Silver Flash

"You are not permitted in this yard, omega."

The warrior at the gate did not draw his sword. He did not need to. He was six and a half feet of pure pack muscle in a dark green training tunic, his arms folded across his chest, his face arranged in the particular expression of a man who had been told, recently, that the new omega in the corner room was not to be coddled.

It was four in the morning.

I had been outside for thirty minutes, walking the courtyard in trousers and a tunic the assistant cook had quietly left at my door at two. I had not been able to sleep. I had decided that a woman who could not sleep in a Keep where she had been called a queen and treated like a beggar might as well learn the geography of the place before the rest of it woke up.

"I am not asking permission," I said.

"You are asking permission, omega. You just have not noticed yet."

"That is a very generous interpretation of what I am doing."

He stared at me.

In my life I had only one weapon I had ever fully trusted, and it was the small space between the third and fourth seconds after a man with power had said something cruel to me. In that space he was usually trying to decide whether I had not understood him, or had understood him and was choosing to ignore him, or had understood him and was about to do a third thing he had not prepared for.

This man was not handling the third thing well.

"Step aside. Or do not. You will need to choose in the next two seconds."

"You will be removed from the yard."

"Likely. But not by you."

I walked past him.

He did not stop me.

I had been ready for him to put a hand on my shoulder. I had been ready to break his thumb. Mira's mother had told me once, when I was thirteen, that the smallest joint on a man's body was the joint he had given the least thought to defending. I had practiced the break against a fence post twice a year for nine years. I had not used it on a living person.

I had been mildly hoping to use it on a living person this morning.

The training yard was empty. Sixty feet of packed dirt. Wooden practice posts. Two lanterns hanging from iron hooks at the corners.

I had been walking the perimeter eleven minutes when the second warrior came in.

He was younger. Twenty-five. He had not been told the new omega was not to be coddled, because the first warrior had not had time to tell him. He had been told only that she was in the training yard and was not supposed to be.

He decided, when he saw me, to teach me my place.

I knew he had decided because he did not speak first. He walked into the yard. Picked up a wooden practice sword from the rack. Gestured at me.

"Pick one up."

"I'm not here to fight."

"You are now."

"I have eaten three meals in the last two days. None of them were full. I have slept four hours since I arrived. You are at a significant advantage. I am going to make you regret it anyway, but I wanted you to know that I tried to warn you."

He laughed.

This was, in retrospect, the moment in which the day became, for him, a very long day.

I picked up a wooden practice sword.

It is hard to describe what happened next, because three things happened in the same second.

The first thing was that the place at the base of my ribs that had been told, for twenty-one years, that there was nothing in it, opened.

The second thing was that the rejection scar at my collarbone went silver-hot and stayed that way.

The third thing was that the warrior swung at my head.

I do not remember deciding to step. I remember the step. I remember the air of his swing passing the side of my face, close enough that my hair moved. I remember my own sword going under his arm in the inside angle he had not protected because no one had ever explained to him that a five-foot-five woman did not need to swing high to ruin his morning.

The flat of my practice sword hit the back of his elbow.

His arm folded.

The sword came out of his hand.

I caught it with my left hand while it was still in the air, brought it across my body, and set the edge of it against the side of his throat in the time it took him to register that he had dropped it.

I had practiced none of this.

I had not been trained.

The Voss pack had not allowed me into a training yard since I was nine.

I had a sword in each hand. The man whose throat I had a sword against was twice my size and had a beard. His eyes had gone very wide and were locked on something just above my own eyes, in a place I had not been able to see for myself yet.

He was looking at my eyes.

He was looking at my eyes because my eyes were not the color they had been a minute ago.

He went still.

I went still.

The yard was very quiet.

Across the yard, by the low stone wall, a third person was standing. She had not been there when I had walked in. She was a small old woman in a grey apron with one hand at her throat, and her face in the lantern light was the face of a woman who had just seen something she had been told, all her life, she would not see again.

The old cook.

Mother sighting number three.

I lowered the sword from the warrior's throat.

I lowered the second sword.

I closed my eyes.

I counted, slowly, to ten. When I opened them, the warrior took a step back. He stared at me. He took another step back. He turned, picked his sword off the dirt, walked to the rack, put it back. He did not look at me again. He left the yard.

The first warrior was at the gate of the yard.

I had not heard him arrive. I did not know how long he had been there.

I looked at the old cook across the yard.

She lowered her hand from her throat. She walked across the dirt. She stopped three feet from me. She did not curtsy. She did not look down.

"You should not have done that, child," she said. Very softly.

"I know."

"Have you done that before."

"No."

"Are you all right."

It was the first kind question anyone had asked me in this Keep, and it was asked by a woman who had told me, twelve hours ago, that I was not permitted to ask hers. I felt the muscle at the back of my throat do the thing muscles do when they are about to betray you, and I made it stop.

"I am fine," I said. "Thank you for asking."

"You are not fine."

"No," I said. "But I am still standing. I have decided that is the same as fine for today."

She looked at me for one more second.

"You will be," she said. "Standing. For a long time. The trick is not to forget that the standing is the work."

She turned. She walked back across the yard. She passed the warrior at the gate without looking at him. She went out into the courtyard and toward the kitchens and was gone.

The warrior at the gate had not moved.

I walked past him a second time.

He did not stop me.

I did not look up at the third-floor window of the central tower, which had a view of the yard and which had been lit, the entire time, by a single steady candle.

                                                                       ****

KAEL'S POV

"Twenty-three minutes."

Riven was beside me at the window. He had come up at one in the morning to deliver a packet from the southern continent and had stayed when he had seen what I was watching. He had not spoken in twenty-two of those minutes.

"You have been counting."

"I have. Twenty-three minutes for an omega the Voss pack told me had been unable to lift a training sword as a child. Twenty-three minutes of a perimeter walk in the dark. The flash in the eyes was three full seconds. I timed it."

"Three seconds is too long."

"Three seconds is a lifetime."

I did not move from the window. The candle on the sill had nearly burned out.

Below us, in the yard, the warrior I had not given an order to had picked up a wooden sword and decided to teach my wife her place.

I had watched.

I had not moved.

I had wanted, for the first six seconds of the engagement, to be down in the yard with my hand on the back of his neck and his face in the dirt. I had wanted, in the seventh second, to walk down without my boots on, the way I had walked once when I was twelve, the year my father had taught me what an Alpha owed a woman he had not yet claimed properly. I had wanted, in the eighth second, to put my own sword through the joint at the back of his knee.

I had not moved.

I had not moved because the woman in the yard had not asked me to. I had not moved because she had been beating him. I had not moved because the place at the base of my ribs, where my wolf had been pressing against the inside of his own wall for a day and a half, had not been saying protect her.

He had been saying watch her.

He had been saying it the way a man watches a thing he has been waiting his whole life to see.

"Riven."

"Sir."

"She is a True Alpha untrained."

"Yes, sir."

"She has had no instruction."

"None I am aware of."

"She disarmed a Draeven warrior, brought him down at the elbow, set a blade to his throat, in three movements."

"I counted three."

"What does it suggest to you."

"That she has been compensating her whole life. That whatever they did to her at birth made her quiet on the outside and a great deal louder on the inside. That she has been listening to a wolf she could not name for twenty-one years, and the wolf has been teaching her things in the only language available, which is the language of her body."

I looked at him. He looked back.

"That is a very specific answer."

"You asked a specific question, sir."

Mine, the wolf said quietly. And she does not know what she is.

"No," I said aloud. "She does not."

Riven did not ask who I was speaking to. He had learned, in the last day and a half, to stop asking.

I went down to the courtyard.

I had not been planning to. I had been planning to wait. I had been planning to send for her in the early afternoon, after she had eaten and rested, and to do what I had decided in the library three hours ago, which was to give her the east wing room with the window and the locking door and to begin, gently, the slow business of becoming a person she would not flinch at.

I had not been planning to walk down to the courtyard at five in the morning in front of the staff in the dress shirt I had been wearing for thirty-six hours.

I had not been planning, in particular, to do what I did.

She was crossing the courtyard back toward the lower wing. The two scullery women on the kitchen step had stopped what they were doing to watch her go. The steward had come out of his office at the far gate and was pretending to be reading a ledger. The warrior at the training yard gate had come up to the courtyard wall and was standing very straight.

I walked to her.

She saw me. She stopped.

She had not, until this moment, looked at me twice in the same hour either.

"Your eyes are fine now," I said.

"...Are they."

"Yes. Brown again. The flash was three seconds. I counted from a window."

"That is creepy, sir, if I am being honest."

"I am told it is one of my qualities."

A beat. The corner of her mouth did something it had not done since she had walked into my throne room. It was not a smile. It was the ghost of one. She put it away.

"You are bleeding," she said.

"Where."

"Your hand."

I looked at my hand. The cut from the silver bowl had opened again. I had not noticed.

"Your healer needs to look at that, sir."

"I will tell him."

"You will not. You will tell him only if I am standing next to him when you do it."

"That is also creepy, Luna. If I am being honest."

"I am told it is one of my qualities."

I lifted her wrist.

I did it slowly, in front of the courtyard. The scullery women stopped pretending not to look. The steward set down his ledger. The warrior at the gate did not move at all.

I turned her arm so the inside of her wrist faced the lantern light.

The bond mark was there.

It was a small dark shape under the skin, perhaps the size of a thumbnail, in the shape of a thin five-pointed leaf. It had not been there yesterday. It would not have been there an hour ago.

I passed my thumb across it. Slowly. Once.

The mark warmed under my touch the way a stone warms in sun. I heard her breath catch. I did not look up to see whether anyone else had heard it. They had heard it.

"Good fight," I said. Quietly. Only to her. "Don't do that again without telling me."

"Was that an order, sir."

"That was a request."

"Then I will consider it."

"You will consider it."

"Yes. I consider all requests. I have not yet been told what I am to you in your law. Until I am, I am in the considering stage of compliance."

There was a long moment.

I did not let go of her wrist.

The thing in my chest, which had been speaking in single words for a day and a half, said something more complicated.

Hold the wrist.

Mark it deeper.

Tell her in front of all of them.

I did not.

I lowered her hand. I let it go. I turned. I walked back into the Keep.

I did not look back, and so I did not see her standing in the middle of the courtyard with the early-morning light coming up over the eastern wall and the staff watching her from three sides, holding the wrist I had just touched the way a woman holds a thing she does not yet know whether to put away.

I knew, anyway.

I had not needed to look.

By dinner, half the Keep had decided what we were.

This was Riven's later assessment, delivered in the south corridor over the strongbox. He had been counting whispers. He had a clerk's mind. He had told me, in twenty-eight words, that the kitchen had it that the omega had silver eyes, the steward had it that the King had touched her wrist like a claim, and the warriors had it that she could put a man on his back faster than two of them put together.

"All three of those are true."

"Yes, sir."

"All three of them are also problems."

"Yes."

"Pick the one most likely to reach the Council first."

"The third one. The warrior is twenty-five and has a sister he writes to in the southern continent."

"Stop the letter."

"Done before breakfast."

"And Riven."

"Sir."

"Tell the kitchen head, very politely, that if my wife is given dog toast again I will be displeased."

"Yes, sir."

"Use the word displeased. She will understand it."

He bowed, slightly, and went.

I stood in the corridor for a long time. The wolf at the base of my ribs was very quiet. He was not silent. He was the quiet of a thing that had been fed.

I had touched her wrist in front of the courtyard, and I had not asked, and by dinner half the Keep had decided what we were.

So had I.