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The Quiet Wife of Ironbough

"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 wa

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The Quiet Wife of Ironbough (2)

By sundown her legs were trembling under her gown. She climbed the stairs to her chamber slowly, holding the rail with both hands. The serving girl had come and gone again. A small fire was burning in the hearth. The candle on the writing desk was lit. The shutters had been pulled closed against the cold.Elowen bolted the door behind her.She sat down at the writing desk and looked at the polished silver mirror her father had sent her on her wedding day. The mirror was the one beautiful thing in the chamber. She had not looked at herself properly in it for a long time. Tonight, for some reason she could not name, she made herself look.The woman in the mirror had hollows under her eyes. The woman in the mirror had skin like old paper. The woman in the mirror had a mouth pressed tight against itself the way you press your mouth tight when you have just been told not to make a sound. The woman in the mirror was twenty years old."That isn't me," Elowen whispered.The woman in the mirro

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Bruises That Are Not Hers

The new bruise was on her ribs.Elowen found it before the bell for morning prayer. She was sitting on the edge of her bed lifting her shift to pull it over her head and her hand stopped halfway because the dark shape under her left breast had not been there last night. She knew. She had checked herself last night. After what she had seen in the lit window of the study, she had stripped to her shift in the dark and run her hands over every inch of herself, the way you check a child after a fall, looking for the proof of something.There had been nothing then. There was a bruise the size of a fist now.She lowered her shift back into place very slowly. Her hands were not shaking. That surprised her. She had thought they would shake."One," she whispered. "Two. Three."She counted them on her fingers under the blanket. The one on her forearm from yesterday. The one on her hip from three days ago. The one that wrapped around the back of her left calf like a belt. The smaller round one on

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The Woman in the Red Gown

"They're hanging the festival garlands."The kitchen girl said it like a question. She was setting the morning tray down on the small table by the window of Elowen's chamber. She was not the same girl from the library doorway. This one was older — perhaps seventeen — with the same too-careful face every servant at Ironbough wore around the Luna.Elowen turned from the window."Yes," she said. "I can see them."She had been watching the courtyard for almost an hour. The pack-folk were stringing red and gold paper garlands along the courtyard walls in long bright loops. Two men were rolling a wine barrel in from the cellar gate. A woman was sweeping the cobbles. Children were running between the legs of the workers and being shouted at. The whole courtyard was busy in a way it had not been busy since last autumn.Nobody had come to the Luna's chamber to ask her opinion on any of it.She had not expected anyone to. She had not been consulted on a festival arrangement at Ironbough since t

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The Woman in the Red Gown(2)

Nothing about it was kind.Elowen had been raised by a careful father in a cold house and she had been the wife of a Lycan Alpha for four years and she knew, the way you know the temperature of a room, exactly what was happening in this hall. It was the way Selene's gaze rested on her face for one half-second too long. It was the way Doran's hand had not moved. It was the way Selene's smile did not quite reach the tightness around her eyes.It was the way a woman looked at another woman whose place she had already decided to take.Elowen walked the rest of the way across the hall.She did not curtsey back. A Luna did not curtsey to a guest. She inclined her head — barely — and met Selene's eyes with the small steady look she had been practicing for four years for moments she had not yet known were coming."Lady Selene," she said. Her voice was quiet. It was very even. "Welcome to Ironbough. I trust the east-wing chambers will be to your liking."Selene's smile flickered. Just for an i

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Festival Eve

"The Alpha will see you in his study. Now."The senior household woman did not knock. She opened Elowen's chamber door with the same brisk authority she used to open the doors of pantries and storerooms, and she stood in the doorway with her hands folded at her waist and her chin slightly lifted, and she did not call Elowen my lady.Elowen was at her writing desk. She had been trying to read a small book of devotional poems her mother had given her on her tenth name-day. She had been on the same page for over an hour. She closed the book very gently and set it aside."Now?""Now, my lady."The woman did not move from the doorway. She was waiting to walk Elowen down to the study. Doran had sent her not just to summon his wife but to escort her, the way you escort a prisoner who might think about running."I shall need a moment to make myself presentable.""The Alpha said now.""Then he shall have me as I am."Elowen rose from the writing desk. Her legs were trembling under her gown the

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Festival Eve(2)

He was waiting for her to nod.He was waiting for her to bow her head and weep prettily and tell him that she understood and that she was grateful for his consideration and that she would go quietly back to her father's house and not make any small public scene about being put aside for a dark-haired woman in a red gown who had arrived from Silverbrook Pack three days ago.He was waiting for her to make this easy.Elowen looked at the cup of wine he had pushed across the desk to her. She looked at the soft grey shirt unlaced at his collar. She looked at the warm careful smile on his mouth.She thought: I gave you four years of my life. I gave you my whole sixteen-year-old heart. I lay in this house in the dark and I waited for you to come and be kind to me, and you never came, and I never said a single word against you to a single living soul, and I let you call me sickly and dramatic and delicate and fevered while you made me into the ghost you needed me to be. And now you have invit

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The Festival Begins

"My lady is wearing the green gown?"The serving girl had her hand frozen halfway to the wardrobe.Elowen was already at the polished mirror, pinning her dark hair up in the simple plaited crown her own mother had taught her how to plait when she was nine years old. She did not turn around."Yes.""My lady — that is your wedding gown.""I know what it is.""The Alpha said—""The Alpha may say whatever he likes. Bring it to me."The girl brought it to her with a face that was carefully not asking any of the questions her face was full of, and Elowen lifted the deep green gown out of the girl's hands and laid it across the bed.Four years of dust came off the folds of the skirt in a small soft cloud. The gown had been packed away in the cedar chest at the foot of her bed since the morning after her wedding night. She had not looked at it since. She had not been the kind of woman, until this morning, who wanted to look at it.This morning she was a different kind of woman.This morning s

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The Festival Begins(2)

It was not going to change anything. It was not going to stop what was coming. But it was going to make Doran say the words while looking at his wife in her wedding dress in the chair the wedding dress had been made for.It was the only thing Elowen could give him.Doran came up the steps of the high table from the side door of the manor a moment later. He was in his Alpha's furs. He was smiling the easy public smile he wore at festivals. He stopped when he saw Elowen in the green gown.The smile did not move. Doran had been an Alpha for nine years and the son of an Alpha for twenty-five and he did not lose his smile in front of his pack, but the small line at the corner of his jaw twitched once, and Elowen saw it.He sat down in the Alpha's chair without looking at her.The festival began.It went the way festivals at Ironbough always went. Toasts were made. The senior steward read the small list of births and deaths and harvests. A young couple knelt in front of the high table to be

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The Rejection

"By the laws of Ironbough Pack and by the right of the Alpha—"Doran's voice carried.He had been trained to make his voice carry across a courtyard since he was a boy. He spoke now in the slow careful formal cadence of a man reciting words he had practiced. He did not look at his wife. He did not need to. He stood at the front of the high table with his hands at his sides and his chin lifted, and he spoke into the silence of the courtyard like a man dropping stones into a still pond."—I, Doran Blackwood, Alpha of Ironbough, do hereby declare—"Elowen sat in her green wedding gown and listened.The grey ribbon on her left wrist was pulsing hot now, in time with the second heartbeat under her ribs. Boom. Boom. Boom. The calm woman's voice she had heard in her head a moment ago — Hadwen, be brave, we are nearly there — was gone. The two birds were still wheeling over the western tower. The pale blue sky was still pale blue. Doran's voice kept dropping its careful stones."—that the bon

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