Vows at Knifepoint

They covered the boy with a white sheet and carried him out through the servants' door, and nobody said a word.

Nobody said a word to me, either. That was the part that frightened me most. Kael had given three quiet orders, and each one had made the room smaller. Dorian wiped the blood from the stone himself. Two guards stood outside the door. The seamstress, the maids, and even sour-faced Orla were herded away to be questioned.

I was left in the middle of the chamber in my wedding gown, with the king's eyes on the side of my face.

"You went pale," he said.

"A boy died in front of me."

"He did." He did not look away. "But you went pale before that. When you saw his hand."

My mouth was dry. "I saw a man bleeding to death with a symbol carved into his skin. I think most people would go pale."

"Most people would ask what the symbol meant."

"Do you know what it means?"

It was a dangerous question. I asked it anyway, because the best way to stop a wolf from watching your throat is to give him something else to chew.

Kael's gaze sharpened. "It is a Veyra crest. House Veyra was wiped out sixteen years ago, in a plague fire." The word plague came out flat, almost bored, and I realised with a jolt that he did not believe it. Not entirely. "Their land was burned to stop the sickness spreading. That is the official record."

"I was told the same thing as a child," I said carefully. "That is all I know."

"Then somebody wants you to know more."

He was right, and that was the worst part. I stood there, listening to the sound of the cathedral bells beginning to ring in the great hall below us, and thought: Whoever wrote that note knows I am alive. Whoever killed that boy knows where I am. And the man in front of me, the man whose father burned my family, is looking at me as though he is trying to decide whether to protect me or interrogate me.

I could not tell which one scared me more.

"We will talk after the ceremony," he said. "All of it."

"Of course, Majesty."

"Kael."

I blinked.

"In an hour you will be my wife," he said. "You can say my name."

The Hall of Moons was the largest room I had ever seen.

Silver light poured through a ceiling of pale glass, cut into the shape of a full moon, and fell onto a floor of black marble. Four hundred guests packed the benches. Alphas from the northern packs. Council lords in jewelled collars. Warriors with scarred faces and polished boots. Ladies in silk who watched me walk down the aisle the way people watch a carriage crash.

I kept my chin up. I counted my steps. Twenty-six from the doors to the altar.

Do not look at the threads, I told myself, but of course I did, because I always did.

The hall was full of them. Silver ribbons between old friends, gold ribbons between mated pairs, bright knots of colour that tangled and crossed like a spider's web. It was beautiful. It was the most beautiful thing in the world, and I had never been able to enjoy it, because for sixteen years I had learned to look at it with fear.

Because some of those threads were wrong.

I could not always tell why. A true thread had a soft, living glow, flickering with the mood of the two people it joined. A forged thread was too bright, too even. Like wire painted silver. It looked right from a distance, and then it gave itself away by never changing, never flickering, no matter how the two people felt.

I had seen three of them since I entered the hall.

Three false bonds, in a room of four hundred.

My stomach tightened. I looked away, up to the altar, and found the man who was waiting to marry me.

Kael stood at the top of the steps in black and silver, utterly still. Beside him, in a long robe the colour of old pearl, stood the royal adviser.

Ezekiel.

Everyone in Valmoor knew his name. He had advised three kings. He was said to be sixty, though his skin was strangely smooth, and his silver beard was always trimmed to perfection. He had pale eyes and a soft, warm voice, and he had never once been seen to raise it.

I had watched him from a distance for six weeks, while I played the part of the humble clerk's daughter. There was something about him I could not name. Something old.

I reached the altar. Kael took my hand again, lightly this time, and I felt the faint pressure of his thumb against my knuckle. A reassurance? A warning?

"Beloved wolves of Valmoor," Ezekiel said, in that gentle voice that carried perfectly without effort. "We gather beneath the silver moon, as our ancestors did, to witness the joining of Alpha King Kael Blackthorn and Lady Elena Voss."

A murmur ran across the hall. Lady. Clerk's daughters were not ladies. The council had granted me the title to make me presentable.

"Before the Goddess's blessing," Ezekiel continued, "our law requires one final custom." He turned to me, and his pale eyes were kind. "The Scent of Truth. A king may not wed one who carries hidden poison. The bride must be tested before the pack."

I had known this was coming. Mara Quill, the king's healer, had warned me a week ago, in a whisper, in a stairwell, while pretending to measure my pulse.

They will say it is custom. It is not. It is a scent test, for Wardens. If you carry that smell, he will know.

What is the smell? I had asked.

Mara had looked at me for a long moment. Her eyes were very green and very tired. Moon-iron, she said. Cold metal and old rain. It is the smell of the old keepers of the Rite. Chew these. She pressed a small packet of dried leaves into my palm. Silverleaf. It will cover it. Not forever. Perhaps ten minutes.

I had not asked how she knew. I had been too afraid of the answer.

I put my hand to my mouth and felt the last bitter fragment of silverleaf against my cheek. It had been there since the hallway. It tasted like pepper and metal.

"Will the bride kneel?" Ezekiel said.

I knelt.

The marble was cold through my gown. He walked a slow circle around me, his robe whispering on the stone. I could feel the entire hall looking, hundreds of wolves with sharp noses, leaning forward to watch a girl be sniffed.

Ezekiel stopped behind me. Then he bent close, so close his breath touched the back of my neck.

He inhaled.

One second.

Two.

Three.

Inside my chest, my heart began to beat with slow, hard force. Calm, I told myself. Calm. Calm. My fingers pressed into the silk of my gown. I stared at the black marble and thought of nothing, nothing, nothing.

Ezekiel went still.

I felt it, an instant of stillness behind me, like a hunter who has heard something in the grass. He breathed in again, more slowly, and I swore I felt his breath catch.

"Adviser," Kael said.

His voice was cool. Not loud. But it cut through the silence like a blade through paper.

"Majesty?"

"You have had time to scent three brides in one breath. I had thought the custom was brief."

A faint ripple of laughter passed through the benches. Ezekiel straightened, and I could not see his face, but I heard the careful smoothness in his tone.

"I beg your pardon, Majesty. The lady's scent is... unusual."

"She is wolfless," Kael said. "She will smell different. I have been told this by every healer in my court. Is there something in her scent that endangers the throne?"

The question was a trap, and everyone in the hall knew it. If Ezekiel said yes, he would have to prove it in front of four hundred people. If he said no, the ceremony would continue.

I held my breath.

"No, Majesty," Ezekiel said at last. "There is no poison."

"Then you may stop."

"Of course."

I let out my breath so slowly that nobody could have noticed. When I looked up, Ezekiel was watching me, and for a single heartbeat his kind face had no kindness in it at all. Only a long, quiet, thoughtful hunger. As if he were looking at a locked door he had been searching for.

Then it was gone, and he smiled warmly, and offered me his hand to help me rise.

I did not take it. Kael did.

He drew me to my feet with a small, firm tug, and as I stood he leaned very slightly toward me. His lips did not move. But I heard him, soft and low, in a voice meant for me alone.

"You are lying about something," he murmured. "I will find out what."

"And yet you stopped him."

"I did not stop him for you." His thumb moved over my knuckles. "I stopped him because I did not like the way he was looking at you."

The vows were old and long. We said them to the moon in the high old tongue, and I stumbled once, and Kael's hand tightened on mine without a flicker on his face. I said the words I will be your wife until death and felt the weight of the lie settle in my bones. Not because I did not mean to stay. Because I meant to ruin him.

That was the plan. Sixteen years of planning. Get into the citadel. Learn what the Blackthorns had done. Find the Loom, if it was real. Take the throne apart stone by stone.

Nobody had told me the king's hand would be warm.

"And so by the silver moon," Ezekiel said, "and by the Goddess who watches from above, I name you—"

Whistle.

I did not hear it so much as feel it. A faint, thin sound, the sound of something moving very fast through a very large space. The sort of sound a girl who has hidden in a burning cellar never forgets.

My eyes went up.

High in the gallery, behind a pillar of white stone, a figure in a servant's grey uniform stood with a crossbow raised. The bolt was already in flight. It caught the silver moonlight for one bright, beautiful instant.

It was pointed at Kael's heart.

"Kael!" I screamed.

The hall exploded.