The Hidden Twin Queen They Threw Away

Anara POV

"Keep it level, Anara. Level! If you tip that thing again Pell will have both our heads."

Mari said it through her teeth without moving her lips, the way she did everything when a steward was close, and she shuffled sideways down the service corridor with her own tray on one hip and her bad leg dragging a little behind her. I turned my head so my right ear faced her. The left one only gave me a hum these days, and the ballroom on the other side of the wall wasn't helping, with its violins and its three hundred voices all laughing at once.

"I am keeping it level, Mari," I said.

"You're keeping it level like a drunk keeps a straight line." Her eyes dropped to my hands, which were shaking around the silver tray, and her voice went quieter. "When did you eat last?"

"Yesterday. Some of it."

"Some of it." She snorted. "Put the glasses on the end table, come straight back, and I'll sneak you the heel of the loaf. And before you say no, I wasn't asking."

I didn't say no. My stomach answered for me, a long low growl, and Mari laughed so hard she had to lean on the wall.

"Has Elder Isolde's boy come by yet?" she asked once she could breathe. "With your bottle?"

"Not yet."

"That's weird. He's never late."

"She's probably busy, half the palace is in her rooms asking for headache powders tonight." I shrugged, and a glass slid toward the edge before I caught it with my thumb. "It's one morning, Mari. I'll live."

"You skip it and you get that look. The grey one." She waved a hand at my face. "Anyway. Guess who I saw through the door."

"Don't tell me."

"Cassian Ashwood. Heir of the Ashwood pack, hair like he combs it with a knife, smile like he already knows you'll say yes." She grinned. "Your sister's got him on a leash and she's walking him around the room like a show dog."

"He's engaged to her. That's what an engagement looks like."

"It looks like a leash." She tipped her head toward the clock above the pantry door. "Twenty to midnight, by the way. Twenty minutes and you're old. Happy birthday, you ancient thing."

"Don't. There'll be a honey cake at my door tomorrow, same as every year, and I'll eat it and pretend I know who left it."

"Isolde."

"Probably."

"Definitely. Who else would.."

A door banged at the far end of the corridor, and Steward Pell came down it with his chin up and his keys swinging. "Two maids and one conversation! This isn't market day. Princess Lyra said the cursed one stays on the back wall, Anara, the back wall, and if a guest so much as glimpses you I'm the one who answers for it. Go!"

"Yes, sir. Sorry, sir."

"Don't be sorry, be gone." His eyes ran down the patched grey dress and he curled his lip. "Look at you. The Princess says you look like something the kennel threw out, and she isn't wrong."

He shoved the ballroom door open for us and the music rushed out. A woman in green silk, close enough to touch, glanced at me and stepped back, her fan going up. "Is that her? The cursed one?" she whispered to her friend. "Don't stare, Odalys. They say it's catching." Heat and perfume and roasted meat rolled over me, and under all of that, so faint I almost missed it, something else.

Wood smoke. Cold rain on stone. And under those, something warm that made my mouth water in a way that had nothing to do with the loaf.

I stopped walking.

For twenty years there had been nothing inside me but a quiet empty place where a wolf was supposed to be. I stopped knocking on it when I was twelve. Now something in that place turned over, like a person waking in a dark room, and it said one word so clearly that I felt it in my teeth. The tray started to tremble again, and this time it wasn't from hunger.

‘Mate.’

"Anara." Mari's elbow found my ribs. "Anara, move, he's watching. Hey. You've gone white as flour. Is it the tonic? Do you need to sit?"

"Do you smell that? Smoke, rain, something like…"

"I smell boar and Lord Haskett's cologne, and the cologne's worse."

"No, it's.." I put the tray into her arms. She grabbed it out of pure reflex, and the glasses rang against each other. "Hold this."

"Hold.. Anara! What are you doing? Pell will skin you!"

"I'll be right back."

"You don't get to say that and walk out the door! If you get caught, I don't know you!"

I was already through the garden door. The night air cut straight through my dress, and the blood moon hung so low and red over the hedges that the frost looked pink. My thin shoes crunched along Ambrose's rose beds. I didn't decide to go left at the fountain. My feet just knew, and the scent pulled at me like a hand on my collar.

"Anara?" The old gardener was sitting on the edge of the fountain with his pipe, his bad knees stretched out in front of him, and he stood up faster than I'd seen him move in years. "What are you doing out here? You're meant to be in the kitchens."

"Ambrose, I think something's happening to me. I smell…" I stopped, because it sounded insane out loud.

"Nothing's happening. Go back inside." He stepped into my path and spread his arms like I was a runaway goat. "Go on, there's a hot loaf with your name on it."

"There's a loaf with everyone's name on it. Please move."

"Not that way, lass." His voice had gone low and strange. "Not tonight. I'm begging you."

"I'm sorry," I said, and ducked under his arm. He called my name once behind me, and the hedges swallowed it.

"Where have you been?" I whispered. "Twenty years. Twenty years of nothing, and you pick tonight?"

She didn't answer. She only pulled harder, and I let her, which was a strange thing to do after twenty years of walking on my own.

Voices reached me before the rose arch did.

"Not here," a woman murmured. "Someone could walk by."

"Who? The whole court's in there drinking to us." The man's voice was low and pleased with itself. "Let them wait."

Then she laughed, and I knew that laugh. I heard it through walls my whole life, and it was nearly always at my expense. I stopped under the arch because my legs wouldn't take me any further, and I put a hand on the cold stone to stay upright.

Two figures stood in the moonlight on the far side of the stone bench. The woman had her fingers buried in the man's hair, and he had a fistful of her silk skirt, pulling her closer, and the scent that had dragged me across the whole garden was pouring off him so thick I could taste it.

My mate was kissing my sister.

A sound came out of me before I could stop it, a high, torn "ah" that was half whimper and half something I didn't have a name for. They pulled apart. The man's head came up and turned toward me, nostrils flaring, and I watched him catch the scent too.

Lyra didn't turn immediately. She wiped her thumb under her lip, slow and careful so she wouldn't smudge her paint, and then she looked at me over his shoulder. She wasn't startled. She looked at me the way you look at a clock you've been watching for an hour, and she smiled.