The old woman in gray at the foot of the table let her pompous voice carry the length of the hall. “Tell us, my lady. Do you think there will be war between Valdren and your homeland of Aravelle? ”
Isra set down her cup with great care because her hands had begun to shake, and she could not let the hall see it.
She’d been in the court of Valdren for a matter of days. None of them knew the truth. No one suspected she was anyone but the future queen of Valdren. No one knew she was the true queen’s twin sister, an impostor wearing her sibling’s name, clothes, and title like a stolen cloak, whilst her twin had snuck away like a thief in the night.
“A few weeks,” Nadira had promised. “We have the same face. Just keep quiet. Play sick if you have to, and I’ll be back before you know it.
” She had not told her why she’d had to go. As always, Isra had obeyed. Hundreds of eyes latched onto her expression, waiting like vultures for the carcass of her response. And Isra did not know how to lie.
Life as a priestess had not prepared her for the ways of the court. The silence stretched. The enormous hall rose around her in cold, gray stone and gold banners, lit by a hundred candles that threw more shadow than light. The nobles’ expressions were turning.
Why was she taking so long to respond? Tightening her hands into fists, she took a breath. Focus. Take your time.
That was what Nadira had told her to do. “As long as our marriage lasts,” she answered at last, projecting her voice the way Nadira had taught her, and let a small smile touch her mouth. “I see nothing to suggest war. ”
The old woman blinked, surprised, but inclined her head, accepting the reply.
Isra breathed again through the ache behind her ribs. Three weeks ago, though it felt like three lifetimes, she had been kneeling at the altar of the Temple of the Silver Flame, where she had lived and worshipped since she was seven years old. Then her twin sister had arrived, stumbling in from the downpour with blood on her sleeve, and a demand that ended Isra’s small, ordered life in a single sentence. “Please, take my place.
”
Nadira had been the clever, worldly one, raised for court while their parents gave the gentler, second-born twin to the goddess. Nadira had been sent north as a bride to seal the truce between Valdren and their kingdom of Aravelle. For a while, things had gone well. Then something had gone deeply wrong, and Nadira had had to vanish.
And the betrothed of the Alpha King of Valdren could not simply disappear. It would shatter the fragile truce, and war would swallow them both. “I can’t,” Isra had whispered, even as her sister pressed the traveling cloak into her arms. “I’m no courtier, Nadira.
I don’t know how to be you. I’ve never so much as left these walls. ”
“There’s only you,” Nadira had said, taking her face in both cold hands. “For crown, for kingdom, for family.
”
So what could Isra have said but yes? She’d never once found the way to tell Nadira no. “You’re quieter than usual,” said a voice at her side, low and even. Isra turned to the man she was learning to fear more than anyone here.
Emrick of Valdren did not look like the tyrant she’d expected. The Alpha King was younger than she had imagined, broad-shouldered and plainly dressed, dark gold hair cropped short. It was his eyes that undid her. A deep cobalt blue, and the way they rested on her face was so piercing she panicked internally.
“The road was long,” Isra said, holding eye contact with difficulty. “And your court is not an easy room to speak in. ”
“No,” he agreed dryly. “It isn’t.
I’ve sat on this dais my whole life, and it’s still as difficult as the first day. ” He paused, watching her thoughtfully. “When you came in the spring, you had an opinion on everything. You told my treasurer his accounts were a disgrace, to his face, in front of the whole court.
He hasn’t forgiven you, you know. ”
Isra felt the floor go thin beneath her. Nadira had not briefed her on every single thing she had said. Her whole counsel had been: keep quiet, say as little as possible.
“Perhaps I overstepped then,” she offered. “I came here certain of many things. Maybe it’s time I learned to listen. ”
For a long moment, he said nothing.
“Well, that’s new,” he said at last, turning his cup slowly in his hand. “Perhaps the last few months with us have rubbed some wisdom off on you. ”
Isra inclined her head and did not trust herself to answer. The lean, dark man at the king’s right hand had not touched his food.
He had watched her throughout the entire exchange and was still staring. When she met his eyes, he did not look away. Lord Barther, she had been told. The beta.
The king’s shadow and his sword. He smiled at her, courteous and cold. She survived the rest of the feast by speaking little and listening much, gathering every scrap the court dropped about the woman she was meant to be. When at last she was permitted to withdraw, she walked from the room with her chin level and her hands folded and her heart going like a struck drum.
It was only when the door of her borrowed chamber closed behind her that she let herself come apart. She sank to the cold stone, her sister’s silken skirts pooling around her, and pressed both hands over her mouth until the shaking passed. A few weeks, she told herself. Only a few weeks and Nadira would be back.
Keep silent. Don’t be discovered. And she could go home again. She had no idea that before long, she would want to stay more than anything in the world.
Nine days later, she sat in the high gallery above the tournament field and clapped when the others clapped, rose when they rose, and prayed no one would ask her to do anything. The field below was a churn of color and noise, banners snapping in the gray wind, warriors in their house colors. She’d never been to a tournament before. Nadira had been right.
If she kept to herself and asked questions instead of starting conversations, the lords and ladies were more than happy to talk about themselves. She had learned that the truly dangerous moments were never the grand ones. It was the small things—the name of a handmaid, the wine Nadira had favored, the way her sister laughed easy and bright where Isra’s own laugh came out careful and soft. Then a horn cut across the crowd, high and clear, and the whole vast gathering began to quiet.
A herald climbed the gallery steps and bowed before her, holding out a folded length of crimson silk on a cushion. Every face turned to her. What on earth was she supposed to do? Distantly, she remembered something about ladies bestowing favors upon knights.
But on whom? There were a dozen warriors on the field, and she knew none of their names. The silence stretched, thin and dangerous. She glanced sideways to find the king watching her, a small crease between his brows, his head tilted a fraction.
Confused. Move. Move now. She rose, took the silk as confidently as she could, and let her eyes sweep the field.
There, nearest the gallery, a broad young warrior had just unhelmed, sweat-darkened and grinning up at her. She crossed to the rail and held the silk down to him. The grin died. A ripple went through the stands, a low, confused murmur.
The young warrior took the silk because he could not refuse it, but his face had gone red, and the men around him would not meet her eyes. Wrong man. Oh goddess, what have I done? She lifted her chin, letting a small, serene smile settle on her mouth as though she had meant it all along.
“He fights without house or banner,” she said, pitching her voice clear enough to carry. “I am told Valdren honors strength above birth. Even the lowest deserves their glory in the sun. ”
A few of the older warriors nodded slowly, and the murmur shifted from confusion to thoughtful.
Isra sat back down and did not breathe until her heart slowed. “That was kind of you,” Emrick said. “The Nadira I met would have given that silk to the highest title on the field without a second glance. ”
Isra’s stomach dropped.
“I told you—I have had time to think these past months about what I truly value. ”
“So you say,” he studied her a moment longer, then mercifully looked back to the field. The afternoon wore on. Between bouts, Emrick leaned close again, his voice pitched for her alone.
“Do you remember what you told me the first night we met about why you’d agreed to the betrothal? I’ve thought about your reply more than once since. ”
Isra’s mind went white. She had no idea.
“I said it was my duty,” she tried. Something flickered behind his face. The wrong answer. “Ah,” he said.
“I’d remembered it differently. No matter. ”
Worse, far worse, Lord Barther was rising from his seat, coming toward her along the gallery, his eyes fixed on her face. She stood before he could reach him.
“Forgive me, my lord, I find I need air. Might I withdraw? ”
She was gone before he could answer, down the gallery steps and into the cool dim of the castle, and she felt Barther’s eyes on her spine the whole way down. In her chamber, she sank against the door and pressed both hands over her mouth.
She, who had never told a lie in her life until nine days ago, was now lying badly, publicly, with a kingdom’s peace balanced on her clumsy tongue. When the trembling eased, she knelt on the cold stone, the way she had every night of her life, and she prayed. “Mother of the moon, give me guidance. I am so far from home.
I do not know how to be brave like my sister. Show me how much longer I must endure. ”
The room gave her no answer. Only the wind at the high window, and somewhere below, faint, the roar of the crowd.
Afterward, she wrote to Nadira in the careful code her sister had taught her. “It is harder than you said. A man here watches me. How much longer must I stay?
When are you coming back? ”
She sealed it and sent it by the silent route, the way she had sent four letters before it. Nadira had answered none of them. For the first time, it did not feel like patience.
It felt like something had gone wrong. By the third week, Isra had stopped drowning. She no longer froze when a noble addressed her by a name that wasn’t hers. She had learned to turn questions back on the asker, to let a thoughtful silence stand in for answers.
And she had managed to keep well clear of Lord Barther. It was the garden that undid her, though not in any way she might have feared. She had found it in her second week, a forgotten square of green tucked behind the east wing, walled in old stone, the gate half off its hinge. Its calmness reminded her of her temple.
Now she came every dawn before the castle woke. This morning the dew was still on the leaves, and the first real sun of the season warmed the stones. She knelt among the herbs with her sleeves pushed back and her hair loosening from its pins. For a little while, she was not an impostor, not a liar.
She was only a woman in a garden. “The last person I saw in this garden was the head gardener,” said a voice behind her. “And he retired eight years ago. ”
She turned, and Emrick was leaning in the archway, arms crossed, watching her.
Without the trappings of kingship, there was just the man himself. Broad of shoulder, the open collar bearing the strong line of his throat. The morning light caught the gold in his hair and the cobalt of his eyes, and he was beautiful. “I found rosemary,” she said.
But Emrick smiled, a small thing that changed his whole face, softened the hard carved authority of him into something startlingly, dangerously warm. “So you did,” he agreed. He came closer. “When you came in the spring, you called this a damp little kingdom full of mud.
”
“I have been thinking about roots lately,” she said, letting the truth do her lying for her. “About what holds in unfamiliar ground. A thing has to put down something, or the first hard wind takes it. ”
“That sounds like someone homesick.
”
“It sounds like someone deciding what home means,” she answered with a gentle smile. To her astonishment, he crossed the garden and sat on the worn stone bench across from her, elbows on his knees, as though he had nowhere in all his kingdom he needed to be. “May I ask you something? ” she asked.
“Did you choose to be king, or did the crown choose you? ”
“My father died when I was young,” he said at last. “There was no choosing in it. I did not choose the crown.
I chose not to let it fall. That is the only choice a man in my place is ever offered. ”
“That is not the same thing,” she said softly. “No.
It is not. But it is what I had. ”
He studied her for a long, quiet moment. “You are not what I expected,” he said, not as an accusation, but almost as a wonder.
She rose to leave because she did not trust what her face was doing. He rose, too, and he was close, closer than protocol allowed, and the morning air carried his scent to her—sandalwood and rain on hot stone. And deep in her chest, in the place she had kept shut and silent for fifteen years, something stirred. Her wolf, awake and reaching.
She went very still. The moment drew out, taut and humming. Then he stepped back. “The garden suits you, Lady Nadira,” he said.
The wrong name in the right voice, gentle as a blessing. She dropped into a small curtsy and walked from the garden with her chin level and her hands folded. The moment the gate was behind her, she pressed a hand flat to her hammering heart. Being caught was no longer the worst thing that could happen to her.
And worse—what if he could feel it, too? The king was hunting boar, and Isra had not been given the choice of staying behind. It was an old Valdren custom, the first great hunt as the autumn turned. So when the summons came, she swallowed her dread, let them dress her in Nadira’s fine riding leathers, and rode out with the rest.
The fog came down at dawn, thick and white, swallowing the riders ahead until they were only shapes. She kept her mare well to the back of the party. Since the garden, she had stayed well away from the king, away from the scent that woke her hungry wolf. She had let it be quietly known through a blushing handmaid that it was her woman’s time.
A small, shameful little lie, but it bought her distance. A set of strong fingers gripped her arm. Lord Barther had emerged from the fog without a sound. “You have been difficult to track down for some weeks now, my lady.
One might think you were hiding something. ”
She made herself meet his eyes. “And why do you seek me out, Lord Barther? ”
“I have served Emrick since we were boys.
I read people well, for the safety of the king. And you, my lady, are not who you were. The woman who came to us would have had my hand off her arm and a sharp word in my ear before I’d finished the sentence. ”
“Having a spine need not always be shown with bared teeth,” she answered evenly.
“I remembered a teaching I had let myself forget. Humility. The grace of holding one’s tongue when in another’s house. You mistake a lost spine for learning my place in your king’s hall.
”
For a long moment, Barther said nothing. His eyes flicked to the corner of her mouth, to the small mole there—the one telltale difference between her and her sister. He opened his mouth to press further, and a shout went up ahead, ragged through the fog. The boar.
“We are not finished, my lady. ” And then he wheeled his horse toward the cry and spurred away into the white. Alone in the fog, her heart still slamming from Barther’s grip, she nearly laughed aloud. She had gotten away with it again.
But she could not keep living on luck. And when, oh when, was Nadira coming back for her? The boar came out of the fog like something flung. It burst from the white, not ahead of her but to the side, vast and black, tusked and squealing, and crashed across her path not three lengths away.
The mare screamed and reared. Isra grabbed for the pommel, the reins, anything, and caught nothing. The world turned over, and she struck the frozen earth hard enough to drive every breath from her body. Emrick was off his horse before it had fully stopped, on his knees in the frozen mud beside her, raw fear in his face.
He slid an arm beneath her shoulders and raised her gently until the air came back in a great, whooping gasp. And the world caught fire. It went through her the instant his bare fingers found hers. Her wolf surged up from the deep, forgotten place, so hard and so fast her vision blurred.
This was not the soft warmth of the garden. This was old and deep, and it had teeth. Mate. Mine.
Emrick went rigid. He felt it. His jaw locked hard, his nostrils flaring. For one suspended heartbeat, his hands tightened on hers.
Then he let go. “Your scent is different,” he said, his voice carefully level. “When you first came to Valdren, you smelled of amber. Now you smell of temple incense and wildflowers.
”
“A new perfume,” she said, too brightly. “From home. My mother sent it north. ”
Emrick held her gaze.
“I do not believe you. ”
After the hunt, Isra made herself small. She took her meals in her rooms. She stayed hidden, out of sight.
So when the library door opened one night and Emrick stepped through, her heart nearly stopped. She had chosen this room precisely because it was a forgotten corner of the castle, high and cold, where she had taken to hiding after dark. Not once had anyone found her here. And yet here he was.
He had come looking. “You hide very well,” he said. He filled the doorway, then crossed to the small table where her candle burned. “The spring version of you never once let me finish a sentence.
”
“Perhaps I’m shy,” she suggested. He folded himself into the chair across from her and poured himself a glass of wine. “Why do you hide? You’re not just avoiding Lord Barther or the public gatherings.
You’re avoiding me. ”
She held his gaze. “Do you not also wish to escape sometimes, my lord? ”
A flicker behind his eyes.
“They think I’m made of stone, my council. When a grain ship is lost or a village on the border burns, they bring it to me and they wait. And I decide who is fed and who is not. Then they go home to their wives and they sleep.
And I sit up with the consequences. ”
She heard herself say, “At the temple, the bells ring six times a day. You learn to feel the hours in your body. I loved it.
It was the only home I ever knew. ” The words kept coming, warm and unguarded in the candlelight. “When they brought me here, I thought only of going back. I counted the days until I could kneel to those hours again.
”
Something in his voice stopped her cold. “You speak of that place as though it raised you. As though you knelt there as a girl and a woman grown. But you didn’t, did you, Nadira?
”
She kept deathly silent. “You were a daughter of the Aravelle court,” he went on. “You told me so yourself. You said your mother kept you at her shoulder through every banquet and every treaty since before you could walk.
You laughed about the holy orders, called the temple women dull little candle keepers moldering behind their walls. ”
Say something. Anything. Now.
“You’re right that I have changed,” she said, distantly amazed her voice came out level. “When first I came to Valdren, I confess I was playing a part. I thought a king’s bride ought to be bold and quick and clever. But the woman you see now, the quiet one—this is who I have always been underneath all that noise.
I simply grew too tired to keep pretending otherwise. ”
For a long moment, Emrick said nothing. Then the sharpness eased from his face. He rose, came around the small table, and reached out to touch her face, just the backs of his fingers along the line of her cheek.
“You’re not what I expected,” he said, low, almost wondering. And with the bond full and furious between them, the whole truth surged up into her throat. I’m not Nadira. My name is Isra.
I was sent here to deceive you, and I have fallen in love with you, and I don’t know how to stop. There is something coming for your kingdom that I cannot tell you about. But then she thought of Nadira bleeding in the temple doorway, of a kingdom burning, of everything that hung on her silence. And she closed her mouth and said nothing.
The moment passed. Emrick let his hand fall slowly. He inclined his head, bid her good night, and took his leave. The message came on the darkest night of the moon.
After weeks of silence, here at last was Nadira’s careful code. Isra’s heart leapt. Alive. She’s alive.
It’s nearly over. Then she read it again, slower, and reached the line that turned the relief to ice. Confirm the guard rotations on the Eastern Pass. The numbers, the watch hours.
The council needs them within the fortnight. Isra understood it all at once. Nadira had not come to Valdren to hold a truce. She had come to map it, to learn the soft places in its wall, and carry them home to Aravelle’s war council.
The betrothal had never been a bridge between two peoples. It had been a door, propped open just wide enough, just long enough—and Isra was the one who had been holding it. She was still sitting there when a knock came at the door. “Nadira.
” His voice, low through the wood, as though it were the most precious word he knew. She should have hidden the page. She did not. Emrick stood in the dim corridor.
“You’ve been crying,” he said. “What’s happened? ” He shut the door and came to her, his hands framing her face, his thumbs brushing the tears away. “Let me help you.
Whatever it is, let me carry some of it. ”
And that was the cruelest thing he could have said. Because the part he was offering to carry was the very knife aimed at his own back. Behind her on the table, the page that would damn them both lay open in her sister’s careful hand, not three feet from him.
He never once looked at it, because he could not look at anything but her. “Emrick,” she whispered, the first time she had ever used his name without a title. She rose onto her toes and she kissed him. He made a low sound against her lips, surprise and surrender both.
And then his arms came around her, and he kissed her the way she imagined he did everything he had ever truly wanted—completely, without reservation, as though the world could fall. She poured fifteen years of silence and three weeks of terror into that single kiss. And she hated herself for every second of it. Because she knew what he did not.
She was kissing him goodbye. In the days since that night, Isra should have been happy. Their bond had settled and sealed, snapped fully and permanently into place, so that she could feel the warm distant pulse of him at every hour. Her mate.
Hers. And then she remembered the page hidden in her sister’s letterbox. And the war it carried. And the word that might come any day to tear her from this place forever.
That afternoon, she was crossing the great hall at Emrick’s side when the herald’s staff struck the floor and a voice rang out, announcing a royal envoy newly arrived from Aravelle. Isra turned toward the doors with the rest of the court—and watched her own face walk into the room. Nadira came up the length of the hall in traveling silks, her chin high, her eyes hard and bright. The same eyes, the same dark hair.
The two of them stood in the same room before the same crowd, two women with one face, and the whole court drew breath in a single ragged gasp. Isra did not look at the court. She looked at Emrick. She watched him understand.
The scent that had never been a perfume. Her slip with the temple. The woman who knew the history of his kingdom and nothing of her own life. Lord Barther, standing beside the king, whispered something, and Emrick’s gaze flicked to the corner of her mouth, to the small dark mole there, and then to her sister’s bare, unmarked face.
“Clear the hall,” he said. He did not raise his voice, but the words dropped into the silence like stones into a well. The court emptied in a frightened rush. The great doors boomed shut.
There were only the three of them left. “Who are you? ” he asked them. “My name is Isra,” she said, knowing it was hers to do.
“I am Nadira’s twin sister, raised in the temple of the Silver Flame, sent here in her place. We did not come to keep your peace, Emrick. We came for Aravelle’s war council. ”
The silence after was a living thing.
“Was any of it real? ” he said at last. “It was the only real thing in the whole of it,” Isra said, her voice cracking. “I never once lied about who I am.
The woman you came to know is the only woman I have ever been allowed to be. She is real. ”
Nadira moved then. “Your quarrel is with me.
I am the one who—”
“No. ” The single word stopped her sister where she stood. For the first time in the whole of her life, Isra did not let Nadira step in front of her. “This is my battle.
”
Emrick looked between them. “Get out of my sight,” he said. “Both of you. Now.
”
And because there was nothing in all the world she could say that would not make it worse, Isra obeyed. She turned and walked the long length of the emptied hall, and with every step, the bond stretched and pulled and burned in her chest, screaming at her to turn back. They were a half day’s ride from Valdren when Isra reined in her horse and stopped. Emrick had let them go without consequence.
“We’ll stop at the river crossing tonight,” Nadira was saying ahead of her. “Another two days and we’re home, and you need never think of this place again. ”
“I’m not going home. ” Isra heard the words come out whole and steady, and the steadiness was the strangest part, because her heart was breaking even as she spoke.
“I’m going back. ”
“Back to Valdren? To the man who threw you out like waste? Isra, he would put you under guard.
There is nothing left for you there. ”
Isra swung down from her horse, crossed to where her sister’s pack hung, and drew out the packet inside. The folded weight of everything Nadira had gathered across all these months—the rotations, the watch hours, the soft and secret places in Valdren’s wall. “Isra.
That is not yours to take. That belongs to Aravelle. ”
“It’s a map for killing the man I’ve bonded to,” Isra said, holding it against her chest. “I will not carry it home.
There’s another way, Nadira. A peaceful one. We were only ever taught to break the door in. Nobody ever taught us to look for the one that opens if you knock.
Let me go back and make my own ruin. Give me time. He will listen to me. ”
For a long moment, Isra was certain her sister would argue.
But she didn’t. “All these years,” Nadira said at last, very quiet. “I never once saw what I was asking of you. ” She looked at the packet held against her sister’s chest, and did not reach for it.
“If you can find another way, go then. ”
She brought her horse alongside Isra’s one last time, reached down, and took her sister’s face in both hands, and pressed her forehead to hers. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” Nadira whispered. Then she straightened, turned her horse south, and rode for home.
Isra turned her own horse north, back toward Valdren. She went to him that night, not as Nadira, not as anyone’s instrument or anyone’s shield. She went as Isra. Emrick stood at the window with his back to the door.
“I’ve brought you everything she gathered,” Isra said, crossing to his desk and laying the packet down. “Every weakness she found in your defenses, and everything I know of Aravelle’s intent. It’s yours. ”
He turned.
“You understand what handing me this makes you, to your own people. A traitor. ”
“Yes. Unless I broker peace between our kingdoms.
” She drew a breath. “I love you. And the love was never the lie. On that we can build the foundations of friendship between Valdren and Aravelle.
”
He reached along the bond between them, testing it, reading her down its length. She let him. She had nothing left to hide. “You’re not lying,” he said at last, low.
“No. ”
“But the bond doesn’t absolve you, Isra,” he said. It was the first time he had ever said her real name, and even cold, even like this, it went through her like light through water. “It makes it worse, not better.
”
“Yes,” she said. “I do. ” And because she understood, she gave him the only thing she had left to offer. Her absence.
“I am not asking to stay at your side. I know what I have broken. But there is a temple here, within your walls, to the goddess I was raised to serve. If you want me gone from your kingdom, say the word and I will go tonight.
But if you would let me stay there, among the candles where I belong, then I will wait for as long as it takes. ”
For a long moment, Emrick said nothing. “So be it,” he said at last. “Thank you,” she said quietly, and bowed her head and left him there at the cold window.
At the door, she paused. “I will wait,” she said. “As long as it takes. ”
There had been another way, after all.
Emrick did not march on Aravelle with the advantage she had handed him. He sent envoys instead. The war council, finding their enemy extending an open hand rather than a blade, came to the table. The alliance held, rebuilt slower this time, and harder, and far more honest.
But the peace between two kingdoms was the easier thing to mend. The peace between Isra and the man she had deceived was not. So Isra waited in the temple of the Silver Flame and took up the old life again. The bells six times a day, the healing work, the long quiet hours at the altar.
She did not write to him. She only stayed and prayed and waited. Nadira wrote to her, urging her to come home. “There is nothing binding you to that kingdom now.
” And every time, Isra wrote back the same gentle refusal. “I am happy here. ”
She was not happy, not as she had once been happy. But she was certain she was exactly where she was meant to be.
Over time, Nadira’s letters softened. “All those years I thought you were the one who needed protecting. I see now you were the brave one all along. ”
The weeks went by.
The first frost came. And then, one gray afternoon, the temple door opened and the Alpha King of Valdren entered. He did not say much that first time. He sat at the back while she tended the sick, watched her work, and left without a word.
The next time, he stayed a little longer. The time after that, longer still. He began to speak to her. A question about a remedy, a word about the harvest.
And slowly, so slowly that neither of them could have named the day it began, he began to thaw. Then, one evening when the first crocuses of spring were blooming, he asked her to run with him. She stared at him for a long moment, standing there golden and beautiful in the doorway as he had been in the garden all those months ago. “Are you sure, my lord?
”
In answer, he held out one large hand. When she took it, touching him for the first time in months, she felt their bond slide into place within her heart, mending a long gaping wound in a single connection. They went out past the walls at moonrise, and there Isra shifted for the first time in years. Her wolf came slowly, uncertain, a small pale silver thing.
For Emrick’s wolf was vast and dark gold and magnificent, and he waited in the moonlight with an animal’s patience while she found her unsteady feet. He pressed his great muzzle very gently to hers. Then they ran. Afterward, as humans again, they sat in the walled garden where they had first spoken true.
Emrick took her hand and held it a long while. He lifted his other hand to the corner of her mouth, to the small dark mole that had given her away, and touched it gently. “Isra,” he said. Her name.
Her own real name. She looked up at him, her eyes wet. “This,” said the Alpha King of Valdren, “is the woman I chose. ”
And then he kissed her.
It was nothing like the kiss in her chamber that night—that desperate, drowning thing. This one was slow and sure and unafraid. When they finally parted, she was breathless, her forehead against his. “Say it again,” she whispered.
“Isra,” he murmured, low, like a vow. “Isra. ”
And Isra, who had been given away at seven and surrendered her name, and worn her sister’s face, and lived for everyone’s peace but her own, was, for the first time in the whole of her life, exactly and entirely herself.
