The Trial

They gave me a room with a fire and a barred window and a door that did not lock, which was its own kind of cruelty. A locked door I could have hated cleanly. An open one made me a guest, and I had not come to Highfen to be anyone's guest.

The law called it the Claiming Trial. One moon, the elders explained, during which the refused Alpha kept his fated mate within his household and was permitted to court her consent, and during which the wound of the open bond did its slow work on him. If at the severance I said yes, the bond would complete and he would live. If I said no, it would break, and he would not.

I had wanted him dead. I told myself this, lying awake that first night with the bond humming low in my chest like a banked coal. I had wanted exactly this. The moon had simply handed me a slower blade.

But a tyrant is easy to kill, and Soren Vayle would not behave like one.

He did not come to my room. He did not send for me. When we crossed paths in the long stone halls he gave me distance and a grave nod, as if I were a visiting Alpha and not a conquered girl who had announced his death to the world. The second morning I found a tray outside my door with the food I had eaten at the Accord, the exact dishes, which meant someone had watched closely enough to know. I left it untouched on principle and despised how the gesture lodged in me anyway.

"He won't press you," Hesper told me, changing the dressing on a kitchen burn I'd taken on purpose, to have a reason to roam the household. "Some would. The law lets him court hard. There are Alphas who'd have had you weeping yes by the third night and called it wooing." She tied off the linen. "Not this one. He'll die first, I think, before he'll take a thing you don't give."

"Then he's a fool," I said.

"Likely," she agreed, and did not argue it.

I told myself she was wrong, or lying, until the night I came around a corner in the lower hall and found him alone. He had not heard me. He stood with one hand braced against the cold stone and his head bowed, and his whole great frame was shaking, a fine, continuous tremor, the kind a body makes when it is spending strength it does not have. The bond in my chest gave a sympathetic, sickening lurch. I watched the most feared Alpha on the coast master it, breath by breath, alone in the dark where no one was meant to see. Then he straightened, and the iron came back into him like a door closing, and he walked on without knowing I was there.

It was real, then. Not an elder's tale to soften me. My refusal was killing him by inches, and he was carrying it in private so his pack would not see their Alpha weaken.

I should have felt triumph. I had sworn over my father's body to feel exactly that. Instead I stood in the dark with my hand pressed to the burning place in my chest, the same way he pressed his, and I was furious, at him, for being harder to hate than I had planned. At myself, for the question rising in me that had no business being there.

One moon. I had one moon to decide whether to let him die. And from somewhere down the hall, soft and patient and far too interested, I heard another voice, the visiting councilor, Castellan Rourke of Karn, who had stayed on past the Accord when every other pack had gone home, ask a servant, ever so kindly, how the Alpha was sleeping these nights.