All Chapters of After My Alpha Rejected Me, I Became the Lycan Queen: Chapter 91 - Chapter 100

Cassian left Riverside in the thirteenth year. Not forever. Just for long enough to do the work the Keeper needed him to do. He was training with her directly now, learning how to help people escape the loops of time that trapped them, learning how to teach others to see the threads that connected different lives. The evening sessions at the builder's yard had long since stopped being secret, and then stopped being enough. The Keeper's letter, when it came, was three lines long and did not ask. It named a season and a place. Cassian read it at the kitchen table and passed it to me without a word, and I read it and passed it back, and we both knew what it meant before either of us said it. "You should go," I told him that night. "I have not decided." "Yes, you have. You decided the day you first came home from the yard with that look on your face. You are only waiting for me to make it easier." I pulled the blanket up to his shoulder. "So I am making it easier. Go." He packed on

Iris turned nine years old, and she began to ask harder questions. Up to then her questions had been the kind a library is built to answer. Why the river froze at the edges first. How many teeth a wolf had. Whether the old librarian had ever been young, and if so, where the evidence was. I had enjoyed those questions. They came with a shelf number attached. Nine was different. At nine she stopped asking what things were and started asking why people had done them, and the answers to those are never filed where you can reach them. "Why did you leave?" she asked me, sitting in the library where I worked. It was a slow afternoon at the end of the week. Rain had kept the students away, and the reading room smelled of wet wool and beeswax and the apple she had smuggled in against my express rules. She was cross-legged on the long oak table, which was also against the rules, with a history of the northern provinces open in her lap and her finger stopped halfway down a list of noble house

The Keeper arrived in Riverside on a day in late autumn. It was the kind of day the town did best: the trees along the river gone to copper, the air sharp with woodsmoke and windfall apples, the light arriving low and sideways and making everything look as though it had been varnished. The children were back at their lessons. The library had its winter smell again, dust warmed by the stove and the faint vanilla of old paper, and I had spent the morning on the ladder in the history section, putting back books that students had shelved according to a private system known only to themselves. She came to the library, where I was shelving books, and she stood in the doorway the way she always stood in doorways — as though she was not quite sure the building had the right to keep her out. She had not changed. That was the first thing. Sixteen years had passed over Riverside and over me — there was grey at my temple now that Iris liked to find and announce — but the Keeper stood there exac

On my fortieth birthday, I stood in the doorway of the cottage and realised I had lived two complete lives. It was early, and the mountain had not yet decided what kind of day it would be. Mist lay in the valley like milk left standing in a bowl. The air smelled of cold stone and woodsmoke and the thyme Aurora insisted on growing in cracked pots along the step, where nothing sensible should have survived and everything she planted somehow did. I had a cup of tea going cold in my hands and bare feet on a threshold that had worn smooth under a great many other people's boots, and I thought, with no warning at all: I have been two women. One as the woman born into House Vale, shaped by position and protection and the expectations of people who had decided who I should be. That woman had been beautifully dressed and perfectly positioned and never once asked what she wanted for breakfast. She had learned to smile in a receiving line while her feet bled inside her shoes. She had learned t

The story does not end. That is what I have learned. It just becomes clearer. On the day that Iris turned twenty-one, she came to me and told me that she had been accepted to study at the Keeper's temple. She wanted to learn the work that Cassian did. She wanted to help people see across the threads of time. She told me in the garden, with dirt on her hands, because she had always delivered her largest news while doing something small. At six she had confessed to breaking Aurora's inkwell while shelling peas. At fourteen she had announced she was in love with the blacksmith's apprentice while scrubbing a pan with such violence that the pan never recovered. Now she knelt among the bean rows, tugging at bindweed, and said the words to the soil rather than to me. "The letter came last week," she said. "I have read it eleven times. I wanted to be sure it was real before I let you be happy about it." "And are you sure?" She sat back on her heels and looked up at me, and she had her fa