MATED TO MY MUDERER

Rhaeva's POV The moonflowers were my mother's idea. She said they were for luck. I think they were for her. "Hold still." Her fingers moved through my hair, dividing and weaving with the kind of focus she usually saved for arguments she intended to win. The ribbon between her teeth muffled her words but not her meaning. "You keep tensing your shoulders." "I'm not tense." "You've been not tense since before dawn." She pulled a section of hair a little tighter than necessary. "I know what your not tense looks like, Rhaeva." I looked at her hands in the small mirror propped against the windowsill. The roughness across her knuckles. The way her left thumb moved when she worked a knot loose. I looked at them the way you look at something without knowing you are memorizing it. The breakfast dishes were still on the table. Nobody had touched the food. "Papa hasn't eaten," I said. "Papa is fine." From the doorway, without turning around, my father said, "Papa is standing right here." My mother's hands paused in my hair. Then she laughed — a real one, surprised out of her — and the sound of it filled the small kitchen the way it always did, like it belonged to every corner of the room. I watched her face in the mirror. The way the laugh reached her eyes and then didn't quite leave, even after her mouth settled. I pressed that into the memorizing place too. My father crossed the room. He was a big man, broad across the shoulders, with hands that had fixed every broken thing in this house for as long as I could remember. He crouched in front of me and took my face between those hands and looked at me the way he had been looking at me all morning — like he was trying to find the right words in a language he didn't speak yet. "The Duskfang pack is the strongest on the continent," he said. "I know, Papa." "Kaedon is hard. But hard men can be fair men." "I know." His jaw moved. His hands were very still against my face but I could feel the tension in them — the particular stillness of something that wants very badly to move. "You don't have to be afraid." I covered his hands with mine. "I'm not afraid." It wasn't a lie. Fear was the wrong word for what was sitting in my chest that morning. Fear implied uncertainty. What I felt was something more like standing at the edge of a cliff in full daylight — I could see exactly what was below me. I just had to step off anyway. My mother tied the last moonflower into the braid and set her hands on my shoulders and looked at our reflection together in the small mirror. "Look at you," she said quietly. I looked. Dark auburn hair pinned with white flowers. My mother's jaw. My father's eyes. A face that had grown up in this warm, small house with the broken windowsill latch and the loose board on the third step and the smell of my father's woodsmoke and my mother's cooking. A face that was about to become someone else's property. "Rhaeva." My mother's hands tightened on my shoulders. Not hard. Just present. She leaned down until her lips were close to my ear and her voice dropped to something that was only ever for me. "Whatever they make of you there. Whatever that place tries to do to you." She paused. "You are the strongest thing I have ever made. Don't let them make you small." I reached up and put my hand over hers. I didn't answer because I didn't trust my voice. Outside, one of the carriage handlers called out that they were ready. My father stood. My mother straightened. The kitchen was warm and the food was cold and the morning light came through the window at the angle it always did at this hour, falling across the table where the three of us had eaten every meal of my life. I picked up my bag. I checked my coat pocket for the ribbon my mother had pressed into my palm an hour ago — the old blue one she had worn in her own hair the day she married my father. It was there. I kept my hand around it. We walked outside together. My parents stood in the yard while I climbed into the carriage. My father had his arm around my mother's shoulders. She had her hand pressed flat against her sternum, just below her throat, the way she stood when she was holding something in. The carriage began to move. I turned and watched them through the small rear window. My father raised his hand. My mother didn't move, just watched, her hand still at her chest. The yard shrank. The house shrank. The road bent and the pine trees closed in from both sides and then there was only the trees and the grey winter sky. I faced forward. I held the ribbon in my closed fist and I did not cry and I told myself I would see them again soon. I believed it.