Chapter 3 Senna

It felt like a fist around her heart.

Senna had been walking away from the carriage with her bag in one hand and her pride in the other when it hit her. A hook, low and sudden, sinking into muscle she hadn't known she had. Her wolf, silent for five years under the weight of grief, surged against her ribs so hard it hurt to breathe. Her eyes flashed gold. She felt the change behind them like a lamp being lit.

She turned her head and found him.

Varek Rhoswyn had grown into his shoulders since the last time she'd seen him, five years and a war ago. He was taller now, harder around the jaw, in the deep green of his House instead of the raiding leathers she remembered from her worst nightmares. His hair had gone near black from the sun-streaked brown she remembered, wavy and worn long enough to curl at his collar. His eyes, when they finally found hers across the snow, were gold, a clear unsettling amber like a wolf's, as if the wolf in him bled straight through to the surface.

Her chest had recognized him before her mind caught up. And some low, furious part of her noticed the width of his shoulders and the clean line of his jaw, an ugly, traitorous heat pooling beneath her ribs that had nothing to do with fate and everything to do with a body that hadn't gotten the message about who he was.

She hated it more than she had ever hated anything, including him.

Twenty minutes later they were in the council chamber.

Banners lined the approach, one for every House that still answered to Cairnhold. She found House Vaelkarn's crest without meaning to, an ash tree over a grey wolf's head, hanging two positions down from a deep green banner she made herself not look at.

High Speaker Ossian stood at the head of a round table carved from a single slab of black stone, flanked by six Council elders whose names she didn't bother learning. Six wolves, and she could smell every one of them: old fur, old power, old patience. The strongest scent in the room belonged to none of them. It was woodsmoke and steel, from across the table. The chamber had no windows. Her father had come as far as the outer gate and no further. The Council allowed no one in this room who wasn't bound by whatever came out of it.

Varek stood across the table. A Council guard stepped to Senna's elbow to steer her toward a chair.

The growl cracked across the chamber before she had finished flinching.

"Hands off her."

Every head turned. The guard froze with his fingers an inch from her sleeve. Varek's claws were out, his eyes burning like struck brass, and he looked as stunned by the sound as the rest of the room.

Mine, said the wolf under Senna's ribs, in perfect agreement.

She wanted to hit him. She wanted to hit herself harder. She stepped away from the guard on her own terms, and neither of them sat.

"No," he said, low, to no one and everyone. "Not her."

The growl still hung in the air. The wolf in her answered it before she could stop it, and she felt her lips draw back off her teeth.

Senna's hands curled into fists on the black stone. "You know exactly what this is. Don't pretend you don't."

Speaker Ossian's mouth thinned. "I take it the bond has made itself known."

She looked around the table at six faces that had clearly decided this before either of them walked in. She understood, with a cold clarity that had nothing to do with the thing clawing under her ribs, that neither she nor Varek had been asked anything at all.

"The bond." Her stomach turned over. She'd heard the stories, the way a scent or a look could catch a wolf and never let go, the way it was supposed to feel like coming home. Not like this. Like betrayal wearing recognition's face. "You knew. Before we ever walked in here."

"We suspected," Ossian said. "Fated pairs are rare between Houses at war. Rarer still that the Council gets to use one." He didn't sound sorry. "It solves several problems at once."

"It doesn't solve anything." Varek's voice cut across the chamber. "You can't legislate a bond into a wedding and call it peace."

"We're not asking you to love each other, Lord Rhoswyn. We're asking you to marry. To let both Houses see it done, and to let the humans go on believing whatever quiet story keeps them from looking too closely at us for one more generation." Ossian folded his hands. "The bond will make that easier than it would otherwise be."

Under the table her whole body was leaning toward Varek as if gravity had quietly rewritten itself in the last half hour. His eyes hadn't left hers. Hers hadn't left his.

"I'd rather burn," she said, to the room, to the Council, to the thing in her that wanted nothing more than to close the distance, "than let that decide anything for me."

Something unreadable moved behind Varek's eyes.

"Careful what you promise a wolf," he said quietly. "We tend to remember."

"The Houses have already agreed," said Ossian.

The room went very still.

"Agreed to what?" Senna said.

"The binding." Ossian slid a single page across the black stone. It stopped in front of her. "Signed by both Lords. Witnessed. Filed with this Council. The charge of treason against Lord Kester Vaelkarn is held in abeyance upon its fulfilment."

She looked down.

Two signatures sat at the bottom, one in a blunt cramped hand she would have known in the dark, the other a slanted scrawl that could only belong to Dravin Rhoswyn. Beneath the ink, a date.

Twenty-three days ago.

Her father's name. Her father's seal. Her father's handwriting, steady and unhurried, as if he had signed it over breakfast.

Twenty-three days. Yesterday in the war hall he had stood with the Council's letter lying untouched on the table, and let her believe it was news. He had said I am asking. He had said I will not order it. He had let her think she was choosing to save him.

Senna read the date a third time. It did not change.

Her claws had sunk into the black stone. She had not felt them come. Somewhere under her ribs, very quietly, the wolf began to howl.

There had never been a choice. He had sold her three weeks ago, and then he had asked her to say yes.