The spare bride

Chapter two

They gave her three days to pack a life into two trunks.

Cathrine spent most of that time folding things she didn't want and refolding things she did, as if the order of the packing might somehow matter, might somehow announce to whoever unpacked them on the other end that this had been a person once, with preferences, before she became a treaty.

Her mother came in on the second evening to "help," which meant standing in the doorway offering opinions on things Cathrine had already decided. "Not the green one, Cathrine, it washes you out. Take the blue." The blue dress. Tiana's dress, technically, though no one in the house called it that anymore.

"I don't think it matters what I wear to be handed over," Cathrine said, and immediately regretted the bitterness in it not because it wasn't true, but because her mother's face did the thing it always did when Cathrine said something true and unwelcome: went smooth and pained, like Cathrine was the one causing harm simply by naming it.

"You make it sound so dire." Her mother folded her arms. "You're marrying an Alpha, Cathrine. Do you understand how many girls would trade places with you in a heartbeat?"

"Then perhaps one of them should," Cathrine said, and this time she did not apologize for it, and her mother left the room without another word, and that was, Cathrine thought, probably the most honest conversation the two of them had had in years.

Tiana did not come to help her pack at all. Cathrine caught sight of her twice across those three days once through a cracked door, sitting at her vanity with an expression Cathrine couldn't read, turning a hairpin over and over in her fingers without seeming to notice she was doing it; once in the hall, where Tiana opened her mouth as if to say something, and then visibly decided against it, and swept past instead in a cloud of rosewater perfume, leaving nothing behind but the faint impression that she had almost, almost said something that mattered.

Cathrine did not go looking for a goodbye. If her sister wanted to give her one, she knew where to find her.

None came.

The carriage left at dawn on the fourth day, and her father rode alongside it for the first hour of the journey before peeling off at the border stone with a stiff embrace and words that were meant, she understood, as comfort *you'll write to us, won't you, let us know you've settled* as if settling into a wolf's den three territories north were a matter of finding the right curtains.

He did not apologize. She had not expected him to. Some small, stubborn part of her had still hoped, and she made herself set that hope down on the road behind them like a stone she was finally strong enough to stop carrying, because carrying it any further north was only going to make the weight of everything else heavier.

Her mother had not come to see her off at all. A headache, the maid explained, apologetic on someone else's behalf. Cathrine did not ask which kind.

The journey north took six days.

She had never been more than a day's ride from home in her life never needed to be, never been permitted to want to be, her whole world drawn in tight concentric circles around the house and the pack lands and the particular radius of her family's expectations and so the unspooling distance did something strange to her chest as the days went on. Not grief, exactly. Something closer to air. The trees changed first, oak giving way to pine, the light growing colder and more silver as they climbed north and east into territory that smelled, even through the carriage windows, of something ancient and untamed.

Her escort was a small contingent from her father's pack, four guards and a driver, none of whom spoke to her beyond what courtesy required, all of them, she suspected, faintly relieved not to be the ones marrying into the Blood Moon line themselves. She spent the days watching the country change through the window and the nights in inns that grew progressively rougher and quieter the further north they traveled, until by the fifth night the innkeeper wouldn't meet her eyes at all when he set down her supper, and she understood without being told that everyone in these northern towns knew exactly whose territory this was, and exactly what it meant that a stranger was traveling toward it.

"They say the trees go quiet at the border," one of the younger guards told her on the sixth morning, not unkindly, more as a fact he thought she ought to have before she needed it. "The birds don't sing in Blood Moon territory. Not for miles."

"Why not?"

He shrugged, uncomfortable now that she'd actually asked. "Some say it's the Alpha's aura. Others say it's older than him something about the land itself, going back generations. I don't know if I believe any of it. But you'll hear the quiet yourself soon enough. You'll know it when you cross over."

She thought he was exaggerating, the way people exaggerated things they were afraid of, dressing fear up as folklore so it felt like a story instead of a warning.

He was not exaggerating.

She felt the border before she saw it a change in the air itself, some pressure dropping low and taut across her skin, the fine hairs on her arms lifting beneath her sleeves. The carriage rolled forward under an arch of black iron worked into the shape of two wolves facing each other, jaws open, and the moment they passed beneath it, the world went silent in a way Cathrine had never experienced and would never fully be able to describe to anyone who hadn't felt it themselves. Not silence like an empty room. Silence like something *listening*.

No birdsong. No wind moving through the pines the way it had moved through every mile of forest behind them. Even the horses' hooves seemed to fall softer against the packed earth road, as if the land itself demanded a kind of reverence, or fear, or both.

Cathrine sat very still in the carriage and made herself breathe evenly, in through the nose, out through the mouth, the way she had taught herself to breathe through every unbearable dinner and every stolen birthday of her whole life, and told herself that fear was only a feeling, and feelings passed, and she had survived worse than silence.

She was not entirely sure that was true. But it helped to say it anyway.

The Blood Moon pack house rose out of the treeline an hour later, and it was not at all what she had pictured.

She had imagined something crumbling and gothic, a ruin dressed up as a residence, fitting architecture for a monster. Instead the great house stood dark stone and dark timber against the mountain behind it, austere rather than decayed, every line of it deliberate not a place that had fallen into darkness, she thought, but a place that had been *built* that way on purpose, by someone who understood exactly what impression he wanted his home to make on anyone who approached it.

Wolves watched from the treeline as the carriage climbed the last stretch of road. Not shifted, not threatening exactly simply *present*, pairs of eyes catching the low afternoon light, tracking the carriage's progress with the unhurried attention of creatures who already knew there was nothing here they needed to rush toward. Cathrine kept her own eyes forward and her hands folded in her lap and did not let herself flinch, though every instinct in her body was screaming at her to.

The carriage stopped in a wide stone courtyard, and for a long moment nobody moved at all not the guards, not the driver, not Cathrine, all of them waiting, she realized, for some cue that only the pack itself would give.

Then the great doors of the house opened, and a woman came down the steps first tall, dark-haired, moving with the easy confidence of someone entirely at home in her own skin, her eyes finding Cathrine through the carriage window with an expression that was, unexpectedly, warm.

"That's Eli," murmured the young guard who'd warned her about the birds, relief plain in his voice, as if her presence changed something about the danger of the situation. "Beta's mate. She's the one who runs the correspondence with the southern packs. If anyone's going to be decent to you here, it'll be her."

Cathrine filed that away ,a name, a role, a small foothold of possible kindness in a place that had otherwise offered her none and let the guard hand her down from the carriage on legs that felt considerably less steady than she wanted them to.

"You must be Cathrine." Eli's voice was low and pleasant, and her smile, when it came, looked genuine in a way that startled Cathrine more than open hostility would have. "I'm Eli. I know this isn't " she paused, seeming to choose her next words with visible care, " the easiest way to arrive somewhere. But you're safe here. I promise you that much, whatever you've heard."

"Everyone keeps telling me what I've heard," Cathrine said, before she could stop herself, "as if it isn't true."

Something flickered across Eli's face not offense, but a kind of rueful understanding. "Some of it isn't. Some of it is. I won't insult you by pretending I know which parts you mean." She glanced back toward the house, and her expression shifted, sobering slightly. "He's not seeing anyone yet today. The ceremony isn't until tomorrow evening there's a formal presentation first, you'll be briefed on it tonight. Until then, you're mine to look after, if that's all right."

It was, Cathrine thought, the first thing anyone had asked her permission for in six days. "That's all right," she said.

Eli's smile widened, just slightly, as if that had confirmed something she'd already suspected. "Good. Come inside. You look like you haven't eaten a proper meal since you crossed the second river, and I refuse to let the Blood Moon Pack's hospitality be measured by whether we starved our new Luna candidate on her first night."

*Luna candidate.* The words landed strangely, some formal weight to them that made the whole arrangement suddenly, briefly, unbearably real in a way that the carriage ride and the packing and even the black iron arch of wolves had not quite managed to.

She followed Eli up the wide stone steps and through the great doors, into a hall that smelled of woodsmoke and pine and something else beneath it, something wilder that she didn't have a name for yet, and did not let herself look back at the treeline, where the watching wolves had not moved, and would not move, for as long as it took her to disappear from their sight.

Her rooms, when Eli showed her to them, were larger and warmer than anything she'd had at home ,a private sitting room with a fire already lit, a bedroom beyond it with heavy curtains and a bed piled with furs, a washroom with hot water already drawn, as if someone had known precisely when to expect her and prepared accordingly. It should have felt like luxury. Instead it felt like a very beautiful cage, and Cathrine was too tired, finally, after six days of travel and twenty-three years of swallowing everything down, to pretend otherwise, even to herself.

"You'll want to rest," Eli said gently, setting a tray of bread and cheese and something warm and spiced on the low table by the fire. "Tomorrow will be a great deal. Tonight, just eat something, and sleep if you can."

"Can I ask you something?" Cathrine said, before Eli could leave.

Eli paused at the door, eyebrows lifting slightly. "Of course."

"The rumors." Cathrine made herself hold Eli's gaze, though it cost her something to do it. "About the brides who came before me. Is it true? What happened to them?"

For a long moment, Eli didn't answer, and Cathrine's stomach dropped, certain she was about to hear something she wasn't ready for.

"No one 'happened' to them the way the stories say," Eli said finally, careful and precise, choosing each word like she was setting stones across a river. "I won't pretend there's a simple answer, because there isn't one, and I think you'd see through it if I tried to give you one anyway. But I will tell you this much, because I think you need to hear it tonight and not in six months when you've already decided to be afraid of him forever: Killian has never hurt a bride sent to him. Not once. What happened to the others none of them wanted to be here any more than you did, and none of them were made to stay against their will. That's the truth, even if it isn't the whole story, and the rest of it isn't mine to tell you. It's his."

"Why would he tell me anything," Cathrine said quietly, "if he's the monster everyone says he is?"

Eli's expression softened into something almost sad. "Give it time before you decide what he is. That's all I'm asking. Everyone in this pack fell in love with him long before they were afraid of him, and everyone outside this pack learned it the other way around, and both of those things being true at once is —" she paused, searching for the word, " is sort of the whole tragedy of him, honestly. You'll understand what I mean eventually. Or you won't, and you'll leave, and no one here will stop you. But give it time first. That's all I'll ask."

She left then, closing the door softly behind her, and Cathrine sat alone in front of the fire in a beautiful room in a house full of wolves who did not sing, in a territory where the birds themselves had learned to hold their breath, and found, to her own surprise, that she was not thinking about escaping at all.

She was thinking about tomorrow evening. About the ceremony. About a man whose name she had learned to fear before she had ever learned to picture his face, and about the strange, quiet certainty in Eli's voice when she'd said *give it time* as if time were a kindness Eli genuinely believed Cathrine would want to have spent, once she understood what waited on the other side of it.

She ate what she could of the meal, and did not sleep for a long time, and when she finally did, she dreamed of nothing at all which was, after six days of dreading this place, its own small and unexpected mercy.