The Alpha King's Tribute

rel

ears is that you learn exactly how fast nothin

illness had cleared, wringing the edge of his wolfskin. "There's - forgive me, there's been a misunderstanding. The girl isn't a gift. Greywater offers her, of cou

racked and bright in the dead-quiet morning, and I

me out in the snow the winter I was nine b

rre

ting the ledger.

and didn't rise, because the most feared wolf in the kingdom was standing an arm's length from me and

turning his head. "You

e. "We - we understood Your Majesty hunts the witch-blooded. We thought o

rose. That was the terrible part. It stayed low and even, and it laid every word down like a stone on a wall. "And

ow it sounded. He had no answer. For once in

d draft where the weight of his attention had been. He looked at Greywater. All of it. The w

never touch again. Not her name. Not her shadow. If I hear that Greywater so much

where a child started

e truth I'd only ever tell you. I felt the floor of my whole life drop away, because the one thing I'd always known - that

e eyes weren't cold at all. That was the

ride?"

. "I've walked every

n't the q

istent, toward him, and I leaned back against it out of pure spite. "You don't have to do this. Whatever this is. You felt - something. So did

g to name. Not pity. Pity I'd have spat at. It was closer to grief - like I'd

, the same hand that had tilted my face to the light. "I have spent my whole reign bei

my hand in his - and the bond sang, a sweet bright ache straight through the breastbone, an

d Greywater fell behind us into the grey, and I did not look back. Not beca

*

el

a mercy-killing dressed as a duty, a border pack settling its debt in the cheapest blood it had.

rned, and the world

uld finish him - mate, and the bond real, realer than anything his blighted blood had any ri

felt triumph.

. Something the world was supposed to have lost a long age ago, by the reckoning of every law that had ever been written against her kind. He ha

hing in years I r

thing he refused to give back might be the thing that saved his cr

ean into a single mile of the ride. Refusing him even now. Some buried

*

of the pines like a

re you for the cold of it, the way the dark walls drink the light, the way the gates open like a mouth. By the

beautiful and hard-faced, a hundred pairs of eyes that found me on the King's horse, in front of

stone dropped in a pool. Confusion.

ad been smiling when we rode in. I watched the smile die by degrees as she took in the King's arm around a half-breed in pauper's grey - watched her face go fr

ted. He looked at me the way a gambler looks at a card he didn't expect but absolutely knows how to play. And as Kaelen swung down and reached u

lady. The mutt w