Chapter 11

Evander's POV

The mark sat low on my left hip, where a belt would cover it. My mother knew it was there because she had bathed me. Two old nurses knew, and my father. I had never shown it to a woman in my life, or I had never known myself to.

Cold went down the backs of my arms.

I went over those three lost days again, as I had a hundred times since the Longest Night, and found nothing in them but snow and a scent. My mother's women were watching me. The girl had lowered her eyes, and the flush had climbed into her ears.

"One more thing," I said. "That night. What did you smell of?"

She bit her lip and turned her face aside, the way a shy girl would, and didn't answer.

It was the old woman behind my mother's chair who did. Mistress Coyle had served the Queen since before I was born, and she spoke the way she did everything, as if it were already settled. "Your Highness will pardon me. I unpacked the young lady's trunk myself this morning. Her linen was folded in wild orchid. Like rain on wild orchids, the maids said."

I had never spoken of that scent to anyone in the palace. I had only asked for it, shop by shop, down every perfumers' row in Silverkeep.

My mother laughed, and the whole room loosened with her. "There. Evander, that's enough. Whatever quarrel the two of you had, it's finished." She patted the girl's hand. "Two of my steadiest women will go home with her to your house and see to everything. When the pup is born, I'll speak to your father myself. You'll want for nothing, child."

The girl folded her hands over her belly and bowed until her forehead almost touched the cushion. "Your Majesty is too kind. But His Highness will be bound one day to a lady of his own rank and have pups born in the bond. I don't want to be the stain on his name. Please let me go home."

"Nonsense." My mother's voice had changed, and every woman in the room heard it. "What you carry is royal blood, and royal blood is not left to grow up in a farmyard. You will stay in the Prince's house until it's born, and you will not speak of leaving again. I won't say it twice."

I bowed to my mother. I didn't trust myself to say anything at all.

* * *

The sun lay white on the steps outside. I walked ahead down the long colonnade with the girl behind me between two of my mother's women, and I made myself think of nothing. Halfway along, a draft came through between the pillars, smelling of hot stone and pond water and the lavender on the girl's sleeve, and my head cleared.

In my mother's room I had begun to listen past the girl's quick heart, and the mark had driven it out of my head before I found what I was listening for: a second heart under hers, small and fast, the beat any wolf can hear through a mother's belly from the fourth month on.

I listened now, in the quiet of the colonnade.

There was one heart. Only hers.

I turned and went for her shoulder, fast enough that a frightened farm girl would have been caught before she knew I'd moved. She wasn't there. She bent back from the waist and slid half a step aside on the balls of her feet, the way my own guards are taught to slip a grab, and my fingers closed on air.

"Good," I said, and the second time I caught her by the shoulder blade and held on. She gasped, and her face went white. "Who taught you to move like that? Who sent you?" I looked past her. "And you, Mistress Coyle. Who told you to find orchids in her trunk?"

The old woman dropped to her knees on the flags. "Mercy, Your Highness. It was the Queen's order. Whatever it took, she said. The girl was to stay at your side, and you were to own the pup."

"My mother," I said, and my grip eased.

"Evander." She had followed us out. She stood beside a pillar a little way back, perfectly calm, as if she had come out to look at the weather. "Let her go."

* * *

In her inner room, with the shutters closed against the heat, my mother sat down and looked at me for a long moment.

"There's no one here but us. Tell me the truth. Your woman in the Lakelands. Did you make her up to put your father off?"

"I made up the farm," I said. "I didn't make her up. There is someone, Mother. I don't know her name, or where she is."

She sighed and got up and came to straighten my collar, which didn't need it.

"You know about your brother's leg. Corvin will never sit the throne, and your father wants it to be you.

"But an unbound prince with no pup? The Council won't have it, and neither will the old Packs, and I can't pretend they don't count." Her fingers were cold against my throat. "In all these years I have never once put a girl in your bed. Do you know why?"

I waited.

"You were six. You asked me why your father went to Lady Sabine's rooms and had pups with someone else. You said that when you grew up, you would have one mate, and only her, and be good to her all your life." She smiled a little. "I thought it was a child talking. And then you kept saying no to every match, and I saw you meant it."

"So you found me a pup."

"So I found you a girl. Larkin is one of my own guard. Her family is clean and she is loyal. If you had owned her and the child, you would have had an heir to quiet the Council, and all the time you needed to find the one you wanted. Afterward, I would have seen to it that she and the child went away. Quietly."

I couldn't answer her. Passing off a false pup as royal blood was treason. If it ever came out, they would hang her for it, Queen or not, and she had done it anyway, for me.

She looked at my face, and whatever she saw there made the hardness go out of hers.

"Never mind," she said gently. "You don't want it. I was in too much of a hurry, and I used the wrong tool." She smoothed my hair back the way she had when I was small. "I only want you to be happy. The throne, the pups, there are other roads to all of it."

"Give me a year," I said. "If I haven't found her in a year, choose a girl for me yourself, and I'll be true to her all my life."

I bent and put my forehead on her shoulder, as I hadn't done since I was a boy. It was smaller than I remembered.

* * *

Wren's POV

In the week of Midsummer, Hester came in from the lane without stopping to scrape her boots.

"Mistress Rowe's sent a cart for you," she said. "That binding gown you did the sleeves for, with the twin moonflowers. The bride caught one on something at her fitting this morning and pulled the threads right out of it. She's bound at moonrise tonight. Rowe says there's no one in the shop who can match your work, and she's begging you to come and mend it."