Not At Home

Bren did not wait for Elara to move. He took one step toward her, stopped, remembered, and held out his arm with the palm turned up, the way a man offers a hand to a frightened horse.

"Inside, miss," Bren said quietly. "Quickly, please."

Elara could not feel her legs. She let Hesta take her elbow and steer her up the steps, but all the way there she kept her eyes on the courtyard, because the long shape in the cloak was being set down on the gravel. The cloak slipped. Underneath was not a body. It was a carrying chair, padded and polished, with two long poles and a ribbon tied to one arm.

The ribbon was Silverpine green. She had tied one exactly like it around her own wrist on her wedding day. The thought turned her stomach.

"Don't look, child," Hesta whispered, and the doors swung shut.

Upstairs, Elara sat in the chair by the hearth with her hands pressed between her knees. "That's for me," she said. "They sent it so I wouldn't have to walk home. He's coming to take me back."

Hesta did not answer, which was answer enough.

Kaelen

Kaelen came down the steps slowly. Speed looked like worry, and worry looked like weakness, and no Alpha he knew failed to smell weakness on another.

The Silverpine rider went down on one knee in the gravel. He was perhaps twenty, and his hands shook around the white banner.

"Alpha Dorian says his wife is unwell and unfit to walk," the rider said. "He sends this chair so she may be returned home in comfort. He rides behind me and will be at your border by dusk to collect her."

"To collect her," Kaelen said. "A chair, for a woman he locked in a cellar without water."

The rider said nothing.

Kaelen looked at the chair for a long moment. It was a fine piece of work. It told every wolf in the courtyard that Elara was a sick thing to be carried, and that Dorian was a kind husband for sending for her.

"Burn it," Kaelen said.

"Alpha?" Bren asked.

"In the middle of the yard. Let the Silverpine guards watch." Kaelen turned back to the rider. "Tell your Alpha the woman is not at home to him. If he sets foot on my land, he comes as a guest, and guests do not bring litters."

The rider fled. Behind Kaelen, the chair went up in a roar of flame, and the green ribbon curled and blackened and was gone.

Elara

She watched the smoke from her window. It climbed past the glass in a thick gray column, and she could smell lacquer and cloth, even through the stone.

He had burned a gift, in public, on his own land, as casually as a man crushing a bug. She had spent a year learning what Dorian's gestures meant, and she had no idea how to read this man.

"Is he angry with me?" Elara whispered. "For bringing trouble to his door?"

"No," Hesta said, folding a shawl. "He is angry with Dorian."

"It's the same thing."

"It is not, child. One day you will see the difference."

Elara said nothing. Her hands were shaking, so she pressed them flat against her stomach until a horn sounded at the border.

Kaelen

Dorian had brought eight warriors. Kaelen met him at the marker stone with twenty of his own and Bren at his right hand. Dorian looked as if he had not slept. The bruise from the Blackthorn courtyard had gone yellow along his jaw.

"I have come for my wife," Dorian said.

"I know. I burned your chair."

A ripple ran through the Silverpine warriors. Dorian's knuckles tightened on the reins. "By every pack law, Elara is under my protection. You have kept a married woman from her husband for four days."

"I have seen your protection," Kaelen said softly. "I broke it open with one hand."

"That was a misunderstanding."

"You locked her in a cellar."

"She was being disciplined." Something flickered across Dorian's face, too fast to name. "For a reason I will not discuss in front of strangers."

"Then we have nothing to discuss. Turn your horses around, Dorian. Do not send another chair, another rider or another threat. Next time I will not burn the gift. I will burn the man who sent it."

Dorian looked past him, up the hill, to the single lit window on the second floor. A pale shape stood behind the glass. Kaelen did not turn. He knew exactly whose silhouette it was.

"This is not finished," Dorian said. "You will answer to the Council for this."

"Then I will answer. After you sign. Tomorrow I will come to Silverpine myself. Have your pen ready."

"My pen?"

"Your divorce papers. The ones your lawyers have had drawn up since the day you called another woman your Luna." Kaelen's smile was thin. "You will sign them in front of your own council."

"You have no right."

"I have twenty swords on this side of the line and eight on yours. I think that is all the right I need."

Dorian wheeled his horse and rode away, and the dark swallowed his torches.

"He will not sign," Bren said.

"He is a coward," Kaelen said. "Cowards always sign."

Elara

She did not sleep. The wind had carried his words up the hill as clearly as a bell: Tomorrow I will come to Silverpine myself. She lay in the dark with them, turning them over, and she had no idea what to do with them.

He was going to Dorian. He was going to make him sign something. Why?

At dawn she heard hooves in the yard and crept to the sill. Kaelen sat his horse in the middle of the courtyard with Bren beside him and a dozen warriors behind. A leather case was strapped to his saddle. He looked like a man riding to war, and also like a man going to collect a debt.

Nobody had ever ridden out for her before. Dorian had summoned her, ordered her, sent for her. Nobody had ever ridden out.

Hesta came to stand beside her. "Is he taking me back?" Elara whispered.

"Look at him, child. Does that look like a man going to return something?"

As Elara watched, Kaelen lifted his head. He did not search the windows. He found hers at once, the way a hawk finds a single mouse in a field, and for one long second his eyes held hers across the courtyard.

Then he turned his horse, the gates opened, and he was gone.

Hesta put a hand on her shoulder. "By nightfall, you will either be Dorian's wife again, or nobody's."

Elara pressed her forehead against the cold glass. She did not know which one frightened her more.