The Court of Voss

The great hall of House Voss was lit by more candles than Wren had ever seen in one room, and full of more people than she had ever wanted to be looked at by in one room, and she had been standing in the doorway for less than a minute before she decided she hated both of those facts equally.

Seraphine had given her exactly enough time to wash the road off herself and change into something the palace staff had laid out for her, dark green fabric that fit closer than anything Wren usually wore and made her feel like she was walking into battle in the wrong armor. She had considered refusing it. She had considered a great many acts of refusal in the hour since she had arrived, and discarded most of them, because her father had not sent her here to make a point. He had sent her here to keep three hundred wolves from dying, and petty defiance over a dress was not going to accomplish that.

The hall quieted as she stepped through the doors, not all at once, but in a spreading wave, conversation dying out as heads turned to track her progress across the floor. She kept her chin level and her pace steady and refused to let her eyes drop, even as she felt every gaze in the room cataloguing her the way Seraphine had at the gate.

At the far end of the hall, on a raised dais beneath a banner bearing House Voss's crest, three figures waited. An old man, thin and grey and visibly unwell even from this distance, who Wren guessed correctly was King Constantine. Beside him, a man perhaps twice her age with sharp, watchful features and the kind of stillness that made her think of a snake deciding whether it was worth striking, who she would later learn was Lord Malachi Thorne. And beside them both, a younger man, dark haired, dressed simply compared to the ornamentation around him, standing with his arms crossed and an expression that made it very clear he did not want to be here any more than she did.

That, she understood without being told, was Alaric Voss.

She stopped at the base of the dais because it seemed like the expected thing to do, and for a long moment nobody spoke. Alaric looked at her the way she imagined a man might look at an unwelcome bill arriving early, and she found herself matching that look with one of her own, cold and unimpressed, refusing to be the first one to blink.

"Wren Blackthorn," Malachi said finally, breaking the silence with a voice that was smooth in a way that immediately set her teeth on edge. "The council welcomes the pact bride to Nocthaven. We trust your journey was uneventful."

"Three of my pack were murdered on the border two weeks ago," Wren said, keeping her voice level even as she felt Seraphine tense somewhere behind her. "I wouldn't call anything about the last two weeks uneventful, my lord."

A ripple went through the gathered court, and Wren caught the faintest flicker of something in Alaric's expression, gone almost as fast as it appeared. Interest, maybe. Or surprise that she had not simply bowed her head and accepted the pleasantry.

"A tragedy the council takes seriously," Malachi said, unbothered. "And precisely the sort of instability the Pact exists to prevent. We are grateful your father understood the wisdom of proceeding with the renewal despite it."

"My father understood that refusing would hand you an excuse for war you seemed remarkably prepared to use." The words were out before Wren fully decided to say them, and she watched Malachi's expression not change at all, which told her more than an angry reaction would have.

King Constantine stirred at that, coughing into a handkerchief before speaking for the first time, his voice thinner than she expected from a man who had ruled this city for decades. "You have your mother's directness, I understand. Callum spoke of her, once, many years ago. A formidable woman."

The mention of her mother, from this man's mouth, in this hall, sent something cold and furious through Wren's chest, but she kept her face still, because falling apart in front of this court was exactly the kind of thing she had promised herself she would not do. "She was," was all she allowed herself to say.

Alaric spoke for the first time then, and his voice was lower than she expected, controlled in a way that suggested a great deal of practice at controlling it. "My father tires easily. Perhaps introductions can continue over dinner, rather than dragging the bride through a receiving line before she's had a chance to sit down."

It was not kindness, Wren understood immediately. It was efficiency, a man managing an event rather than a person, and she resented how much easier that was to accept than sympathy would have been.

Dinner was, if anything, worse than the receiving line. Wren was seated beside Alaric at a table longer than her father's entire house, surrounded by courtiers who watched her handle unfamiliar cutlery with the same interest they might have given a novelty animal at a menagerie. Alaric said almost nothing to her directly for the first half hour, speaking instead to the courtiers on his other side about matters of state Wren mostly did not follow, and she was beginning to wonder if he intended to ignore her for the entire meal when he finally turned toward her, midway through the second course.

"You didn't have to say that. About the war." His voice was quiet enough that it did not carry beyond their end of the table. "To Malachi."

"It was true."

"True things aren't always useful to say out loud in a room like this."

"Then perhaps this room could use more of them." Wren met his eyes for the first time properly, and found something there she had not expected, not quite hostility, though there was plenty of that too, but something wearier underneath it, a man who looked like he had been fighting a version of this exact conversation for a long time before she ever arrived. "I didn't come here to make your court comfortable, my lord. I came here because the alternative was watching my pack die in a war your uncle seems very interested in starting."

Something flickered across Alaric's face at that, gone before she could name it. "You think Malachi wants war."

"I think a man who calls a murdered seventeen year old a tragedy the council takes seriously, in the same breath he calls for the Pact to be enforced early, is not a man who lost any sleep over it." She kept her voice low, matching his. "I've been in this city for three hours. I could be wrong. But I've been wrong about very little since I found three of my people dead in the frost two weeks ago, and I don't intend to start being generous with my judgment now, whatever the seating arrangement suggests I owe you."

For a long moment Alaric said nothing at all, studying her with an expression she could not read, and when he finally spoke again his voice had lost some of its earlier flatness. "You're not what I expected."

"Neither are you," Wren said, and meant it, though she was not yet ready to examine what exactly she had expected instead, or why the truth of him sitting beside her, sharp and tired and clearly fighting battles of his own inside these walls, unsettled her more than open cruelty would have.

Dinner continued around them, and the court continued watching, and somewhere at the head of the table Malachi Thorne smiled at something the ailing king said and did not once look directly at either of them, which Wren found, on reflection, far more unsettling than if he had.