Chapter 4

Chapter 4: A Different Welcome

Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation

The Welcoming was the same.

That was the cruel little fact of it. The lawn was the same green. The garlands were the same white-and-silver. The trestle tables were laid with the same Silvercrest service, plate after plate of cold venison and apricots and the small honey cakes Cook only made twice a year. The string quartet on the pavilion had been hired from the same Bluemoon house since before I was born. Even the smell was the same — cut grass, river damp, the faint smoke of the kitchen fire two courtyards away.

I had stood on this lawn for the first time as a girl who fell in love.

I would stand on it today as a woman who had been burned alive, and I would not let one inch of grass know it.

"Selene." Mother caught my elbow at the bottom of the steps. Eleanor Hartwell at full court was something I had forgotten how to look at. Her dark hair was up, sapphire combs glinting; her grey eyes were searching my face with the careful concern of a woman who had raised four pups and could feel a flinch from across a room. "Your colour is high. Are you well?"

"Excited," I lied, and smiled the smile I had used in the past life on a dozen Crescent Fang elders before they sentenced me to fire. "Camilla looks well."

"Camilla looks like she has not slept since the equinox," Mother said, and laughed under her breath, and let me go. "Stand by your father. The Cross delegation is at the gate."

The Cross delegation.

I had practised this. Three years in another life of standing at his elbow, pouring his tea, smiling at his lies. I had practised, this morning, the only thing I needed to practise: nothing.

I crossed the gravel to where Father stood at the head of the receiving line. Magnus Hartwell was a great square shape of a man, broad and grey-streaked and dressed in slate; his hand on my shoulder when I reached him was as warm and steady as my memory of him. He looked down at me and his eyes softened.

"There you are."

"Here I am," I said.

"Eleanor told me you were quiet at breakfast."

"Eleanor exaggerates."

"Eleanor never exaggerates." His mouth moved at the corner. "Eyes up, daughter. Smile when they bow. Do not give the Cross boy more than three sentences in a row. He has a habit of taking five."

I laughed. I had not expected to laugh. It came out of me like a small green leaf.

"Yes, Father."

The Cross carriages came down the drive in a slow line, banners blue-and-black, four matched bays at each axle, drivers in pressed livery. I counted them the way I had once counted the buttons on Damien's wedding coat: as a thing to be done with my hands while the rest of me waited.

The first carriage stopped. The footman handed down a man in his fifties — Lord Brennan Cross, Damien's great-uncle, a small, dry, courteous wolf I had always quietly liked. He bowed to my father. My father bowed back. Words were exchanged that I did not hear because my body had begun to lock around the thing it knew was coming.

The second carriage stopped.

The footman opened the door.

Damien Cross stepped down onto the gravel of my father's drive.

I had thought I had prepared for this. I had spent two days, in the long red wreckage of memory, picturing this exact moment: the height of him, the line of his shoulder under the indigo coat, the way his hair fell out of its tie when he moved his head. I had imagined the smile.

I had not imagined that the smile would still, for the smallest, traitor instant, do something to me.

It was the way the body remembered. Three years of being his. Three years of his hand at the small of my back, his mouth at the curve of my throat, the easy comfortable lie of him. The body did not know yet that the soul had walked back through fire to hate him.

It would learn.

I let the instant pass without moving a muscle on my face. The smile that he turned on the receiving line — the one he had been practising in mirrors since he was sixteen — found my father, found my mother, found my sister at the corner of the lawn, and finally, with a slow public arc that I now recognised as theatre, found me.

"Lady Selene." He stepped forward; he bowed, exactly the right depth. He held out his hand for mine in the formal welcome. "It is a pleasure to be received at Silvercrest."

I did not give him my hand.

I let it stay at my side. I let it stay there long enough that the silence around the receiving line stretched one heartbeat, two, three. I felt my mother's stillness behind me. I felt Lyra, on the lawn, stop chewing on her lemon ice.

I dipped my head. The smallest possible curtsy. The kind a Lady made for a foreign minor noble whose name she had not bothered to learn.

"Lord Damien."

His outstretched hand hung in the air for a moment longer. Then, with a smoothness that had once made me think him gracious, he turned the gesture into a sweep toward the lawn, as if he had only been indicating the way. His smile did not falter. It widened, in fact. He had always loved a challenge.

"You are taller than I remembered," he said.

"You remembered me?" I said, mildly.

His pause was very small. A woman who had not been married to him would not have caught it.

"I saw you last summer at the Bluemoon hunt. You were thirteen. You shot a partridge cleanly through the neck and asked the cook for the feathers."

I had been sixteen, not thirteen, and the partridge had been a pheasant, and I had been seated three tables down from him at supper afterwards and he had not so much as glanced at me. He had glanced at the back of Camilla Yates' second daughter, who had been wearing an unfortunate yellow.

"How kind of you to remember a child," I said.

His eyes — clear blue, ringed in slate — found mine for the first time and held. There was the little flicker. There was the man underneath the man, the one only Vivienne and the dead and I had ever been allowed to see. He was reweighting me. He had come here expecting a girl who blushed.

I looked back at him without blushing.

"Father," I said, turning slightly. "Lord Brennan, I believe, is asking after Mother's roses."

"He is not," Father murmured, but he turned with me, smooth as old wood, and Lord Brennan, who was a tactful old wolf, took the cue and asked after Mother's roses on the spot. The receiving line fell back into motion. The gravel made the little crisp sound of small social wheels resetting.

Damien did not let me pass.

"Lady Selene." Quieter, now. A shade of warmth in the voice; the first move in a longer game. "Walk with me. I should like to know the gardens."

"The gardens are this way," I said, and gestured exactly the direction Mother and three of the older Bluemoon ladies had already drifted, and waited.

He laughed — a soft, charming, surprised laugh. Heads turned. Lyra, on the lawn, lifted both eyebrows.

"With company, then."

"Always with company, Lord Damien," I said. "I'm not in the habit of walking alone with men whose name my father has only said three times this morning."

The laugh faltered, half a breath. He covered it well. Three years' practice at his elbow had taught me where the seams were in him; today I was reading them like a book.

"You will think me forward."

"I will think you a guest," I said, gentling, because I did not want my father to come back through that crowd and have to mediate. "And our guests are very welcome here."

He took the polite door I had left him. He bowed. He stepped back. He turned, and as he turned he raised his hand, briefly, to his great-uncle in some private signal I would have given my left ear to hear named.

I did not watch him go. I turned my back on him with the deliberate, small cruelty of a woman who knew exactly the angle from which he would see her shoulders and exactly the message her shoulders would send.

Lyra arrived at my elbow approximately one second after he was out of polite earshot.

"Sis," she hissed.

"Smile," I said, smiling.

"I am smiling. I am also having a small heart attack. What did you do?"

"I greeted a guest."

"You greeted a guest with the warmth of a salted herring. He looked like someone had hit him."

"Did he."

"He looked like — Selene. That was Damien Cross."

"I'm aware."

"Damien Cross," she repeated, as if I needed it spelled out. "Three packs east of us. Heir to the Crescent Fang. A good face on him. Father has been muttering for a year that he wants you in that room when he and Lord Brennan finally talk treaty, because Damien Cross might or might not be politely sniffing in your direction —"

"Lyra."

"— and you just curtsied at him like he's a mid-rank deputy from a pack we've never heard of."

"Lyra," I said, quieter.

She looked at my face. Whatever she saw there, it stopped her mid-sentence; she closed her mouth so fast I heard her teeth meet.

"Did Father ever tell you," I said, conversationally, "the story about Great-Aunt Maren and the Whitlock match?"

"The one where she was twenty-two and they tried to marry her into Whitlock to settle the river border, and she said no on the front step because she'd had a dream a week before that the man would lock her in a room."

"That one."

"Yes."

"Hold that story for me, will you?"

Lyra's eyes, hazel and miss-nothing, fixed on me. She had been my child sister yesterday and she would be my child sister tomorrow, but she had grown up watching wolves; she knew what a hunting face looked like when she saw one. She did not ask the obvious question. She did not ask any question at all.

"All right," she said.

"Thank you."

"Selene."

"Mm."

"If you are going to keep looking at people like that, please tell me before you do it. I want to be holding a champagne glass and standing in front of someone I want to impress."

I laughed. I had laughed twice in twenty minutes. The morning was getting away from me.

"Eat your ice, brat. The Bluemoon delegation is coming up the path and you've got lemon down your sleeve."

She glanced at her sleeve, made a sound of betrayal, and abandoned me for a napkin. I stood alone on the gravel for one breath, two breaths, three, with the murmur of the lawn around me and a small bright cold thing settling under my breastbone where my heart used to live.

Lord Damien Cross had walked onto my father's drive expecting a girl who would blush.

He had instead met the woman who watched him strike the match.

I lifted my chin. I took, from a passing footman, a flute of pale wine I would not drink. I walked into my own party with my mother's posture and my father's name and a knife I had not yet shown anyone in my sleeve.

The Welcoming was the same.

I was not.