when you hear a song and can't remember where from.

"Look at the inside," Nell said, and she turned up the hem toward the moon.

Right along the bottom edge there was stitching, in thread so pale it was nearly white. Tiny moons, dozens of them, none bigger than my thumbnail, each one joined to the next by a curling little twig. It was so fine that I stopped breathing to look at it.

"That's not pack work," said Nell. "Nobody in Silverpine can sew like that. That's expensive, Sera."

"I've never seen it before."

"You were three. Of course you haven't."

I ran my thumb over the little moons. For a second it felt like there was a word sitting just behind my teeth, something I ought to know, and then it went, and I was a girl on a dark road, holding on to an old coat.

"Nell," I said. "You shouldn't be here. You'll get in so much trouble."

"I know." She bit her lip. "Listen, I have to tell you something, and then I have to run. When you left I went round to the kitchen door and I saw Rusk in the yard, getting the hunters together. They were buckling on spears and nobody was talking. They're going out at moonset, Sera. It's a rogue hunt. That's the law, they have to."

The cold went down my back.

"Moonset," I said.

"So that's maybe two hours. Less." She grabbed both my hands. "You've got to get off Silverpine land. Go north till you hit the stream, then follow it to the river, and then east along the river, way past the Hollow. My gran used to say there was an old healer out there who took in rogues and never asked them a single question. I don't know if he's still alive. That's all I've got."

"Past the Hollow," I said, twice, so I wouldn't lose it.

"Please be careful." She was crying again. "You were the only person in this whole stupid pack who ever saved me the burnt edges of the pie on purpose."

"You *like* the burnt edges."

"I know! That's my whole point!"

We were both laughing and both wet in the face, and I have never in my life been so glad to have anyone. I told her to go home. She told me to shut up. Then she kissed my cheek, grabbed up her empty cloth and ran back down the road, and I stood there listening to her heartbeat get smaller until I couldn't pick it out from the wind.

"Thanks," I said to the dark, quietly, in case she could still hear.

I made it about a mile into the forest before I threw up.

It wasn't anything dramatic. I stopped next to a birch tree, bent over, and everything I'd eaten that day came back up, which was half a heel of bread eaten standing at the counter around ten in the morning. Then I stayed there with my hands on my knees, feeling stupid. There was nobody around to see me and I was still worried about the mess. I'd just been thrown out of my home in front of four hundred people, and my brain was busy telling me not to leave a puddle on somebody's tree.

My lip was split where I'd bitten it, so everything tasted like pennies and sour wine. My chest hurt too, though not the way it had in the courtyard. That pain had been sharp and had stopped somewhere on the road. This one was duller. It sat in the middle of me like something I'd swallowed wrong, and every time I took a step it tugged me sideways, back toward the pack house, like a dog on a leash I couldn't see.

"Stop it," I said to it. Out loud. To my own chest.

I made a list, because I always do when I'm scared. Things I had: a cloak, a knife, a waterskin, half a loaf, some cheese, a friend's mittens, a brown dress, mended shoes, a hair ribbon, a split lip. Things I didn't have: a plan, a bed, anywhere to go. Under a loose board in my room above the pantry there were six copper coins. I'd been saving them for seven years to buy a decent pair of winter boots. Seven years. And now I'd never see them again, and out of everything that had happened that night, that was the thing that almost made me cry.

I took the apron off. I couldn't tell you why. It just felt wrong to still be wearing it. It smelled like flour and the kitchen. I stood there holding it for a minute, and I honestly could not think what you do with an apron in the woods, so I folded it up and hung it over a branch, as if somebody might come along later and want it back.

It was then that I noticed the river.

The river was north of the pack lands, at least a half hour on foot, and here I was hearing it as clearly as if it was running past the kitchen window. A steady soft rushing off to my left. And once I'd noticed that, I noticed everything else. An owl somewhere overhead, and the little dry noise its wings made when it shifted on the branch. Something tiny in the leaves. A fox, way off to the west, trotting along and thinking about nothing.

I could smell the fox, too. That was the part that scared me. Not the woods in general, the pine and the cold and the wet dirt, I'd always smelled that. But there was a line of something sharp and musky across the path where I was standing, and I knew, just knew, that it was about an hour old and that it went west. I turned my head and followed it with my nose like a hound.

So it wasn't just Nell. It was everything.

I didn't have a wolf. Everybody knew that. When I was fourteen I stood in a field for a whole afternoon with my eyes squeezed shut, trying to make something happen, and nothing did, and I went back and washed pots. In twenty years I had never heard or smelled anything an ordinary person couldn't.

*Great,* I thought. *I've gone mad. That's handy.*

I walked north, like Nell said. I wrapped the cloak tight and stuck the knife in my belt and ate some of the bread as I went, because I figured I'd need it more in my stomach than in a bundle. The moon crept over the sky. The ache in my chest kept dragging me toward the pack every time I moved, and every time it did, I turned a few degrees further north, purely out of spite.

After a while the ground began to slope and I found the stream. It was narrow and fast and looked like a strip of tin in the moonlight. I knelt down to drink, and I saw my face in the water and stopped.

I looked terrible, obviously, but that wasn't what did it. It was the little patch of light at the bottom of my throat, showing through the neck of my dress. I pulled the collar aside. A small curve, thin as a fingernail clipping, a crescent moon lying on its back and glowing very faintly under my skin.

I touched it. It was warm.

It wasn't hot and it didn't hurt. It was warm like a hand that's been resting on something for a long time. And somewhere deep inside me, further down than I could easily reach, something moved. Only a little, a shift. But it felt exactly like being in a dark room and knowing, without hearing a thing, that there's someone else in there with you.

"Hello?" I whispered, feeling like an i***t.

Nothing answered. But the warm spot under my finger pulsed once, slow and steady, like a heartbeat that wasn't mine.

I sat back on my heels with my own heart going wild, and then I thought of my knees.

I'd hit those stones hard in the courtyard. I'd heard something crack. I hauled up my skirt in the moonlight, expecting a mess, and there was nothing. No scrape, no bruise, no mark at all. My skin was smooth and perfect and I couldn't even find where the cuts had been.

I stared at my knees for a really long time.

And then, because apparently I can't help myself, I thought about Kaelen Draven. Standing in the torchlight with his hand pressed flat against his chest and his face gone the color of old porridge. I'd seen it. I knew I had. It had hurt him, too.

*Good,* I thought, and it felt so nice I nearly smiled.

Then straight after: *No. Not good.* Because I didn't want him hurting. That was the worst of it, honestly, that I didn't want him to. I would have liked to hate him cleanly, the way people do in stories, but instead I was sitting by a stream in the dark worrying about the man who'd thrown me away. I decided I didn't have time for that right now and shoved it to the back of my head to deal with later.

I drank, filled up the waterskin, and got to my feet.

That was when the first horn went off.

It was thin and a long way behind me, back toward Silverpine. One long high note that rose and hung there, and died. Every muscle I had locked up at once.

A second horn answered it. Then a third. And under the horns came a sound I'd heard maybe a dozen times in my life and never once from the wrong end, a long rising howl, and then another, and another, as the hunters started to shift.

It wasn't moonset. Not yet. They had come early.

Of course they did, I thought, weirdly calm. Lysandra never could wait for anything.

I ran.

I didn't decide to. My body just took off, and it took off in a way it never had before. I have always been slow. Clumsy, even. I've spent my whole life dropping plates and walking into door frames. But now the woods went past me in a blur, and I ran through them as if the ground was helping. A fallen log came up out of nowhere and I was over it before I'd properly seen it. A branch swung out of the dark at head height and I ducked it without knowing it was there. I could feel every root under my shoes a half second before I stepped on it. My lungs burned, but not the way they should have, and my legs weren't getting tired.

Behind me the howls were getting closer. I could hear paws now, dozens of them, hammering the dirt, and the deep excited panting of wolves that had just been told they were allowed to chase something.

And in the middle of all that, in the back of my head, a small voice I'd never heard before said, very calmly, *Faster.*

I had no idea whose it was. I didn't stop to argue.