Chapter 5: The King’s Domain

Liora

I woke up in a bed.

That sounds like the smallest, most unremarkable thing. But after three years of a husband who monitored my pillow count and two weeks on a clinic cot with straps on my wrists, the weight of a real mattress beneath me — thick and warm and clean — felt so foreign it triggered a spike of pure, animal panic before my brain caught up to my body.

‘You are not in the clinic. You are not in the packhouse.’ I went perfectly still and took stock.

Stone ceiling, arched and ancient, twice the height of any room I'd ever slept in. A fireplace the size of a small doorway burned amber and gold in the far wall. The room smelled of old cedar and mountain cold.

My abdomen screamed when I tried to sit up. I bit down on my lip and pushed through it, getting one elbow under me, then the other, until I was upright against the carved headboard, panting.

Then I looked right.

He was there.

My son was tucked in a cradle beside my bed — a proper cradle, dark polished wood with carved wolf-heads on the posts — wrapped in a clean, cream-colored blanket. His small face was relaxed in sleep. His tiny chest rose and fell in perfect, even rhythm.

Something in me crumpled entirely before I could stop it. I pressed the back of my wrist against my mouth and breathed through it until the wave passed.

"He fed an hour ago," said a voice.

I twisted toward the sound — immediately regretted it, fire screaming across my stitches. On the other side of my bed, in a high-backed chair near the fire, sat an older woman. Steel-grey hair braided severely back from a wide, weathered face. The calm, unhurried energy of someone who had seen everything there was to see and been impressed by very little of it.

"Who are you?" I asked.

"Maren. Head healer of this fortress." She rose and came toward me with a small clay bowl. "I need to check your wound."

"Not yet." I pulled the blanket higher over my stomach. "Tell me where I am first. Tell me how long I've been unconscious. Tell me who else has been in this room and what they did while I was asleep."

Maren stopped. Something that was almost, almost approval moved through her weathered face. "You have been unconscious for two days. No one has entered this room except me, the wet nurse who fed the infant, and the King."

"The King came in here."

"Once. He stood by the cradle for approximately four minutes, then left." She paused. "I was present the entire time."

I absorbed that carefully. "He didn't touch my son?"

"He stood by the cradle. He did not touch the child."

I exhaled slowly. "All right. Check the wound."

While Maren worked with precise efficiency, I studied the room again. One door — heavy, iron-banded oak. One window — arched, narrow, leaded glass. Frost on the outside. A forty-foot drop to a stone courtyard below. Guard rotation visible if I craned my neck.

‘The window is out. The door is guarded. One woman I might get past if I weren't split open like a gutted fish.’ I thought to myself.

"You're assessing the room," Maren said, not looking up from my abdomen.

"I'm looking at the ceiling."

"Mm." She tied off a fresh bandage with brisk, economical movements. "The window is forty feet from the courtyard floor. There are six guards on this corridor. The door requires a key held only by the King and myself." She finally looked up. "I am telling you this because it is more useful to know the reality than to waste energy planning around assumptions."

I stared at her.

"I am also telling you," she continued, gathering her supplies, "that you have a three-day-old infant with a healing wound on his scalp, and that your abdominal stitches will tear completely if you do anything strenuous in the next three weeks. The King intends no harm to you. But your body may kill you more efficiently than any enemy if you push it."

She moved toward the door.

"One more question," I said.

She paused.

"You’re a head healer, so you should know this." I pressed my hand to my sternum. "My wolf, she's been dormant my entire life. When the King appeared at the slave block in my pack, she woke up. She screamed. And now she's… not dormant the way she was before. She's more like… sleeping. Waiting." I looked at Maren. "Is that normal?"

Maren was quiet for a beat. The careful quiet of someone choosing words. "When a dormant wolf meets her true mate, the mate bond can act as a catalyst. The wolf recognizes what the mind cannot yet process." She paused at the door. "Whether she stays awake depends on you."

“But I have to tell you something,” Maren continued, “You are… strange. I have worked as Healer for decades –even treated mere humans and people with weak wolves, but you.. There’s something about your wolf that seems totally abnormal. Too powerful even for me to examine.”

She left before I could ask what that meant.

I sat in the silence for a long moment, listening to my son breathe.

My wolf was quiet now — not dead-lake dormant the way she had been for twenty years. More like a sleeping animal. Present. Waiting. What did Maren mean by ‘too powerful to examine’? Was she talking about the same wolf that wasn’t even able to assist me during childbirth. Funny! I scoffed,

‘Don't get comfortable’, I told her. ‘We are not staying.’

She didn't answer. But I had the uncomfortable, inexplicable feeling she was unconvinced.

* * * 

The King came an hour later.

I was sitting up in bed with my son in my arms when the door opened. I had dressed myself in the clean shift someone had left folded at the foot of the bed, and arranged myself as upright and composed as a woman with forty stitches in her abdomen could manage.

He was larger than I remembered. Or perhaps that was just the room — stone walls that would have dwarfed most men simply scaled to fit him, as if the fortress had been built around his proportions. He wore no crown, no formal armor. Just dark, plain leathers and a grey wool shirt rolled to the elbows, revealing forearms roped with old scars.

He looked at me. Then at the sleeping baby. Then back at me.

"You're sitting up," he said.