Beneath the Surface

The rooms they gave her overlooked the city rather than the mountains, which Wren supposed was meant as some kind of courtesy and instead felt like the last small cruelty in a day already full of them. She stood at the window long after the palace had gone quiet around her, watching lantern light move along the streets below, and tried to reconcile the beauty of the place with everything it had cost her.

She did not hear the door until the second knock, quiet and almost hesitant, nothing like the confident stride she had watched Alaric use to cross the great hall. When she opened it, he was standing in the corridor alone, without Seraphine, without any of the court that had surrounded him all evening, dressed more simply than he had been at dinner.

"I didn't expect a visit," Wren said, not quite an invitation.

"I didn't expect to make one." He glanced past her into the room, then back to her face. "May I come in. There are things about the binding you should understand before the council starts filling your head with their version of it."

She stepped back to let him pass, more out of the certainty that this conversation needed to happen than any particular trust, and he crossed to stand near the window, looking out at the same view she had been drowning in for the last hour.

"The binding isn't a wedding," he said, without preamble. "Whatever the court calls it publicly, whatever ceremony they dress it up as. It's older than marriage as either of our peoples understand it now. Under the Red Moon, both parties open a wound, blood to blood, and the pact renews itself through that exchange. It ties something in us together, not love, not even loyalty necessarily, just a thread that keeps the old wards from failing."

"How thin a thread."

"Thin enough that either of us could ignore it entirely and go on hating each other for the rest of our lives, if that's what we choose." He turned to look at her then, and there was something almost like an apology in his expression, though he did not quite let it become one. "I won't pretend this is easy for you. I've watched enough of my father's court to know exactly what kind of place I'm asking you to survive in. But the binding itself doesn't require anything from you beyond the ritual. It doesn't require you to feel anything you don't feel."

"That's not what I asked." Wren crossed her arms, watching him carefully. "I asked how thin the thread is. Because from where I'm standing, this whole arrangement feels like it was built to be exactly as thin as it needs to be to keep the two of us tied together without either of us ever having to actually trust the other one. Which tells me the people who built it two hundred years ago didn't expect trust to be part of the equation at all."

Something crossed his face, surprise maybe, or the particular kind of recognition that comes from someone naming a thing you had not fully let yourself think through. "No," he admitted. "I don't think they did."

"So what happens when the thread isn't enough. When your council decides the wards need reinforcing and the ritual doesn't hold the way it's supposed to."

"I don't know." He said it plainly, without the polish she had watched him use on the courtiers all evening, and she believed him more for the admission than she would have believed a confident answer. "No binding has ever failed to hold, as far as the histories record. But no binding has ever happened under circumstances quite like this one either. Two weeks early, under a cloud of dead wolves and a council that seemed unusually well prepared to move the moment it happened."

Wren went very still. "You noticed that too."

"I've been noticing very little else since the raid." He moved away from the window, closer to where she stood, though not close enough to crowd her, and she found herself grateful for that small restraint even as she remained wary of everything else about him. "My uncle has run the day to day business of this court for over a year, since my father's health began failing. He is very good at making things happen exactly when it's convenient for them to happen, and very careful never to leave fingerprints on any of it."

"You think he's behind the raid."

"I think," Alaric said carefully, "that I have no proof of anything, and that saying so out loud in the wrong room could cost me more than I'm currently prepared to lose. But I think it's worth both of us being careful. You especially. A pact bride who arrives under suspicious circumstances and then meets with some unfortunate accident inside these walls would be exactly the kind of crisis that hands my uncle every excuse he could want."

The bluntness of it landed harder than she expected, not because the thought itself was new to her, she had suspected something like it since the hollow, but because hearing it confirmed by the one person in this palace with the most to lose from saying it out loud made it real in a way her own suspicion had not quite managed.

"Why tell me this," she asked. "You could have let me walk into this blind. Let your uncle's plans, whatever they are, play out without my knowing enough to be careful."

"Because if something happens to you, the wards fail either way, and I lose whatever chance I have of keeping this throne out of Malachi's hands along with it." He held her gaze, steady despite the admission. "I'm not telling you this out of kindness, Wren. I'm telling you because I need you alive and functional for reasons that have very little to do with either of us liking each other."

"At least you're honest about it."

"I find it's usually more efficient." The faintest suggestion of something that might have been humor crossed his face, gone as quickly as it arrived. "You said something at dinner. About true things not always being welcome in a room like this. I'd rather be one of the few people in this palace who tells you true things anyway, whether you welcome them or not."

Wren studied him for a long moment, weighing the offer against nine years of grief and a lifetime of stories about exactly what his bloodline was capable of, and found, somewhat to her own irritation, that she believed him, at least about this. "Fine. Then tell me something else true. What happens to the wolves your council keeps calling a border violation, if this binding fails."

"Nothing good," Alaric said quietly. "For either of us. Which is precisely why I intend to make sure it doesn't."

He left shortly after that, and Wren stood alone in the quiet of her borrowed rooms for a long time afterward, turning the conversation over in her mind, unable to decide whether she had just made an ally out of the last person on earth she expected to find one in, or simply learned exactly how good he was at making a hostile bride feel less alone in a palace full of people who wanted her gone.

Either way, sleep did not come easily that night, and when it finally did, she dreamed not of the hollow, or of Bram's ruined throat, but of a thin red thread stretched taut between two hands neither of them had chosen to offer.