Chapter 5
1033 Words
Seraphine
Wren arrived on the second morning.
Seraphine heard her before she saw her - a familiar voice in the corridor conducting a brisk negotiation with a guard about whether guests of guests were permitted in the east wing without prior arrangement. The guard was losing.
She opened the door.
Wren was small, dark-haired, and armed exclusively with a crossbody bag that she treated as a survival kit and a face that was currently arranging itself through about four emotions in rapid succession: relief, irritation, satisfaction at having successfully bluffed her way through the gate, and then back to irritation.
"You stole a horse and ended up in the Alpha King's guest suite," she said.
"The horse is in the stables. He's doing very well."
"That's not the part I was commenting on."
Seraphine stood aside and let her in.
Wren walked directly to the window, looked out at the mountains, and then turned and looked at Seraphine with the particular assessment of someone who had known her long enough to read the things she didn't say.
"It's him," Wren said. "Isn't it."
Not a question. Seraphine had long ago given up being surprised by Wren's capacity for this.
"Yes," she said.
"The Alpha King."
"Yes."
"Cael Dawnveil. The most powerful wolf alive. Who has six weeks before he has to choose a Luna from the three candidates the council pre-selected. That man is your-”
"Yes, Wren."
A pause.
"And the ward?"
"Apparently it won't kill him."
Wren sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at the ceiling. "Your grandmother," she said finally, "was either a genius or deeply sadistic.
"I've been considering both options."
"Possibly both."
"Possibly both," Seraphine agreed.
She sat down in the chair by the window and looked out at the mountains she had been trying not to look at since she arrived, because they were beautiful in a way that made her feel the full weight of the last four years, and she couldn't afford that right now. She needed to be thinking. She needed to be planning. She needed to find a way through this that left her intact on the other side.
"He's going to reject it," she said.
"You don't know that."
"I know he's a king with a succession crisis and a council that already doesn't like him and six weeks to produce a politically appropriate Luna. I know he's dealt with people trying to use his bond against him before and built himself an entire identity around never letting it happen again." She looked at her hands. "I'm an Omega with no pack and an illegal ward that's been killing his people. I am not a politically appropriate anything."
Wren was quiet for a moment.
"He sat with you through the archive examination," she said.
Seraphine's head came up.
"The guard told me, when I asked how you'd been treated. He said the King came himself and stayed through the whole report." Wren shrugged. "He didn't have to do that."
Seraphine didn't say anything. She was thinking about the way he'd looked when Aldwen said the ward only broke for a full-bloodline fated bond - not at her, but at the table, and then at nothing, the kind of looking that meant the person was watching something happening inside themselves.
She had trained herself not to hope.
She was very good at it. She had been practising for years.
The council dinner was in three days. She knew this because the fortress moved differently around it - the specific accelerated energy of a large household bracing for something important. Linens moved. Flowers arrived. Two of the candidate families' advance parties swept through the corridors with the proprietary air of people assessing real estate.
The first candidate, a Beta female named Cassia, passed Seraphine in the herb garden on the second afternoon.
She was tall and deliberate and had the kind of beauty that got used for political purposes. She looked at Seraphine with calm curiosity, not malice - the look of someone filing away information.
"You're the healer," she said.
"I am."
"The one with the ward."
"Also me."
Cassia looked at her for a moment. Then she said, quietly: 'I don't want this either, for what it's worth. The council wants it. My family wants it. I've met Cael Dawnveil four times and he has never once looked at me like a person.'
Seraphine didn't know what to say to that.
Good luck with your situation," Cassia said, and walked on.
Seraphine stood in the herb garden for a long time after she left, surrounded by rosemary and winter sage. The rosemary caught her, the way it always did - her grandmother had grown it in every windowsill, had pressed sprigs into the pages of her books, had said once that rosemary was for remembrance and she intended to be remembered. Seraphine had thought, at fourteen, standing beside a grave, that this was arrogance. She thought now it was just honesty. Elara had known she was leaving something behind. She had just not known exactly what. She thought about all the people caught in the current of one man's politics. All the collateral in a crisis that was really about a council's fear of change. All the lives being arranged around a single question of succession.
She thought about her grandmother, sitting somewhere dying, deciding to give her granddaughter this gift. The absolute certainty of it. The love in it. The tremendous, arrogant, possibly sadistic confidence of a woman who had decided: not just anyone. The right one. The only one.
She thought about a man with a carved wooden wolf in his desk drawer who didn't know she'd seen his hand move to it twice.
She closed her eyes.
Somewhere in the stables, Inheritance was probably being fed an unreasonable quantity of apples by a stable master who had decided he was the best horse in residence.
Somewhere in the east tower, an Alpha King was reading a report about her grandmother's magic and deciding what to do about it.
Seraphine breathed in the cold herb-sharp air and did the thing she was worst at.
She waited.
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