อ้อนรักหวานใจ

"My lady? You are awake already?"

The kitchen girl in the doorway froze with the wash basin in her hands. Elowen Vayne had been awake for over an hour. She had not lit a candle. She had not rung for help. She sat on the edge of her bed in the grey dawn light with her shawl pulled tight around her shoulders and her hands folded in her lap, the way she had sat for the past four years of her marriage.

"Leave the basin by the door," Elowen said. Her voice was soft. It was always soft now. "You may go."

"My lady, the Alpha said—"

"I said you may go."

The girl set the basin down and fled. Elowen heard her bare feet slap against the cold stone of the corridor. The girl was new this month. The new ones always tried to speak to her at first. Then the older servants pulled them aside in the kitchens and told them what the Alpha's wife was. After that, they stopped trying.

Elowen stood. Her legs hurt. They always hurt now. She walked to the wash basin and dipped her fingers into the water. It was warm. She had been told once, when she was sixteen and newly married, that warm water in the morning was a small kindness the kitchen women gave to the Luna out of respect. She had believed it then. She no longer believed it. The kitchen women warmed her water because the Alpha had once shouted at one of them for letting the Luna's water go cold and embarrass him in front of guests. The water had nothing to do with her.

She rolled her sleeve back to wash her arm.

She stopped.

There was a bruise along the inside of her forearm. A long one. It curved from her wrist nearly to her elbow in the soft purple-blue of a mark perhaps half a day old. She had not been struck. She had not fallen. The skin around it was unbroken.

"Seven," she said, very softly, to no one. "That makes seven this month."

She rolled her sleeve back down before she could look at it any longer. She had learned long ago that looking at the bruises did not make them go away and did not give her any answer about where they had come from. The healer at Ironbough had stopped coming to see her after the first year. The healer had told Doran, in front of her, that the Luna had a delicate constitution and that nothing could be done about it. Doran had not asked again.

Elowen wrapped a second shawl around her shoulders and walked out of her chamber and down the cold stone corridor and out into the manor garden. The garden was the only place at Ironbough nobody watched her. The Alpha had no use for gardens. The pack-folk used the orchard and the practice yards. The garden had been planted by Doran's mother before she died and had been allowed to go half-wild, and the half-wild paths between the bare autumn rose-bushes belonged to her. She walked them every dawn. Nobody had ever told her she was not allowed.

She walked until her hands stopped shaking. Then she walked back inside for breakfast.

The great hall at Ironbough was already half-full when she came in. Doran was at the high table at the far end. He was laughing at something one of his warriors had said. He did not look up when she entered. None of the warriors looked up. The serving women set out fresh bread and a bowl of porridge at the empty seat beside the Alpha's chair, and Elowen walked the length of the hall in silence and sat down in it.

"...and the trader's face when he saw what I'd done with the count, by the Mother, I thought he was going to faint—"

Doran's laugh came out big and easy, the way it did when he was performing for an audience. The warriors around him laughed too. They always did. Elowen reached for the bread. Her sleeve pulled back half an inch from her wrist as she did and she pulled it down again before anyone could see.

"My lady Luna," said one of the warriors after a moment. He was a visiting man in dust-coloured riding leathers. She did not know his name. "Forgive me asking, but you look pale this morning. Are you well?"

The hall went a little quieter. Not silent. Just a little quieter, the way it always did when someone new tried to speak to her directly.

Doran answered before she could open her mouth. "She's well enough. Always pale. Don't worry yourself, friend — sickly stock, the Vaynes. We're used to it." He clapped the visiting warrior on the shoulder hard enough that the man flinched. "Have some more meat. You ride out tonight?"

The warrior glanced at Elowen for one more uncertain second. Then he turned back to the Alpha and let himself be pulled into the conversation about the road to the eastern holdings.

Elowen ate her bread.

She ate it slowly and carefully and made sure none of it fell on her gown, because the last time bread had fallen on her gown one of the kitchen women had snickered behind her hand and Doran had heard it and the kitchen woman had been beaten in the yard the next morning and Elowen had carried the sound of that woman's screams in her chest for a month. After that she had learned to eat her bread very, very slowly.

Sickly stock. Always pale. Don't worry yourself.

He had not even looked at her when he said it.

The day went the way the days had been going for a long time. She was not consulted on the household accounts. She was not asked about the menu for the evening meal. When she walked through the kitchen on some small pretext, the kitchen women stopped talking and waited, polite and frozen, until she was gone. When she walked past the guard room, the guards saluted her with the empty correctness of men who had been told to salute. When she crossed paths with Doran in the long west corridor in the afternoon he stepped around her without looking at her, the way one steps around a piece of furniture left in the wrong place.