Chapter 1 Senna

By dawn, the Council would give Senna Vaelkarn one choice. Marry the man who killed her brother, or watch her father hang for treason.

She didn't know it yet. She was busy breaking her hand on his face.

The face was carved into a training dummy. The hand was real.

Fists only. Never claws, never the wolf, not on this day. The wolf wanted his throat, not his likeness, and Senna did not trust herself to give it either.

It was the fifth of Ashfall. Five years to the day since Varek Rhoswyn killed Emeric, and she had marked every one of them the same way. She drove her fist into the seam where a jaw would be. The wood didn't crack. It never cracked. Her knuckles split at the second joint, right on schedule, as if her body had learned the anniversary better than her calendar had.

Sweat ran down her spine. Her hair, pale gold and wavy and stubborn, was braided so tight it ached and pinned flat so no one could grab a fistful of it in a fight. Loose strands stuck damp to her neck. Under her skin the wolf paced, grey and restless, scenting the air for a man three mountain passes away.

Somewhere under that wood grain, five years ago, her brother had been laughing at something stupid she'd said. Thirty minutes later, the Rhoswyn raiders came over the eastern ridge.

She hit the dummy again, harder, before the memory could get any further.

Pine smoke and worry reached her before his voice did. She would have known the wolf in Dain anywhere.

"You're going to break your hand again." Dain leaned in the doorway of the training yard, arms crossed.

"Good."

"The Council sent a letter. Black wax, the mountain sigil." His voice dropped, the way it did when he meant something instead of needling her. "Your father read it twice. Then he cleared the hall."

That stopped her fist an inch from the wood.

Nobody wasted the Council's black seal on a routine letter. Nobody cleared a hall for good news.

"Sen." Dain pushed off the doorframe. "Whatever it is, I'm coming with you."

"You don't even know what it is."

"A black seal and a cleared hall. It's bad, and it's Rhoswyn. It's always Rhoswyn." His mouth twitched. "Somebody has to stop you killing him in front of witnesses."

She tore off her wraps and went.

Her father stood alone at the head of the hall with the letter open on the table in front of him. He didn't touch it. That told her more than the letter could have.

"Sit," he said.

"I'll stand."

"Senna."

She sat. The hall smelled of cold ash and her father's fear.

Lord Kester Vaelkarn was not a man who paced. He was pacing now, three steps to the window and three steps back, boots scraping a line into stone his own father had worn thin. Twice his eyes went to the letter and slid away again, a half second too fast.

She noticed. She filed it. She had no idea yet what to file it under.

"The Council has charged me with treason," he said.

The words went through her like cold iron. Her claws came out before she told them to. They bit into the edge of the table and drew four pale lines through three hundred years of wax. The wolf under her ribs went still, the way it did before a kill.

"Sheathe them," her father said quietly. He did not look at the gouges.

She did. It took two tries.

"Treason against the Council's peace. They say blood has been spilled over the border these five years, Rhoswyn blood, and they say the hand behind it was mine."

"Was it?"

"No."

He met her eyes when he said it. She believed him. She believed him almost all the way.

"There is one way they will set the charge aside." His voice thinned. "A binding. House Vaelkarn joined to House Rhoswyn, by marriage. You leave for Cairnhold at dawn. They are sending their heir as well."

Her chest went cold. She had built her entire life around never standing in the same room as Varek Rhoswyn again.

"You want me to marry him."

"I am asking. I will not order it."

"Not after what he did to Emeric." Her voice shook. She stood so fast the chair scraped back and nearly went over. "How can you ask me that?"

"Because I buried your brother." His voice cracked on it, barely, but enough that she heard the man underneath the Lord. "And if you refuse, I hang at the next Ashfall, and the Council sends soldiers to finish what the rope starts. It won't stop at one funeral."

He crossed the hall and took both her hands, the way he used to when she was small enough to let him. His grip was steadier than his voice.

"Go to Cairnhold. Survive whatever they've planned. That's all I'm asking."

She looked down at her knuckles, raw and swelling. Five years of grief with nowhere left to put it.

Then she looked at her father's face, grey and aged ten years in a morning, and she said the only word that would keep him alive. The wolf in her howled against it, one long grief-torn note that nobody else could hear.

"Yes."