Chapter 10

Chapter 10: Vesper Speaks

Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation

The rest of the gala happened to me at a small careful distance.

I have, on looking back at it, an exact and shining memory of the worst of it and a very thin tracery of the rest. I remember Damien turning, finally, to follow my eyes; I remember the small soft sound he made when he saw who was standing in the door of my father's hall behind him; I remember the courtly, beautifully absent way he stepped back into the hall as if he had only come outside to admire the rain. I remember Kael Drakon not, in any way, looking at him as he passed.

I remember being presented.

I remember my mother's fingers cold on my wrist as she walked me up the long length of the hall to the dais. I remember Lord Brennan's small white face. I remember Lady Whitlock saying, very loud, into her tea, "Hm." I remember curtsying, exactly the right depth for a daughter of an Alpha to a Lycan King. I remember the dry, gravelled, far-too-careful voice of him saying, "Lady Selene Hartwell. I have heard your name twice this season. The pleasure is mine," and the quiet thing in my chest that pulled, hard, when he said the word pleasure as if he were testing the temperature of a knife.

I remember, very clearly, his eyes never moving from my face for the eight seconds of the formal exchange.

I do not remember the orchestra after that. I do not remember the dance set. I do not, in any meaningful way, remember leaving the hall. I remember a Lycan delegation departing in a manner so precise it looked rehearsed; I remember Caspian Drakon kissing the back of Lady Whitlock's hand with such theatre that she barked a laugh; I remember Father, after the door closed behind them, drawing a long breath and saying, very dry, to my mother, "That was a season we were not having."

I remember being walked, by Mother, up the long stair to my own door, in a small thoughtful warm grip on my elbow that did not, even once, ask the question her eyes were holding.

I remember closing my door.

And then I remember sitting down very slowly on the edge of my bed, in moonlight grey silk that smelled of rain, and saying, into the dark of my own ribs:

"All right. I'm listening."

The voice did not, at first, answer.

I had thought, in the half hour between the dais and my own door, that perhaps I had imagined her. The bond had been so loud, in the great hall, that any number of small shaping things might have come up out of me on the noise of it. I had been seventeen and reborn for six weeks; I had been writing letters to widows in Ironclaw at five in the morning and reading newspapers in three pack capitals; I had not, perhaps, been entirely sane.

I waited.

I waited a full minute.

"About time you noticed me, sister," said the voice, with the lazy satisfaction of a creature uncoiling. "I was getting bored."

I let out one entire breath I had not, in six weeks, breathed.

"You can't be here yet."

"Mm. And yet."

"Wolves don't speak before first transformation. We're months from my first transformation. We're nine months, last life, from my first transformation. Vesper —"

"Oh, you remember my name. Sweet."

"— Vesper. Why are you awake."

"You have, sister, a great deal of catching up to do, and we will do it. Tonight is not, however, the night."

"It is precisely the night."

"It is not."

"It is."

"You have just stood in your father's hall in front of the man who is going to be the most important thing in our life, and you have curtsied at him at the depth of a footman, and you have walked out without giving him your dance card. We will have a great deal to discuss in the morning, sister, but tonight you are going to take that wet dress off, you are going to lie down, and you are going to let me speak to you only when I cannot stop myself."

"I am not," I said, "going to discuss my dance card with you."

"Oh, we are going to discuss the dance card."

"I am taking the dress off because the dress is wet, not because you have told me to."

"Of course, sister."

I stood. I walked, on legs that had remembered how to be legs, to my dressing screen. I undid the buttons at my back myself; I did not call my maid. I peeled the wet silk off in a long slow sigh and let it pool on the floor. I pulled the warmest old robe of my mother's from the foot of the bed over me. I did not, on principle, turn the lamp up.

I sat back down.

"Vesper."

"Mm."

"Tell me, then. Tell me what you are."

"I am your wolf, sister. The same wolf you would have had in either life. The only difference is that, in the life you do not need to remember any more, I would have come up to you for the first time at twenty-four, in a forest north of Crescent Fang, on the night you ran from a husband who had begun to bruise you. I would have been, on that night, so frightened of him that I would not have come well. We would have been a small wolf together. We would have been, sister, ashamed."

I had to put my hand over my mouth.

"I am not that wolf, this time. I am the wolf I would have been if you had not, in your other life, been bent. I am the wolf the Moon Goddess gave back. I am, sister, considerably more annoying than I would have been, and I am very early."

"How early."

"Months early. The first transformation will still be when it is. But I will speak to you in the meantime, when I think you need it."

"You think I need it now."

"You sat on the edge of the bed in a wet dress for forty seconds. I think you needed me thirty-five seconds ago."

I laughed. I had not laughed in private in six weeks. The laugh came out of me low and damp and a little embarrassed. I drew my knees up under the robe and I rested my forehead on them and I let the laugh shake out.

"Vesper."

"Mm."

"You said, in the hall, found him."

"I did say that, sister."

"You said it as if you had been looking."

"I said it as if we had been looking, sister. I am, you may recall, you. We have been looking. We did not know we had been. We have always preferred a tall man with quiet hands and bad eyes for nonsense."

"He is —"

"Two hundred and thirty years old. Yes."

"He is a Lycan King."

"Yes."

"I am the daughter of an Alpha of a third-rank pack who was, six weeks ago, married to a man who set fire to me on a dais in front of his elders."

"Yes."

"I am not — Vesper, I am not in any condition, in any reading of the facts, to be the mate of a Lycan King."

"Mm."

"I am not — listen to me. Listen. I have a thing to do, before I am anyone's mate. I have a man to take apart. I have a woman to drag through every hall in this region. I have a father to keep alive, and a sister to keep alive, and a Beta with kind eyes to keep alive, and if I let — if I let the King of all the Lycans pull me into his orbit before I have finished the work, then everything I have done in six weeks goes onto his ledger and not mine. The pack will say oh, the King had business with Damien Cross. They will say oh, the Hartwell girl was clever, but she had a powerful friend. I will not have it said. I will not have it thought. I am going to do this thing, and when I am done I am going to walk into Drakhold on my own two feet and tell that man he is mine; but I am not going to go into Drakhold on his arm before I have earned the room I will stand in."

The wolf was quiet a long beat.

"Sister."

"Yes."

"That was a beautiful speech."

"Thank you."

"I have one revision."

"Of course you do."

"You will not chase him. We will not, sister, chase him; that is agreed. I will not nudge you toward Drakhold one minute before you have wrung Damien Cross out by his own neck. But, sister."

"Yes."

"If he comes for you while you are working — if he so much as writes to you, sister, while you are working — you will not pretend you do not feel it. You will let him in. You will let him in carefully, on terms; you will let him in at his own pace, since he will move slowly because he is a man who has spent two centuries waiting; but you will not, sister, in the name of your throne, lie to him about what we are."

"That is —"

"Reasonable, sister. That is reasonable. I am being reasonable."

"Vesper."

"Mm."

"Why are you on my side."

"Sister. I am you. I have always been on your side. The only difference is that, in the life you do not need to remember, you spent the years before me being told that being on your own side was rude. We are being rude now."

I lifted my head. I did not, for once, mind the small wet places under my eyes.

"Yes," I said. "We are."

"Then sleep, sister. We have a treaty."

"We have a treaty."

"And, sister?"

"Mm."

"I am picking out our wedding dress."

I laughed, out loud, into the pillow. The laugh was the first uncomplicated thing in either of my lives, and it broke open around something warm under my ribs, and I curled into it like a girl curling into a bed she had not been allowed to sleep in for years.

I slept.

Across the eastern lawn, beyond the drive, beyond the river, half a country away in the storm dark of the mountains, I dreamed I felt the small steady tug of the bond go on, very gently, like a tide, in the direction of a window I had not yet seen. I dreamed a man with gold eyes laid his hand against the inside of that window, fingers spread wide, and rested his forehead on the back of his own hand, and stood there, in the dark of his own house, for a long time.

I dreamed he did not move until the rain stopped.