The Right Hand

You fall asleep on the window seat with your phone in your hand and wake up with a crick in your neck and the lake on fire with sunrise.

You scroll back through last night's texts before you're fully awake. You read them twice. You don't let yourself smile. Then you do anyway, alone in an iron baron's guest room, which feels safe enough.

Aino knocks at seven-thirty with coffee and a look.

"Breakfast is in the great hall," she says. "The whole court eats together on weekdays. It's a tradition. It's also a blood sport." She sets the coffee down and eyes your duffel. "What are you wearing?"

"Jeans?"

"Good. Wear jeans. They'll all be in silk to prove a point. Let them." She tilts her head. "Wear the green sweater. The color's good on you. And walk in like you're late for something important."

"Is that a court thing?"

"That's an Aino thing. It works everywhere."

The great hall of the Forge House was built for iron barons to eat steak under a ceiling of black iron beams, and it hasn't forgotten. Long tables. A fire you could park the truck in. Tall windows full of lake. Sixty Lycans and their households at breakfast, silver coffee pots, the clink of good china.

The noise drops by half when you walk in.

At the head of the hall, on a low dais, stands a long table of dark oak. Wolfram sits at the center in a black sweater with the sleeves pushed up, reading a stack of papers and ignoring a plate of eggs. Chancellor Ottmar Sauer sits at his left, silver at the temples, a tailored gray suit, a face like a closed door.

The chair at the King's right hand is empty.

Wolfram looks up, sees you, and stands.

The whole hall stands with him, because the King is standing, and you watch sixty Lycans realize too late what they've done. He comes down off the dais, crosses to you, and offers his arm. Not his hand this time. His arm, the way you'd offer it to a friend at a wedding.

"Morning, Ava," he says. "You read the texts."

"I read the texts."

"And?"

"And I'm here, aren't I?" you say, and he makes a sound low in his chest that might be satisfaction.

You take his arm. He walks you up onto the dais and pulls out the chair at his right hand. You sit. He sits. The hall sits, slowly, in a rustle of silk.

"That chair," says Ottmar Sauer pleasantly, "is traditionally reserved for the consort, sire."

"I know what it's for."

"Of course. Only the court may wonder at the signal it sends." Ottmar turns a mild, polished smile on you. "Forgive me. We haven't been introduced. Ottmar Sauer, Lord Chancellor. You're the young woman from the dairy pack."

"Creamery co-op," you say. "I kept the books."

"How useful." He says useful the way other people say quaint. "And do they teach you, in the creamery co-op, which fork to use?"

You pick up the fork nearest your plate. You look at it. You look at him.

"The one that gets the food to my mouth, usually," you say.

Down at the nearest long table, someone chokes on their coffee. Wolfram doesn't laugh, but his mouth does something at the corner that makes the woman across from him stare.

Ottmar inclines his head as if you've done something sweet. "Charming. Then I'll be brief, since you're new to our ways. When the King names a woman as his mate before witnesses, as I'm told he did in a barn..."

"A pavilion," Wolfram says.

"... a pavilion, Ironmere custom requires that the bond be read. Our bond-reader, Mother Sigrun, holds the lady's wrist at moonrise on the ore dock and tells the court what is true. It protects the crown from mistakes." His eyes slide back to you. "And from opportunists."

The hall goes very quiet.

"She's my guest," Wolfram says. "She didn't name anything. I did."

"Then Mother Sigrun will read you, sire, through her. The custom is the custom." Ottmar folds his napkin. "Unless the King is afraid of what the bond-reader will find?"

You feel Wolfram's anger beside you like heat off a stove. You also see what Ottmar is doing: putting him in a corner where saying no makes it look like he's hiding something about you.

"I'll do it," you say.

Both men turn.

"I'm not afraid of a reading." You meet the Chancellor's eyes. "I've already been told what I am in front of a crowd, Lord Sauer. Your court can't say anything about me that Hollow Creek didn't say first, and louder."

Wolfram looks at you for a long second. Then he says quietly, "Tonight, then. Moonrise."

Mother Sigrun lives in a tiny room at the top of the north stair that smells of wool, woodsmoke and cloves. She's eighty-four, four foot ten at most, with a white braid down to her waist and eyes like two black stones.

Aino brings you up in the afternoon, "so you meet her before she's holding your wrist in front of everyone. She's nicer when she's sitting down."

Sigrun is not nicer when she's sitting down. She looks at you from her rocking chair for a long, long time without speaking.

"Sit," she says finally.

You sit on the footstool. She reaches out and takes your hand in hers, which is cold and dry and stronger than it looks. She turns it over. She doesn't read your palm. She just holds it, eyes half-closed, nostrils flaring.

"Hm," she says.

"Is that good?"

"Hush." She tilts her head like she's listening to a song in another room. "Who rejected you, girl?"

"The alpha of my pack. Easton Kinnear. Three nights ago."

"Did you accept it?"

"I... what?"

Sigrun's eyes snap open. They're black and bright and suddenly very, very awake.

"There are two men in your blood tonight, Ava," she says. "One of them is dying."