Chapter 5 — The Draven Alpha

In my first life, I curtsied.

I remember it so clearly it might have happened this morning. The great hall at Vale, candlelight on polished stone, my father's hand on the small of my back steering me forward. I lowered my eyes, sank into the deepest bow my mother's dancing teacher had ever drilled into me, and felt the weight of a stranger's gaze move across me and past me the way light moves over a wall, touching nothing, warming nothing, leaving no trace of having passed at all.

I had loved him for a year on the strength of that glance.

It took me until the fire to understand he had probably not remembered it.

So when the horns sounded from the outer wall that evening, exactly at dusk, exactly as I had known they would, I did not go down to the hall. I told the maid I had a headache. I told her to tell my father I was sorry. Then I slipped out through the back terrace, into the cold blue evening, my breath fogging ahead of me in small, nervous clouds, and walked until the sounds of arrival faded behind me and the old glasshouse rose out of the dark like something half-remembered from a kinder dream.

My mother had built it. The panes had clouded over the years, and half the beds had gone to weeds, but the moon-lilies she had planted still bloomed at night, pale and stubborn, their scent thick as honey in the cold air. It was the one place in Vale nobody ever came, and it had been my refuge for as long as I could remember — the one room in this whole echoing house where I had never once had to perform being someone easier to love. In the corner, half-hidden by cracked pots, stood the old tall mirror, its silver backing tarnished nearly black. My mother had forbidden anyone to move it. I had never known why, and had never thought, until recently, to wonder harder.

I pushed open the door and stepped inside.

Kael Draven was standing in the middle of the glasshouse.

I stopped.

For one long, awful moment, my body forgot it was three years younger. It remembered only the snow. The warmth under my ribs. The weight of his silence stretching across three unbridged steps while my life emptied itself onto frozen ground.

He stood with his back half-turned to me, tall and dark in a black coat that seemed to swallow the last of the light, and his shoulders had the stillness I remembered, the stillness of someone accustomed to being watched who has long since stopped acknowledging it. I counted the distance between us without meaning to, some old animal instinct tallying the space the way a wounded thing always measures the nearest exit.

Three steps.

I took one step back before I could stop myself.

He turned.

He was younger. Of course he was. There was no shadow yet beneath the eyes, none of the hard weariness I would come to know across a whole ruined year. The face was the same: sharp, severe, made of clean lines and very little mercy. His eyes were gray as winter water, and for one dizzying second I looked into them and felt the two years of my first life fold over on top of me like a wave pulling the ground out from beneath my feet.

I did not hate him.

I had expected to. I had spent three days of my own death rehearsing exactly how it would feel — had imagined, in the cold dark of whatever place held the newly dead, that hatred would arrive clean and simple, a single sharp thing I could hold onto. But hatred requires that you no longer want the person, and my body, the traitorous, foolish, three-years-young body, was still turning toward him the way a plant turns toward a window, helpless and unthinking and entirely beyond my control.

I locked it down. Hard.

"You're not in the hall," Kael said. His voice was low, quiet, flat as a closed door.

"Neither are you, Alpha Draven."

I heard how it sounded the moment I said it, and I held my chin level and let it stand. There was a pause. Something moved behind his expression, and vanished before I could name it.

"No," he said. "I'm not."

Then he looked at me properly, and I understood what he was waiting for. He was an Alpha of the Draven pack, the most powerful in the north, and I was the daughter of a lesser house standing on my own family's ground. There was a bow expected. Not the shallow nod of one equal to another, but the lowered head and inclined shoulders of one who acknowledges the rank of the other. It was courtesy. It was custom. It was, to the pack, the bare minimum of respect owed to a man of his standing.

I had bowed to him once before. I had bowed to him again and again, in the year that followed, in every hall and courtyard, hoping that each time might be the time he would finally see me as something other than furniture arranged conveniently nearby.

I inclined my head about an inch. The exact courtesy I would have offered a merchant arriving to discuss the price of grain.

"Alpha," I said.

Silence.

Kael's gaze dropped to the small, insufficient movement, and lifted again. His head tilted a fraction, some private calculation visibly turning behind his eyes.

"Interesting," he said, softly.

"Is it?"

"Every Vale I've met so far has been eager to remind me how honored they are." He paused. "You seem to be the exception."

"I'm sorry to have disappointed you."

"I didn't say I was disappointed."

We stood there, the scent of the moon-lilies heavy around us, the great old mirror behind him tarnished and dark. I noticed, absently, that he stood with his back turned to it and his shoulder angled away, in the careful, unconscious way of someone who has done it so long it has become habit rather than choice. As though he would rather not see whatever it might show him, whatever old reflection it still carried from a life before this one.

Then he spoke again, and the whole world went very quiet.

"Liora."

I did not move.

I did not breathe.

I had not told him my name. I had not been introduced. I had not been in the hall, or at the gate, or within a hundred yards of the men who had ridden in at dusk. Nobody in the house had spoken my name in his presence, because in this life no one had had the chance to.

And yet he had said it the way you say a word you have said a thousand times before, low and certain and without a flicker of question, as though it had simply always belonged in his mouth.

As though he had said it in the snow.