The old woman in gray at the foot of the table let her pompous voice carry the length of the hall. “Tell us, my lady. Do you think there will be war between Valdren and your homeland of Aravelle? ”
Isra set down her cup with great care because her hands had begun to shake and she could not let the hall see it.
She had been in the court of Valdren for only a matter of days. None of them knew the truth. No one suspected she was anyone but the future queen of Valdren. No one knew she was the true queen’s twin sister, an impostor wearing her sibling’s name, clothes, and title like a stolen cloak, whilst her twin had snuck away like a thief in the night.
“A few weeks,” Nadira had promised. “We have the same face. Just keep quiet. Play sick if you have to, and I’ll be back before you know it.
”
She had not told her why she had had to go. As always, Isra had obeyed her sister. Even if it meant certain death for her and outright war for the kingdoms if she were caught. She always obeyed her sister.
Until now, keeping quiet had helped deter attention. But now, hundreds of eyes in the great feasting hall of Valdren were latched to her expression, waiting like vultures for the carcass of her response. And Isra did not know how to lie. Life as a priestess had not prepared her for the ways of the court.
Why, oh why, had she agreed to swap places? They would never for one second be fooled into thinking she was her twin sister, Nadira. The silence stretched. The enormous hall rose around her in cold gray stone and gold banners, lit by a hundred candles that threw more shadow than light, and the nobles’ expressions were turning.
Why was she taking so long to respond? Tightening her hands into fists, she took a breath. Focus. Take your time.
That was what Nadira had told her to do. She met their eyes as best she could and kept her chin raised. “As long as our marriage lasts,” she answered at last, projecting her voice the way Nadira had taught her, and let a small smile touch her mouth. “I see nothing to suggest war.
”
The old woman blinked, surprised. But she inclined her head, accepting the reply, and Isra breathed again through the ache behind her ribs. She had not asked for this. Three weeks ago, though it felt like three lifetimes, she had been kneeling at the altar of the Temple of the Silver Flame, where she had lived and worshipped since she was seven years old.
Then her twin sister had arrived, stumbling in from the downpour with blood on her sleeve, and a demand that ended Isra’s small, ordered life in a single sentence. “Please, take my place. ”
Nadira had been the clever, worldly one, raised for court while their parents gave the gentler, second-born twin to the goddess. Nadira had been sent north as a bride to seal the truce between Valdren and their kingdom of Aravelle, and for a while, things had gone well.
Then something had gone deeply wrong, and Nadira had had to vanish. And the betrothed of the Alpha King of Valdren could not simply disappear. It would shatter the fragile truce, and war would swallow them both. “I can’t,” Isra had whispered, even as her sister pressed the traveling cloak into her arms.
“I’m no courtier, Nadira. I don’t know how to be you. I’ve never so much as left these walls. This is my home.
”
She had thought of her narrow bed and her morning prayers and the warm hush of the chapel at dusk. The small, safe, ordered world that was the only one she had ever wanted. And her whole soul had ached to stay inside it. Find someone else.
Please. But there had been no one else. There never was. And Nadira had taken her face in both cold hands and said, “There’s only you.
For crown, for kingdom, for family. ”
So what could Isra have said but yes? She had never once found the way to tell Nadira no. And even if Nadira would not divulge why she had to disappear, Isra accepted that she had her reasons.
It had been easy for her to say. Their faces were the same. Nothing else was. “You’re quieter than usual,” said a voice at her side, low and even.
Isra turned to the man she was learning to fear more than anyone here. Emrick of Valdren did not look like the tyrant she had expected. The Alpha King was younger than she had imagined, broad-shouldered and plainly dressed, dark gold hair cropped short. He was neither flamboyant nor frivolous, and his voice reminded her of distant thunder.
But it was his eyes that undid her. A deep cobalt blue, and the way they rested on her face was so piercing that she panicked internally. “He knows,” the panic whispered. She knew it was only her guilt speaking.
It was a ferociously intense gaze, nothing else. “The road was long,” Isra said, holding eye contact with difficulty. “And your court is not an easy room to speak in. ”
“No,” he agreed dryly.
“It isn’t. I’ve sat on this dais my whole life and it’s still as difficult as the first day. ” He paused, watching her thoughtfully. “When you came in the spring, you had an opinion on everything.
You told my treasurer his accounts were a disgrace, to his face, in front of the whole court. He hasn’t forgiven you, you know. ”
He chuckled softly. Isra felt the floor go thin beneath her.
Nadira had not briefed her on every single thing she had said. There hadn’t been time. Her whole counsel had been keep quiet. Say as little as possible.
A lot of good that did her when someone asked direct questions. “Perhaps I overstepped then,” she offered. “I’ve been thinking that a person ought to learn a place before she passes judgement on it. I came here certain of many things.
Maybe it’s time I learned to listen. ”
The last line came out more as a question, and she winced, hoping he hadn’t noticed her hesitancy. For a long moment he said nothing. The candlelight moved on his face.
She could not read him at all. “Well, that’s new,” Emrick said at last. He turned his cup slowly in his hand. “Perhaps the last few months with us have rubbed some wisdom off on you.
”
Isra inclined her head and did not trust herself to answer. She had gotten away with it this time. She shuddered to think how many more times she would have to play this game before Nadira returned. If she returned.
The lean, dark man at the king’s right hand had not touched his food. He had watched her throughout the entire exchange and was still staring. When she met his eyes, he did not look away. Lord Barther, she had been told.
The beta. The king’s shadow and his sword. He smiled at her, courteous and cold, and did not look away. Not until the lord to his right began speaking to him.
Isra chewed her lip. What had she gotten herself into? She survived the rest of the feast as she had been instructed, by speaking little and listening much. Two skills she had mastered over fifteen years at the temple.
She let the court talk over and around her, gathering every scrap they dropped about the woman she was meant to be. And when at last the king rose and the hall rose with him, and she was permitted to withdraw, she walked from the room with her chin level and her hands folded and her heart going like a struck drum. It was only when the door of her borrowed chamber closed behind her that she let herself come apart. She sank to the cold stone, her sister’s silken skirts pooling around her, and pressed both hands over her mouth until the shaking passed.
The room was full of Nadira. Her gowns, her combs, her letters locked in a box Isra had not yet dared to open. None of it was hers. None of it.
Was there anything, she thought, kneeling there in the dark, left underneath that belonged to herself at all? She closed her eyes and prayed, the way she had every night of her life, to a moon goddess who felt very far from this hard northern stone. A few weeks, she told herself. Only a few weeks and Nadira would be back.
Keep silent. Don’t be discovered. And she could go home again. A few weeks.
Little did she know that before long she would want to stay more than anything in the world. She sat in the high gallery above the tournament field in the carved seat reserved for the future Luna of Valdren and clapped when the others clapped and rose when they rose and prayed that no one would ask her to do anything. The field below was a churn of color and noise. Banners snapping in the gray wind.
Warriors in their house colors. The roar of the crowd rolling up the stands like a wave. It was magnificent. She had never been to a tournament before.
She had only heard them from afar, rearranging the ornaments in her temple. It had been nine days since she had taken Nadira’s place, and despite her fears, no one had found her out. Nadira had been right. If she kept to herself and asked questions instead of starting conversations, the lords and ladies were more than happy to talk about themselves.
She had learned which corridors were empty in the early morning. And she had learned that the truly dangerous moments were never the grand ones. It was the small things. The name of a handmaid.
The wine Nadira had favored. The way her sister laughed easy and bright where Isra’s own laugh came out careful and soft. No one had caught her though. And she thought, as the king took his seat in the royal pavilion beside her, she had managed to avoid his company, too.
Busy as he always seemed to be. Not that he was difficult to look at. She allowed herself the thought quickly. Even at rest, there was something imposing about him.
The breadth of his shoulders beneath the dark cloth. The banked stillness of a man who had never once needed to raise his voice to be obeyed. He was handsomer than the stories had let her expect. And far more contained.
A mountain of a man carved from the same cold stone as his castle. He gave her a cursory nod and signaled for the contestants to begin. Two warriors took their marks at opposite ends of the lists, splendid in burnished steel. Their surcoats brilliant against the gray afternoon.
The crowd rose to it like a tide, stamping the wooden stands until the gallery trembled. Roaring the warriors’ names, waving scarves and banners in a dizzy storm of color. Until Isra could feel the noise in her teeth. Then a horn cut across it, high and clear.
And the whole vast crowd began to quieten. A herald climbed the gallery steps and bowed before her, holding out a folded length of crimson silk on a cushion. Isra stared at it. The crowd had gone quiet.
They were waiting. For what? Every face in the gallery was turned to her. And the herald’s arm did not waver.
And the silk lay there, scarlet against the cushion. What on earth was she supposed to do? Distantly, she remembered something about ladies bestowing favors upon knights. But on whom?
There were a dozen warriors on the field. And she knew none of their names. None of their ranks. None of the months of history that would have told the real Nadira exactly whose shoulders this silk belonged on.
The silence stretched, thin and dangerous. And then she felt it, and glanced sideways to find the king watching her. A small crease between his brows, his head tilted a fraction, confused. Any highborn woman would have known what to do, and she had no way of knowing whether Nadira had done exactly this before, and she was betraying herself to the world by not being able to do the same.
A cold sweat dotted her brow. What would they do to her if they found out? To her sister? To Aravelle?
The longer she sat frozen, the deeper that quiet confusion settled into his face. He’s wondering why you don’t know. Move. Move now.
She rose, took the silk as confidently as she could, and let her eyes sweep the field as though considering. And there, nearest the gallery, a broad young warrior had just unhelmed, sweat-darkened and grinning up at her. She crossed to the rail and held the silk down to him. The grin died.
A ripple went through the stands, a low, confused murmur, the sound of hundreds of people watching their future queen do something that made no sense. The young warrior took the silk because he could not refuse it, but his face had gone red, and the men around him would not meet her eyes. Wrong man. Oh goddess, what have I done?
She did not let it show. She had spent fifteen years learning to keep her face still through long, cold prayers, and she used every hour of it now, lifting her chin, letting a small, serene smile settle on her mouth as though she had meant it all along. “He fights without house or banner,” she said, pitching her voice the way Nadira had taught her, clear enough to carry. “I am told Valdren honors strength above birth.
Even the lowest deserves their glory in the sun. ”
It was a desperate, sweating guess, but she saw a few of the older warriors nod slowly, saw the murmur shift from confusion to thoughtful. The young man straightened, the silk clutched to his chest as though it were spun from gold. Isra sat back down and did not breathe until her heart beat slowed.
“That was kind of you,” Emrick said. She turned. The king watched her with an expression she could not read, his chin resting on one fist. “It was nothing,” she managed.
“You honored a hedge warrior over my own household champions. ” A pause, then dryly, “Half this gallery will be scandalized by supper. The other half will name a son after him. ” His mouth tugged.
“The Nadira I met would have given that silk to the highest title on the field without a second glance. ”
Isra’s stomach dropped. She made herself laugh lightly. “I told you I have had time to think these past months about what I truly value.
”
“So you say. ” He studied her a moment longer, those cobalt eyes boring through her like twin lances. Then, mercifully, he looked back to the field as the next pair took their marks. Isra let out a slow breath, her heart still racing, and gave nothing away.
She had managed to fool him, but Lord Barther, three seats down, was watching her with a deadpan coldness several notches past suspicious. She looked away first. The afternoon wore on, and she thought she might survive it until Emrick leaned close again between bouts, his voice pitched for her alone. “Do you remember,” he said, “what you told me the first night we met about why you’d agreed to the betrothal?
” A faint, testing warmth in it. “I’ve thought about your reply more than once since. ”
Isra’s mind went white. She had no idea.
Nadira had never mentioned a first meeting. The silence yawned, and Emrick waited, his blue eyes on her. “I said it was my duty,” she tried. Something flickered behind his face.
The wrong answer. She saw it cost him a small, quiet disappointment, saw him file it away. “Ah,” he said. “I’d remembered it differently.
” He turned his cup. “No matter. ”
She had misstepped badly, and she knew it. And worse, far worse, Barther was rising from his seat, coming toward her along the gallery, his eyes fixed on her face.
She stood before he could reach her. “Forgive me,” she said to Emrick, pressing a hand to her brow. “The wind, the noise. I find I need air.
Might I withdraw? ”
He rose at once. “Of course. I’ll send—”
“No need.
I know the way. ”
And she was gone, down the gallery steps and into the cool dim of the castle, fast as dignity allowed, before Barther had crossed even half the distance between them. She felt his eyes on her spine the whole way down. She did not look back.
She made it to her chamber before her legs gave out. She sank against the door and pressed both hands over her mouth. Two mistakes in a single day in front of the whole court, in front of him. She, who had never told a lie in her life until nine days ago, was now lying badly, publicly, with a kingdom’s peace balanced on her clumsy tongue.
When the trembling eased, she did the only thing she had ever known to do with a fear too large to carry. She knelt on the cold stone, the way she had every night of her life, and she prayed. “Mother of the moon, give me guidance. I am so far from home.
I do not know how to be brave like my sister. Show me how much longer I must endure. ”
The room gave her no answer. Only the wind at the high window, and somewhere below, faint, the roar of the crowd.
Afterward, she rose and wrote to Nadira in the careful code her sister had taught her. “It is harder than you said. A man here watches me. How much longer must I stay?
When are you coming back? ”
She sealed it and sent it by the silent route into the dark, the way she had sent four letters before it. Nadira had answered none of them. Isra told herself it meant nothing.
The roads were long. Her sister was careful. That was all. She lay awake a long time that night, listening to the silence where a reply should have been.
And for the first time, it did not feel like patience. It felt like something had gone wrong. By the third week, Isra had learned how to be her sister. Not perfectly, not even well, but she had stopped drowning, and that was its own kind of miracle.
Somewhere in the days after the tournament, the panic had quieted into a manageable load, and she had found her footing. She no longer froze when a noble addressed her by a name that wasn’t hers. She had learned to turn questions back on the asker, to let a thoughtful silence stand in for answers. When a baroness cornered her about the spring planting and the tides, Isra spoke so smoothly of patience and good stewardship that the woman went away satisfied, and Isra returned to her rooms and realized, with a start, that her hands were not shaking.
She was holding her own. She, who days ago could not bestow a length of silk without scandalizing a kingdom, was holding her own. And she had managed to keep well clear of Lord Barther. Isra had become very good at not being where he was.
As long as she never had to stand under those cold, knowing eyes, or, goddess forbid, risk a conversation, she could almost believe she was safe. It was the garden that undid her in the end, though not in any way she might have feared. She had found it in her second week, a forgotten square of green tucked behind the east wing, walled in old stone, the gate half off its hinge. The rosemary had gone woody, and time crept between the flagstones in soft green seams, but it was alive, and Isra had stood in the gateway that first morning and felt something in her chest come loose.
Its calmness reminded her of her temple. Now she came every dawn before the castle woke. This morning the dew was still on the leaves, and the first real sun of the season warmed the stones, and she knelt among the herbs with her sleeves pushed back and her hair loosening from its pins. And for a little while she was not the future Luna of Valdren, not an impostor, not a liar with a kingdom balanced on her tongue.
She was only a woman in a garden. “The last person I saw in this garden was the head gardener,” said a voice behind her. “And he retired eight years ago. ”
Her hands went still in the soil.
She turned, and Emrick was leaning in the archway, arms crossed, watching her. And goddess forgive her. He was beautiful. She had known it distantly, the way one knows a fact, that the Alpha King was a striking man.
But she had only ever seen him armored in crown and council and cold authority. And that was easy enough to look away from. This was not. Without the trappings of kingship, there was just the man himself.
Broad of shoulder. The open collar bearing the strong line of his throat. One forearm corded where his sleeve was pushed back. The morning light caught the gold in his hair and the cobalt of his eyes and turned him into something out of the old illuminated romances she had read by candlelight in the temple and told herself she was too sensible to believe in.
Her gaze snagged on his mouth before she could stop it. Heat climbed her neck. Stop it. You are a fraud and he thinks you are your sister.
She dragged her eyes back to the dirt, suddenly painfully aware of the soil under her nails, the loose hair against her cheek, the fact that she knelt before the Alpha King of Valdren like a scullery maid. “I found rosemary,” she said. And then wished fervently that the earth would open and take her, because it was perhaps the silliest thing anyone had ever said to a king. But Emrick smiled.
It was a small thing, barely a curve of the mouth, but it changed his whole face, softened the hard carved authority of him into something startlingly, dangerously warm. “So you did,” he agreed. He pushed off the archway and came closer, looking at the wild green tangle as though seeing it for the first time. “I didn’t expect you to change this much in so short a time.
When you came in the spring, you called this a damp little kingdom full of mud. ”
A week ago, Isra would have panicked, revealing herself in the snare as it closed around her throat. But she was learning. She sat back on her heels and brushed the soil from her hands, unhurried, and let the truth do her lying for her.
“I have been thinking about roots lately,” she said. “About what holds in unfamiliar ground. A thing has to put down something, or the first hard wind takes it. ”
He went quiet.
“That sounds like someone homesick. ”
“It sounds like someone deciding what home means,” she answered with a gentle smile. For a long moment, he simply looked at her. Then, to her astonishment, he crossed the garden and sat on the worn stone bench across from her, elbows on his knees, as though he had nowhere in all his kingdom he needed to be.
“May I ask you something? ” she asked. When he inclined his head, she said, “Did you choose to be king, or did the crown choose you? ”
His jaw tightened, and for a breath she thought she had gone too far.
“My father died when I was young,” he said at last. “There was no choosing in it. I did not choose the crown. ” He looked down at his open hands.
“I chose not to let it fall. That is the only choice a man in my place is ever offered. ”
“That is not the same thing,” Isra said softly. “No.
” His blue eyes lifted to hers. “It is not. But it is what I had. ”
“I understand obligation,” she said before she could stop herself.
Emrick studied her for a long, quiet moment, and when he spoke, his voice had changed. “You are not what I expected,” he said, not as an accusation, but almost as a wonder. Isra rose to leave because she did not trust what her face was doing. He rose, too, and he was close, closer than protocol allowed, closer than was wise, and the morning air carried his scent to her.
Sandalwood and rain on hot stone, and under it a warmth that made her breath catch. And deep in her chest, in the place she had kept shut and silent for fifteen years, something stirred. A pressure against the inside of her skin. An old instinct lifting its head for the first time since she had arrived, turning toward him as a plant turns toward the sun.
Her wolf, awake and reaching. She went very still. Emrick was looking at her mouth. The moment drew out, taut and humming, the whole garden gone quiet around them, and she could not have said which of them was leaning closer, or whether either of them was at all.
Then he stepped back. The distance opened between them like a chasm. “The garden suits you, Lady Nadira,” he said. The wrong name in the right voice, gentle as a blessing.
Isra remembered her role. She dropped into a small curtsy and walked from the garden with her chin level and her hands folded, exactly as she had been taught. And the moment the gate was behind her, the moment no one could see, she pressed a hand flat to her hammering heart and let the truth catch up with her. She had been so afraid all this time of being caught, of the lie unraveling, of the war, of Barther’s cold eyes finding the seam in her story.
She understood now that being caught was no longer the worst thing that could happen to her. Her wolf stirred traitorously in her breast. There was no curtsy graceful enough, no role careful enough, no prayer in all the temple’s books that could save her from that. And worse, what if he could feel it, too?
The king was hunting boar, and Isra had not been given the choice of staying behind. It was an old Valdren custom, the first great hunt as the autumn turned, the whole court riding out at dawn to run down a boar through the cold northern woods and bring it back in triumph for the feast. A wolf kingdom honored the chase, and the future Luna of Valdren could hardly beg off the one ritual that mattered most to them. So when the summons came, she swallowed her dread, let them dress her in Nadira’s fine riding leathers, and rode out with the rest.
The fog came down at dawn. They had left the castle while the sky was still the color of ash, the whole hunting party muffled in cloaks and breath steam. Hooves striking dull on the frozen ground. The cold crept into her bones.
Worse than the cold was the fog. Thick and white, swallowing the riders ahead until they were only shapes, then suggestions, then nothing at all. Somewhere up front the houndsmen worked the dogs, their calls coming back strange and muffled. It felt, she thought, like an unnamed danger breathing down her neck, pressing close, near enough to touch.
She kept her mare well to the back of the party. Since the garden, Isra had stayed well away from the king, away from the scent that woke her hungry wolf. She could not be compromised. She let the lords surge ahead to jostle for the places of honor at his side and hung back among the grooms and the stragglers.
It helped that no one expected much of her today. Nadira had ridden like she was stitched to the saddle. Isra rode like a woman praying not to fall. So she had let it be quietly known through a blushing handmaid that it was her woman’s time.
And the men, embarrassed, had stopped pressing her to ride up front. A small, shameful little lie, but it bought her distance. And distance meant survival. A set of strong fingers gripped her arm.
“Lady Nadira. ” She nearly cried out. Lord Barther had emerged from the fog without a sound. His big gray horse pressed close alongside hers.
His gloved hand locked about her forearm, drawing their two mounts together. His face was very near. There was no one else in sight. The fog had closed around them.
“My lord,” she said, “you startled me. ”
“You have been difficult to track down for some weeks now, my lady. ” His voice was conversational. His eyes were not.
“One might think you were hiding something. ”
Steady. Her old self would have unraveled here, in the cold and the white with that hand on her arm. But she had been three weeks at this court, and somewhere in those weeks she had grown a spine of her own.
She made herself meet his eyes. “And why do you seek me out, Lord Barther? ” she said carefully. “I have served Emrick since we were boys,” he said quietly.
“I read people well, for the safety of the king. And you, my lady, are not who you were. ” His grip did not loosen. “The woman who came to us would have had my hand off her arm and a sharp word in my ear before I’d finished the sentence.
Yet you flinch now, as though someone reached in and pulled the very spine out of you. ”
“The best lies were wrapped in the ribbons of truth,” Nadira had told her. “Having a spine need not always be shown with bared teeth,” she answered evenly. “I spent a night in contemplation in Valdren’s own Temple of the Silver Flame, the same faith I keep at home, and I remembered a teaching I had let myself forget.
Humility. The grace of holding one’s tongue when in another’s house. ” She met his eyes. “You mistake a lost spine for learning my place in your king’s hall.
”
For a long moment, Barther said nothing. The fog drifted between them. “Humility,” he repeated, but his eyes had not changed. “You’ll forgive an old soldier his suspicions.
I think only of the king. ”
“As do I. ”
His eyes flicked to the corner of her mouth, to the small mole there, the one telltale difference between her and her sister. Surely he couldn’t have noticed something so small, so insignificant.
So Barther’s eyes narrowed, and he opened his mouth to press further, and a shout went up ahead, ragged through the fog, passed back rider to rider. The boar. The boar is sighted. “We are not finished, my lady.
”
And then he wheeled his horse toward the cry, the hunter waking in his face, and spurred away into the white. And the rest swept after him, men whooping, the hunt all at once in full cry and gone. The thunder rolled away ahead of her and grew faint, and the fog closed over the sound of it, and she was alone. Alone in the white, with her heart still slamming from Barther’s grip.
And then, beneath the slamming, came the relief, sudden and weak, flooding through her so hard she nearly laughed aloud into the empty fog. She had gotten away with it. Again, by sheer dumb luck. She could not keep living on luck.
Luck ran out. One of these days, the goddess would not send a boar charging out of the fog to save her. And when, oh when, was Nadira coming back for her? The question rose in her like an ache, the way it did every night now.
Four letters, no reply. Her sister had promised a few weeks, and the weeks were piling up, and Isra was out here in the fog of a foreign kingdom, barely holding a lie together, with no idea how much longer she could. The boar came out of the fog like something flung. It burst from the white, not ahead of her, but to the side, vast and black, tusked and squealing, and came crashing across her path not three lengths away.
The mare screamed and reared. Isra grabbed for the pommel, the reins, anything, and caught nothing. And then the ground was rushing up at her. The world turned over, and she struck the frozen earth hard enough to drive every breath from her body.
For a moment, there was only white. White fog, white sky, the white roar of no air in her lungs. Then hooves, close by. “Nadira.
Nadira. ”
Emrick was off his horse before it had fully stopped, on his knees in the frozen mud beside her, raw fear in his face. “Don’t move,” he said. “Are you hurt?
”
She got a hand to his sleeve and shook her head, and the relief that crossed his face undid her more than the fall had. He slid an arm beneath her shoulders and raised her gently until the air came back in a great, whooping gasp, and he took her hand in both of his to steady her. And the world caught fire. It went through her the instant his bare fingers found hers.
Heat, sudden and total, blooming from the place they touched and flooding up her arm and into her chest and her throat and the pit of her stomach. Her wolf surged up from the deep, forgotten place, so hard and so fast that her vision blurred at the edges, and she had to lock her teeth to keep from crying out. This was not the soft warmth of the garden. This was not anything so small as wanting.
This was old and deep, and it had teeth. She could feel his pulse through his hands, and she could smell him. Sandalwood and rain on hot stone, and beneath it that dark and rolling warmth, and her wolf was drowning in it, rolling in it, chanting one word against the inside of her ribs until she thought he must surely hear it. Mate.
Mate. Mine. Emrick went rigid. He felt it.
She saw it strike him exactly as it had struck her. His jaw locking hard, his nostrils flaring as he dragged in a breath through whatever had seized him by the chest. For one suspended heartbeat, his hands tightened on hers as though he could not help it. Then he let go and pulled back and put a careful arm’s length of cold air between them.
Neither of them spoke. The fog drifted. Somewhere far off, the hunt was still running. He helped her to her feet at last, not touching more than he had to.
And when he spoke, his voice was carefully, deliberately level. “Your scent is different,” he said, “than I remember. ”
Isra’s blood turned to ice. He stared at her.
“When you first came to Valdren, you smelled of amber. ” A pause. “Now you smell of temple incense and wildflowers. ” His blue eyes searched her face.
“A new perfume,” she said, too brightly, the brittle laugh catching in her throat. “From home. My mother sent it north. I’m glad it pleases you.
”
Emrick held her gaze for a long moment, and she heard everything folded inside it, clear as a bell tolling across the white. “I do not believe you. ”
That night she sat on the edge of her sister’s bed with her hands pressed flat between her knees and could not make them stop shaking. The fall had left her bruised and aching, but it was not the bruises that kept her awake.
It was the ghost of his hands on hers, a warmth that would not fade no matter how she willed it, and her wolf would not be still. It paced inside her, restless, straining toward the door and the cold corridors beyond, toward him, wanting his scent around her, his warmth against her, and a hundred things she had no words for and had never once been allowed to want. The temple had taught her that desire was a thing you noticed and set gently aside, the way you noticed a storm gathering beyond the windows and chose, sensibly, to wait it out indoors by the fire. But this was no storm she could wait out.
She knelt on the cold stone and prayed to her goddess for the strength to build a wall against it. She already knew there was no wall in all the world built high enough. After the hunt, Isra made herself small. It was the only defense she had left.
“Lord Barther, we are not finished,” followed her through every waking hour, and so she gave him nothing to find. She took her meals in her rooms and pleaded the lingering ache of her fall. She stayed hidden, out of sight, and for a few days, when no one bothered her, believed it was truly working. So when the library door opened one night and Emrick stepped through, Isra’s heart nearly stopped.
She had chosen this room precisely because it was a forgotten corner of the castle, high and cold, where she had taken to hiding after dark among the tall shelves with a single candle and a book she wasn’t truly reading. Three weeks she had guarded her solitude, and not once had anyone found her here. And yet, here he was. The Alpha King himself filling the doorway.
The candlelight catching the gold of his hair and the cobalt of his eyes. Looking, she understood with a lurch, not surprised to see her at all. He had not stumbled in by chance. He had come looking.
“You hide very well,” he said. Isra’s mouth had gone dry. “My lord, I didn’t—”
He let the heavy door fall shut behind him. “I have half a kingdom of people clamoring for my attention.
And the one person I find myself seeking plays hide-and-seek better than any six-year-old I know. ” He crossed to the small table where her candle burned and looked down at her. “You never used to be so evasive. ”
Some part of her was deathly afraid, but the larger part of her had lit like a candle the moment his shape filled that doorway.
He folded himself into the chair across from her as though he had nowhere in his whole kingdom he would rather be and poured himself a glass of wine. He offered her one, which she took wordlessly. “Perhaps I’m shy,” Isra suggested. “You weren’t before.
” A pause, but there was no edge in it tonight. “The spring version of you never once let me finish a sentence. ”
She laughed before she could stop herself and saw him go still at the sound of it. Then the smile faded from his eyes.
“Why do you hide? You’re not just avoiding Lord Barther or the public gatherings. You’re avoiding me. ”
She held his gaze and dared the smallest smile.
“Do you not also wish to escape sometimes, my lord? ”
A flicker behind the eyes. “They think I’m made of stone, my council,” he said at last, turning his cup slowly between his hands, watching the wine catch the light rather than looking at her. “When a grain ship is lost or a village on the border burns, they bring it to me and they wait.
And I decide who is fed and who is not. Which men I send north knowing some won’t come back. ” A pause. “And then they go home to their wives and they sleep.
And I sit up with the consequences. ”
Isra’s chest ached. She had come to this court braced against a tyrant, and instead she found a lonely man holding up a whole kingdom with no one to lean on. She would not have been surprised to learn she was the first person he had ever dared say it to.
And goddess forgive her. She gave him something back. “At the temple,” she heard herself say, “the bells ring six times a day. You learn to feel the hours in your body.
There’s a peace in it. Knowing exactly what each moment asks of you. ” She turned the unread book in her hands. “I loved it.
It was the only home I ever knew, and I was happy there. I never once wished to be anywhere else. ” The words kept coming, warm and unguarded in the candlelight, because for once someone was listening and she had been so long unheard. “When they brought me here, I thought only of going back.
I counted the days until I could kneel to those hours again. ”
“Since you were a child. ” Something in his voice stopped her cold. He had gone still across the candle.
His head tilted a fraction. That quiet attention sharpening to a point on her face. “You speak of that place,” he said slowly, “as though it raised you. As though you knelt there as a girl and a woman grown.
” A pause. “But you didn’t, did you, Nadira? ”
Isra kept deathly silent. “You were a daughter of the Aravelle court,” he went on.
“You told me so yourself. You said your mother kept you at her shoulder through every banquet and every treaty since before you could walk. You laughed about the holy orders, called the temple women dull little candle keepers moldering behind their walls. You said you couldn’t conceive of a duller way to waste a life.
”
The silence rang. He has it. He’s holding the two halves of you up to the light and they will not match. Say something, anything.
Now. She made herself breathe. She made herself reach, the way Nadira had taught her, for the thread of truth that could carry the lie. “You’re right that I have changed,” she said, distantly amazed her voice came out level.
“Though perhaps not in the way you imagine. ” She let a rueful curve touch her mouth, borrowed from a sister who would have managed it more smoothly. “When first I came to Valdren, I confess I was playing a part. I thought a king’s bride ought to be bold and quick and clever, that I had to fill every silence and win every room or be thought dull and unworthy of him.
” She lowered her eyes. “It was exhausting, my lord, and it was not me. The woman you see now, the quiet one, this is who I have always been underneath all that noise. I simply grew too tired to keep pretending otherwise.
”
For a long moment, Emrick said nothing, and she could not tell whether he believed her or had only decided, again, to let her go. The candle hissed low between them. Then the sharpness eased from his face, folding away behind his eyes the way it always did, and the danger drew back like a tide. He rose, came around the small table, the candle throwing his shadow long across the shelves.
He reached out and touched her face, just the backs of his fingers along the line of her cheek, as though she were something he could not quite believe was real. His scent wrapped around her, warm and dark and aching, possessive in a way that made her wolf rise up singing, and the bond pulled so hard and so suddenly that it was nearly pain, a physical hurt low in her chest, the want of him a thing with claws. “You’re not what I expected,” he said, low, almost wondering. And with the bond full and furious between them, the whole truth surged up into her throat.
“I’m not Nadira. My name is Isra. I’m her sister. I was sent here to deceive you, and I have fallen in love with you, and I don’t know how to stop.
And there is something coming for your kingdom that I cannot tell you about. ”
It was all there, every word of it, pressing at the back of her teeth, desperate to be free. His fingers were warm against her cheek. His eyes were on hers.
For one swaying, weightless moment, she stood at the very edge of it, ready to set the whole terrible weight down at his feet and let the pieces fall where they would. And then she thought of Nadira bleeding in the temple doorway, of the war, of a kingdom burning, of everything that hung on her silence. And she closed her mouth and said nothing. The moment passed.
Emrick let his hand fall slowly. He inclined his head, bid her good night, and took his leave. And she watched him go, her wolf howling after him to come back, while outwardly she sat stoic and still, teeth clamped tight against the truth. She had been content once.
All her life she had wanted for nothing because she had not known there was anything to want. She had not wanted more, not ever, until here, until this, until him. The message came on the darkest night of the moon. Isra’s heart leapt the moment she broke the seal.
After weeks of silence, here at last was Nadira’s careful code, and her whole body flooded with relief before she had read a word. Alive. She’s alive. It’s nearly over.
I can go home. She read at once, fast, hungry. The mission was almost complete. She must be ready to leave at a moment’s notice, no farewell, no trace, the instant the word came.
Isra pressed the page to her chest and almost wept with relief. Then she read it again, slower, and reached the line that turned the relief to ice. Confirm the guard rotations on the Eastern Pass. The numbers, the watch hours.
The council needs them within the fortnight. She sat very still. The numbers, the watch hours, the Eastern Pass. There was only one use in all the world for such knowledge, and it was not the keeping of peace.
Isra understood it all at once. Nadira had not come to Valdren to hold a truce. She had come to map it, to learn the soft places in its wall, and carry them home to Aravelle’s war council, so that when the blow fell, it would fall exactly where the kingdom could not bear it. The betrothal had never been a bridge between two peoples.
It had been a door, propped open just wide enough, just long enough, and Isra was the one who had been holding it. The bond sat in her chest like a second heartbeat, undeniable now, and at the far end of it was a king her own blood was working to destroy. She could not warn him. To warn him was to confess everything, and the confession would not only end her, it would shatter the truce in the same breath and hand Aravelle the very excuse for the war Nadira swore she was crossing all this danger to prevent.
And she could not stay silent. That was to let him be cut down blind by a knife she herself had helped to sharpen. She was still sitting there, the page open on the table before her, when the knock came at the door. “Nadira.
” His voice, low through the wood. He said the name, the wrong name, as though it were the most precious word he knew, and the sound of it went through her like a blade. She should have hidden the page. She should have schooled her face into something a person could look at.
She did neither. She was too undone, too hollowed out by what she had just learned, and her hands would not obey her. Emrick stood in the dim corridor. Whatever he had come to say died on his lips the moment he saw her face.
“You’ve been crying,” he said. She had not known that she had. She lifted a hand to her cheek and found it wet. “What’s happened?
” The door shut behind him, and his hands came up to frame her face, tilting it gently to the candlelight. His thumbs brushed the tears away. His brow was furrowed with a concern so plain, so undefended, that it broke something in her. “Tell me.
Whatever it is, who has hurt you? ”
“A letter from home,” she managed. “Sad news? ”
“It’s nothing, my lord, truly.
It is not—”
“Not nothing,” he said quietly, and did not let go of her face. “You have spent these weeks teaching me how little you let anyone see. And now I find you like this, and you tell me it’s nothing. ” His blue eyes moved over her, searching, but there was no suspicion in them now.
Only a tenderness so total it was almost unbearable to stand inside. “Let me help you. Whatever it is, let me carry some of it. ”
And that was the cruelest thing he could have said.
Because the part he was offering to carry was the very knife aimed at his own back. Because he was standing here, the loneliest man she had ever known, opening his guarded heart to her at the precise moment she had learned she was the instrument of his ruin. Because he did not know and could not know and was looking at her with all that warmth while behind her on the table the page that would damn them both lay open in her sister’s careful hand, not three feet from him. And he never once looked at it because he could not look at anything but her.
The bond pulled between them, hard and aching, the second heartbeat in her chest reaching for the first. “Emrick,” she whispered. It was the first time she had ever used his name without a title, and she saw it land in him. Saw something in his face open at the sound of it.
She did not decide to do what she did next. There was no deciding left in her. She was too tired, too frightened, too full of a love she had nowhere to put down, and the distance between them was already nothing. His hands already on her face, his scent already wrapped around her, warm and dark and aching.
She rose onto her toes and she kissed him. He made a low sound against her lips, of surprise and surrender both. And then his arms came around her and drew her in, and he kissed her the way she imagined he did everything he had ever truly wanted and never let himself take—completely, without reservation, as though the world could fall. For one drowning moment she let it be the only true thing in all the world.
She let herself stop being a spy and a liar and a stolen name, let herself be only a woman in the arms of the man she loved, his heart beating against hers, the bond singing where they touched. She poured fifteen years of silence and three weeks of terror and a lifetime of unspent wanting into that single kiss, and for the length of it, she was at last entirely and only herself. And she hated herself for every second of it. Because she knew what he did not.
She was kissing him goodbye. The warmth he gave her so freely was given to a woman who did not exist. And behind her on the table lay the proof of it, written in her sister’s hand. And the kiss they shared now, the truest thing she had ever felt, was built upon a lie so deep that when it broke it would take everything with it.
He did not know. She did. And she kissed him anyway. And hated herself.
And could not stop. By the time he carried her to the bed, their bond a roaring furnace, she no longer had the presence of mind to remember why. Isra should have been happy. In the days since that night, she lived in a state of semi-bliss.
Their bond had settled and sealed, snapped fully and permanently into place, so that she could feel the warm distant pulse of him at every hour. In council, at supper. Asleep across the castle in his own cold rooms. Her mate.
Hers. Completely. In the way the old books swore could never be undone. She woke each morning to the quiet miracle of it and lay still a moment, just feeling him there at the other end of her own heart.
And then she remembered the page hidden in her sister’s letterbox. And the war it carried. And the word that might come any day to tear her from this place forever. And the miracle turned to ash in her mouth.
She was living two lives now. Both of them lies. And she did not know how much longer either could hold. And yet bliss, like all good things, had to come to an end.
That afternoon, Isra was crossing the great hall at Emrick’s side, her hand light on his arm, when the herald’s staff struck the floor and a voice rang out, announcing a royal envoy newly arrived from Aravelle. Admitted under the one credential no guard in Valdren could refuse—the seal of a sovereign kingdom come to observe the betrothal that bound the truce. Isra turned toward the doors with the rest of the court and watched her own face walk into the room. Nadira came up the length of the hall in traveling silks, her chin high, her eyes hard and bright and moving.
The same eyes, the same dark hair, the same amber gaze. The two of them stood in the same room before the same crowd, two women with one face, and the whole court drew breath in a single ragged gasp that seemed to take all the air with it. Isra did not look at the court. She did not look at her sister.
She looked at Emrick and felt her whole world stop. Because this was it. The moment she had dreaded since the night she first put on her sister’s name. The moment she had prayed against and known would come for her in the end.
Everything she had built here was about to fall, and she could only stand and watch. The bond, sealed and singing in her chest, reached for him across the cold flagstones as though it understood that everything was ending. This wonderful bond built on a lie. She watched him understand.
She would remember it all her life. The way that shrewd mind took every piece and assembled them in the space of three heartbeats. The scent that had never been a perfume. Her slip with the temple.
The woman who knew the history of his kingdom and nothing of her own life. Lord Barther, standing beside the king, whispered something into his ear, and Emrick’s gaze flicked to the corner of her mouth, to the small dark mole there, and then to her sister’s bare, unmarked face, and the final piece fell into place. His face was terrifying to behold. “Clear the hall,” he said.
He did not raise his voice, but the words dropped into the silence like stones into a well, and the court emptied in a frightened rush, lords and ladies and guards alike, until the great doors boomed shut and there were only the three of them left beneath the long row of dead kings’ banners. The king and the bride and the bride. “Who are you? ” he asked them.
And his voice was a terrible thing. “My name is Isra,” she said, knowing it was hers to do. “I am Nadira’s twin sister, raised in the Temple of the Silver Flame, sent here in her place the night she came to me and swore the truce would break if the betrothed of Valdren vanished. Everything you were told about me was a lie.
” She drew a breath that cost her the whole of her courage. “We did not come to keep your peace, Emrick. We came for Aravelle’s war council. ”
The silence after was a living thing.
Emrick was very still, and then she saw it. His hand rose to his own chest, to the place where the bond sat, and pressed there as though to test whether the thing he felt was real. “Was any of it real? ” he said at last.
His voice was terribly quiet. “It was the only real thing in the whole of it,” Isra said, her voice cracking, her hand at her heart where she too could feel their writhing bond. “I never once lied about who I am. ”
“Only about what I am called.
”
“The woman you came to know is the only woman I have ever been allowed to be. She is real. ”
Nadira glanced at her sister, confused. Something flickered in Emrick’s face and then hardened, because feeling that she meant it did not undo what she had done.
Nadira moved then. “Your quarrel is with me,” she said, stepping forward, her hard face uncertain for the first time Isra had ever seen. “I am the one who—”
“No. ” The single word stopped her sister where she stood.
Isra did not even turn to her. For the first time in the whole of her life, she did not let Nadira step in front of her. “This is my battle,” Isra said. Emrick looked between them.
The woman who had used him and the woman who had loved him. The same face turned two ways in the cold light. And when he spoke, his anger was cold and frightening. “Get out of my sight,” he said.
“Both of you. Now. ”
And because there was nothing in all the world she could say that would not make it worse, Isra obeyed. She turned, and with her sister just behind her, walked the long length of the emptied hall toward the doors.
And with every step, the bond stretched and pulled and burned in her chest, screaming at her to turn back, to go to him, to undo what could not be undone. They were a half day’s ride from Valdren when Isra reined in her horse and stopped. The road south ran pale and empty through the cold hills, the castle long out of sight behind them, Aravelle and safety somewhere ahead. Emrick had let them go without consequence, and for hours they had ridden in silence, putting the kingdom and the wreckage behind them, mile after mile.
And with every mile, the bond in Isra’s chest had pulled tighter and burned. “We’ll stop at the river crossing tonight,” Nadira was saying ahead of her. “We’re past the worst of it now. Another two days and we’re home, and you need never think of this place again.
”
“I’m not going home. ”
Nadira drew up and turned in her saddle. “What? ”
“I’m not going home.
” Isra heard the words come out whole and steady, and the steadiness was the strangest part, because her heart was breaking even as she spoke. “I’m going back. ”
“Back? ” Nadira laughed, disbelieving.
“Back to Valdren? To the man who stood in his own hall and threw you out like waste? Isra, he would put you under guard. He might do far worse.
There is nothing left for you there. ”
Isra swung down from her horse, crossed to where her sister’s pack hung, and without the smallest hesitation drew out the packet inside. The folded weight of everything Nadira had gathered across all these months. The rotations, the watch hours, the soft and secret places in Valdren’s wall.
“Isra. ” Nadira’s voice changed. “That is not yours to take. That belongs to Aravelle.
”
“It’s a map for killing the man I’ve bonded to. ” Isra held it against her chest. “I will not carry it home. And I will not let you.
”
“Then you’ve doomed us both. Without it, the council has nothing, and Aravelle goes to war blind and unready. You’ll have started the very thing you’re trying to stop. ”
“No.
” Isra shook her head slowly. “There’s another way, Nadira. A peaceful one. We were only ever taught to break the door in.
Nobody ever taught us to look for the one that opens if you knock. ” She tightened her hold on the package. “I’m going to find it. I have to believe it’s there.
”
For a moment, the two of them stood on the empty road, the same face turned two ways, and Isra met her sister’s eyes and did not look away first. Not this time. “You love me,” she said, quieter now. “I have never once doubted that.
But you have spent your whole life deciding what I must do. ” Her throat tightened. “I am asking you now, for the first time in my life, let me go back and make my own ruin. Give me time.
Give me patience. There need not be war. He will listen to me. ”
Something moved in Nadira’s face.
Something that, in a harder woman, might have been the beginning of shame. For a long moment, Isra was certain she would argue, would seize the reins, order her back onto the road south, the way she had ordered her into Valdren in the first place. But she didn’t. “All these years,” Nadira said at last, very quiet.
“I never once saw what I was asking of you. ” She looked at the packet held against her sister’s chest. Her whole mission, months of it, about to be laid at the feet of the enemy, and did not reach for it. “If you can find another way, go then.
”
It was the closest to surrender the world had ever seen from her. She brought her horse alongside Isra’s one last time, reached down, and took her sister’s face in both hands the way she had that first rain-soaked night in the temple doorway, and pressed her forehead to hers, and held it there a moment, the two of them breathing the same cold air. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” Nadira whispered. And then she straightened, turned her horse south, and rode for home and the war council that would not thank her for coming back with empty hands and a missing sister.
Isra watched her until the fog took her. It was the first time in her life she had ever watched Nadira leave, instead of the other way around. Then she turned her own horse north, back toward Valdren, toward the man who had thrown her out. She went to him that night.
Not as Nadira, not as a temple devotee with her eyes lowered and her hands folded, not as anyone’s instrument or anyone’s shield. She went as Isra. She asked to be admitted to the king’s private study and waited a long cold while in the corridor before the answer came. Emrick stood at the window with his back to the door.
He did not turn when she entered. “I’ve brought you everything she gathered,” Isra said. She crossed to his desk and laid the packet down upon it. “Every weakness she found in your defenses, and everything I know of Aravelle’s intent.
It’s yours. Whatever you decide to do with me, your kingdom should not pay for my sister’s mission or for my silence. ”
That turned him. He looked at the packet and then at her, and his face was still shut.
But his eyes had changed. “You understand what handing me this makes you,” he said, “to your own people. ”
“A traitor. Yes.
” She had thought it through on the long ride back. “Unless I broker peace between our kingdoms. No war need exist between us so long as we are willing to talk. ”
“Why would you do that?
” he asked quietly. “Because I love you,” she replied, equally husky. “And the love was never the lie. On that we can build the foundations of friendship between Valdren and Aravelle.
”
For a long moment he said nothing. Then she felt him reach along the bond that ran between them. Testing it. Reading her down its length the way only a mate could.
The way that could not be deceived. She let him. She had nothing left to hide, and it was the strangest relief she had ever known, to be searched through and through and have nothing underneath but the truth. “You’re not lying,” he said at last.
Low. “No,” she agreed. He turned fully toward her then, and the grief in his face was its own terrible kind of honesty. “But the bond doesn’t absolve you, Isra.
” It was the first time he had ever said her real name, and even cold, even like this, it went through her like light through water. “It only tells me that the woman who deceived me is also the woman I—” He stopped. His jaw set. “It makes it worse, not better.
Do you understand that? ”
“Yes,” she said. “I do. ”
And because she did understand, because she would not stand there and ask a wounded man to pretend to forgiveness he did not feel, she gave him the only thing she had left to offer.
Her absence. “I am not asking to stay at your side,” she said. “I know what I have broken, and I know it cannot be mended with a single night’s truth. The betrothal was a lie from its first day.
I was never your bride, whatever your court believes, and I will not pretend a claim I never had. ” She drew a breath. “But I would ask one thing of you. And then I will trouble you for nothing more.
There is a temple here, within your walls, to the goddess I was raised to serve. If you want me gone from your kingdom, say the word and I will go tonight and you’ll never see my face again. But if you would let me stay—not in your court, not near you, only there, among the candles where I belong—then I will wait for as long as it takes. For nothing at all, if that is what you decide.
I would rather pray within reach of you and be forgotten than be comfortable a hundred miles away. ”
For a long moment, Emrick said nothing. “So be it,” he said at last. “Thank you,” she said quietly, and bowed her head and left him there at the cold window with the map of his salvation on the desk between them.
At the door, she paused and looked over her shoulder. “I will wait,” she said, “as long as it takes. ”
Emrick did not answer. He only looked at her a moment longer, then turned back to the window.
But she had told the truth, and he had let her stay. And for a woman who had spent so long being someone else, having her true self known was a victory in itself. So as she retired to the temple within Valdren, she carried only the flame of hope with her. There had been another way, after all.
Isra had staked everything on it, guided only by her own stubborn faith, honed by long hours at the altar, and her sister’s whole mission held against her chest. She had not gone back to Valdren to betray Aravelle. She had gone to offer an olive branch, proof that what one kingdom had taken in the dark, the other could choose to hand back in the light. Emrick did not march on Aravelle with the advantage she had handed him.
He sent envoys instead. And the war council, finding their enemy extending an open hand rather than a blade, did the one thing neither kingdom had truly dared to try in a generation. They came to the table. The alliance held.
It was rebuilt slower this time, and harder, and far more honest, with both kingdoms’ grievances laid bare upon it. And the peace that grew from it, the one Isra had promised her sister was there, proved sturdier by far than any had dared hope. But the peace between two kingdoms was the easier thing to mend. The peace between Isra and the man she had deceived was not.
And there was the other matter. The betrothal had been a lie from its first day. She had never been his bride. The vows that bound their two houses had been sworn with her sister, which had been a lie in itself.
By every law of court and temple alike, there was nothing between them. So Isra waited in the Temple of the Silver Flame that stood within Valdren’s walls and took up the old life again. The bells six times a day, the healing work, the long quiet hours at the altar she had missed more than she had let herself know. She did not write to him.
She only stayed and prayed and waited and tried to make her peace with the ache of the bond that would not fade no matter how far from him she knelt. Nadira wrote to her. Her letters came by the same silent route that had once carried Isra’s unanswered pleas the other way. And this time it was Isra who was slow to give the answer her sister wanted.
“Come home,” Nadira urged in every letter, in a dozen different ways. “There is nothing binding you to that kingdom now. Come home and be among people who love you, and let that man and his grudge keep each other warm. ”
And every time, Isra wrote back the same gentle refusal.
“I am happy here. ”
She was not happy. Not as she had once been happy in her temple back home. But she was certain she was exactly where she was meant to be.
She loved Emrick. To wait for him, even if he never forgave her, even if she grew old at this altar with nothing but the bond and her prayers for company, was a thing she had chosen freely. She would not trade her true meaning for a hollow comfort. Over time, Nadira’s letters softened.
“I never understood you,” she wrote once. “All those years I thought you were the one who needed protecting. I see now you were the brave one all along. ”
And after that, her letters were only love and news of home and the acceptance of a sister who had finally learned to let her sibling be.
The weeks went by. The first frost came. And then, one gray afternoon, the temple door opened and the Alpha King of Valdren entered. He did not say much that first time.
He sat at the back while she tended the sick, watched her work, and left without a word. The next time, he stayed a little longer. The time after that, longer still. He began to speak to her.
A question about a remedy, a word about the harvest. He came in the cold dusks and sat among the candles, and she let him and asked him for nothing, and slowly, so slowly that neither of them could have named the day it began, he began to thaw. And then, one evening when the first crocuses of spring were blooming, he asked her to run with him. She stared at him for a long moment, standing there golden and beautiful in the doorway as he had been in the garden all those months ago.
“Are you sure, my lord? ” she asked quietly. In answer, he held out one large hand, and when she took it, touching him for the first time in months, she felt their bond slide into place within her heart, mending a long gaping wound in a single connection. They went out past the walls at moonrise into the black forest, and there Isra shifted for the first time in years.
Her wolf came slowly, uncertain, a small, pale, silver thing, and she nearly turned back from the smallness of it, standing there beside him. For Emrick’s wolf was vast and dark gold and magnificent, and he waited in the moonlight with an animal’s patience while she found her unsteady feet. He did not rush her. He pressed his great muzzle very gently to hers and waited until she was ready.
Then they ran. They ran the moonlit forest together, the great gold wolf and the small silver one, over the leaping streams and through the silver birches. The cold, clean air pouring past her and the bond singing warm and whole in her chest, and somewhere in the running her wolf stopped feeling small. She had spent her whole life being told what she was.
The spare, the second twin, the quiet one, the forgotten one. But out there with the moon on her gray fur and her mate’s heart beating at the far end of the bond, she was at last herself. Afterward, as humans again, they sat in the walled garden where they had first spoken true. Emrick took her hand and held it a long while before he spoke.
He lifted his other hand to the corner of her mouth where the small dark mole sat that had given her away, and touched it gently. The mark that told her from her sister, the one true thing that had always only been hers. “Isra,” he said. Her name.
Her own real name. She looked up at him, her eyes wet, and could not have spoken if her life had hung on it. “This,” said the Alpha King of Valdren, “is the woman I chose. ”
And then he kissed her.
It was nothing like the kiss in her chamber that night, that desperate, drowning thing, half goodbye and half grief. This one was slow and sure and unafraid. He drew her in by the hand he still held, his thumb resting against the mole at the corner of her mouth as though to mark the place, and kissed her the way a man kisses the woman he has decided, against all his wounds, to keep. The bond drew tight and bright and singing where their mouths met.
When they finally parted, she was breathless, her forehead against his, and she felt him smile against her skin. “Say it again,” she whispered. “Isra,” he murmured, low, like a vow. “Isra.
”
And the bond between them settled, fully and finally, like something heavy and long carried and set down at last in its right place. And Isra, who had been given away at seven and surrendered her name and worn her sister’s face and lived for everyone’s peace but her own, was, for the first time in the whole of her life, exactly and entirely herself.
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