Chapter 9

Chapter 9: A King in the Crowd

Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation

I came back into the hall on the back of my own first knife and walked, smiling, the long length of it to my chair.

The hall was already, six weeks of summer parties' worth of trained, folding the Vivienne moment around itself like a napkin around a stain. The chandeliers swung; the orchestra in the gallery ran, with practised diplomacy, into a dance set; the older guests stood and the younger ones drifted toward the orangery and the marble floor of the cleared centre. Father caught my eye from his seat at the head of the table and lifted a brow a fraction of an inch. You good? the brow said, in fifty years of fatherhood. I lifted my chin in return. I am.

I had perhaps four minutes of being good.

The first sign was the silence. Not a fall of silence — a thin, pulled, listening kind, the kind a hall makes when something at the back of it has come in unannounced. The second sign was the way the orchestra, mid-phrase, faltered for half a bar before the conductor caught them.

The third sign was the air.

I felt it before I heard it — before I turned. A pressure went through the great hall the way pressure goes through a forest before a storm; a low quiet weight that the body knew and the mind did not yet name. The hair at the back of my neck rose. The silver at the lip of my watered-wine glass shivered, faintly, against my fingers. Behind me, at the far end of the hall, a footman drew breath.

"Their Majesties of Drakhold," he said, into the small bowl of stillness.

I did not turn at first.

I could not.

I had been ready, since the morning of the pyre, for many things — for Damien's mouth, for Vivienne's smile, for Father's grief and Mother's fear and Lyra's sharp surprised love. I had not been ready for this. The Lycans did not come to pack galas. They had not come to a Silvercrest function in nine years. There had been no card of intent. There had been no whisper. The only thing in my entire reborn life that I had not, in some shape, foreseen, had walked through my father's main door.

I made my body turn.

The Lycan delegation came in three pieces. The first piece was three guards — tall, hooded, black-coated, the shoulders on them broader than any wolf I had seen at any party in either life. They moved like one animal in three skins. They spread, automatic, against the wall on either side of the door, and the chandelier light slid off their shoulders and went out.

The second piece was a young Lord I would later know was Caspian Drakon. He came in laughing at something one of the guards had just said, with a dueling sword on his hip and a half-undone collar and a smile that suggested he had not, in his entire two hundred years, taken a single ballroom seriously. He saluted my father across the room with the courteous, lazy nod of a Lycan younger brother who had been to a thousand of these, and stepped to one side.

The third piece was him.

The hall, which had been holding its breath, let out a small involuntary sound — half the older Alphas and three-quarters of the younger ones, on instinct, leaning their heads down, the way wolves leaned them when something larger than themselves had walked into a clearing. Mother's hand flew to her throat. Lord Brennan, beside her, set his glass down with one finger as if afraid he would break it. Lady Whitlock, in her chair at the table, said, very loud, "Oh," and forgot, for once, to follow it with anything.

Kael Drakon stood in the door of my father's hall.

I had heard him described, in the past life, by people who had only seen portraits. The Lycan King, they had said, stands six and a half feet tall in his stockings, as if that were the most impressive thing about him. It was not. The most impressive thing about him was the way the room around him reordered itself by a small uneasy degree, the way iron filings reorder themselves around a magnet they have not been shown. He was in black — black coat, black collar, black gloves — and the only colour on him was the gold of his eyes, which were the gold of old wedding bands, and the very thin red of an old scar over his left brow.

His eyes moved across the hall.

I felt the line of them like a hand. They went over Lord Brennan, over my father, over the Bluemoon dowager, over the cleared dance floor, over Damien Cross — paused on Damien for a fraction of a second — and on, and on, and —

They found me.

I had been ready for many things. I had not been ready for this either.

The bond — which I had not, in the past life, ever felt, which I had assumed I did not have, which had not so much as twitched in me at any prior wolf's eye in any prior room — slammed into me like a horse hitting a closed gate. Heat went down my spine in one long whip; the breath went out of my lungs in a small surprised oh I bit off before it could shape itself into noise. A tug — there was no other word for it, an actual tug, as if a hand the size of his hand had reached into my ribs and gathered up some loose handful of me and pulled, gently, gently, gently, in his direction. My knees considered going. My knees did not go. I locked them.

Across the hall, his pupils — I saw it from forty feet away, with the sharpness of a creature whose eyes had just been forcibly opened — flared once, dark, and went back. He did not, otherwise, react. He did not lift a hand. He did not move toward me. He did not, even, smile. He only held my eyes.

Inside my chest, a voice spoke for the first time in seventeen years.

It was a quiet voice. It was a dry voice. It was a voice that was not mine.

Found him.

I did not turn my head. I did not look around me to see if anyone had heard her. I had known her, for the half-second she had taken to speak, more thoroughly than I had ever known anyone. She was inside me. She had always been inside me. She had not, in three years and a fire, bothered to say a word.

She was saying one now.

"What," I said back, in the privacy of my own skull, very faintly.

You heard me, sister.

"What," I said again, "are you."

Later.

"Later when."

When you are not standing in your father's hall about to fall over for a stranger. Get out of this room. We will speak in the dark.

I drew breath.

My breath came back ragged. The bond was still pulling, low and steady, the way a tide pulled a small boat. Across the hall, Caspian Drakon had bowed to my father with all the show of formal court; my father had risen and bowed back. Words were being exchanged. The orchestra had, at someone's signal, picked back up. The hall was already pretending nothing had happened. In another moment Mother would be at my elbow and would, with the grace of forty years, walk me up to be presented.

I would not be standing here when that moment came.

I curtsied — the smallest, most polite curtsy a Lady was permitted to make at the entrance of a King to her father's hall. I let my eyes drop. I turned. I walked, on legs that would have shaken if I had not had three years of being Damien's wife at state functions to teach my legs not to, the side length of the long table to the side door of the hall, and out, and across the orchid corridor, and out the great door, and into the courtyard.

It had begun, in the half hour while we ate, to rain.

I stepped out into it. The rain on my face was cold and good. I went, with the same stiff careful gait, around the corner of the building to the colonnade where the household kept the gala carriages, and I stopped, and I put my back, hard, against the marble of the nearest column, and I shook.

I shook for a full minute.

Inside my chest — somewhere lower than my ribs, somewhere deeper than my ribs — a small steady tug went on pulling, very softly, in the direction of the open door I had just walked out of. I pressed my palm flat over the place where it pulled. I closed my eyes. The rain ran into the collar of my dress and down my back; the cold of the marble bit through my shoulder blades and steadied me.

"Sister?" the voice in my chest said, more careful now. "Are we ill?"

"We are not ill."

"I know we are not ill, sister. I am being polite."

"You did not feel polite a moment ago."

"That was business. Move inside, would you. The marble is killing your back."

"I will move," I said, "in a moment."

I did not, however, move. I leaned my full weight on the column. I let the rain cool the back of my throat. I made a small bargain with the body that I would, in two breaths, three, walk back through that door — through the great door, through the orchid corridor, into the great hall, up to the dais, and curtsy properly, and let my mother present me to the Lycan King — and that I would not, between here and there, allow my hands to come unsteady or my voice to thicken or my eyes to drop. I had been Damien's wife on three thousand worse nights. I had been the Lady of Crescent Fang at funerals. I could be the Lady of Silvercrest at a Lycan visit.

"Sister," the voice said.

"What."

"Behind you."

I straightened. I turned my head. Through the open archway of the colonnade, fifteen feet behind me, against the warm light of the gala door, a tall figure was standing watching me.

It was not Kael Drakon.

It was Damien Cross.

He had followed me out, in the wake of his own humiliation in the orangery, and he had — I saw it now, with the cold clarity of a woman who had been married to him — not been able to find Vivienne. He had instead found me. He stood, a black silhouette against the warm hall, with his hands in the pockets of his coat and his shoulders very level and his face, now that the rain caught the side of it, drawn into the small hard satisfied line of a man who had just been, in his own private accounting, given a gift.

He had seen me leave. He had seen me lean against a column. He had seen me shake.

He had not seen the King's eyes find me.

He thought I had been shaking from him.

He thought he had cracked me at last.

I let the rain run down my face. I did not wipe it. I straightened my shoulders against the marble. I looked at him in the warm gala light, and I let my mouth move, very slightly, into a smile that he could not, in the dark of the courtyard, quite read.

"Lord Damien."

"Lady Selene."

He took, in his careful predatory way, half a step forward.

From the bright doorway of the great hall behind him, another shape moved into the rectangle of light.

It was tall. It was black. It did not say anything. It simply stood in the door of my father's house, six feet five and shoulder to shoulder with the frame, with its hands quietly clasped behind its back, and looked, with the gold of old wedding bands, at the back of Damien Cross's head.

Damien did not turn.

Damien did not, for the moment, know.

I let my smile widen, very small, and I did not look at the second figure in the doorway. I let it stand there. I let it watch.

"You should go back inside, Lord Damien," I said. "It is going to be a long evening."