Fated To Her Alpha Prince

Prologue

Katra

The wolfsbane had soaked through my sleeve by the second mile, and my arm had gone numb to the elbow before I reached the shrine road. I didn't stop to look at it. A numb arm heals. A dead child doesn't.

She hadn't cried once. Not when I pulled her from the smoking wreck of the nursery.

Not when I ran with her weight bound hard against my ribs.

Not now, with her small hand fisted in the collar of my coat and her breath coming too fast for an infant not yet three months in the world.

Frostmark children didn't cry when it mattered.

I supposed that was one mercy, out of a night that had run entirely out of them.

The hollow oak stood where it always had, split down its blackened trunk by some lightning strike older than the war itself, rotted out enough that a grown woman could fold herself into its dark and disappear.

My grandmother hid runaway wolves in it during the last purge.

Her grandmother, before that. It was the oldest kind of shelter Vardain had — older than the throne, older than the packs still fighting over what sat on it — old enough that even the wolves hunting me tonight wouldn't think to search a tree.

I set her down inside it, on a bed of moss I'd gathered on the way, because I'd known three hours ago, when the horns first sounded, exactly where this night needed to end, one way or another.

"You won't remember this," I told her, and I kept my voice steady, because I'd promised myself I would, if nothing else. "Whatever happens on that road, you won't remember it. Let that be the mercy in it, if nothing else is."

I took the carving knife from my belt — the one I'd used on a hundred small House-wards, marriage charms, luck-marks for merchants who paid me in bread and old coin — and I cut the warding into the oak's inner bark by feel, in the dark, because my hands had done this enough times that they no longer needed my eyes to do it.

Concealment. Stillness. Silence enough that a wolf's ear passing three feet away would hear nothing but wind moving through an empty tree.

I did not carve the fourth ward. The one that would have marked her as what she was. My hands remembered its shape the way they remembered how to breathe. But a ward that strong left a signature, and a signature was exactly what the men coming up that road had been trained to read.

So I left her plain. Left her small. Left the crescent-and-thorn mark that had come into the world on the back of her neck, beneath the dark fuzz of new hair, uncarved, unclaimed — a birthright standing without a single ward to guard it.

It was the only choice left to me that might actually keep her alive tonight. Keeping her alive past tonight was going to require I survive this road myself, and I intended to, whatever it cost me to manage it.

The horns were closer now, and the smell riding under them was wrong in a way iron alone never was. Wolfsbane. They'd learned, since the last purge, that ordinary steel didn't always hold Frostmark blood the way they wanted it held.

I kissed her once, on the crown of her head, where the last of her mother's scent still clung faint beneath the smoke.

"Hollow," I said, because a child needed a name, and the tree had just given her one.

Because some old, stubborn, wardsmith part of me wanted the word to mean something other than empty — wanted it to mean the place that kept you safe, tonight and every night after it, for as long as I had breath left to make that true.

"Ilinca Hollow. Remember you were loved before you ever knew whose blood you carried. "

I stepped out from under the oak with my knife still in my hand and my spine straight, because a Frostmark loyalist did not run from what came for her, not even wolfsbane-numb and alone on a shrine road with three hunters closing out of the tree line.

I did not look back at the tree. If they caught the fear on my face, at least they'd have no reason to wonder what I'd left behind me in the dark.

I fought them on the road below the shrine, three against one wolfsbane-slowed woman with a wardsmith's knife and nothing left to lose, and I will not pretend, all these years later, that I expected to walk away from it.

I did. Barely, and not without cost — the numbness in my arm never fully left it, and I carried a limp the rest of my days that I told curious strangers came from a fall, because the truth was no one's business but mine and the child's.

But I walked away, and I walked back to that hollow oak before dawn, and I lifted a three-month-old girl out of the moss and the dark and carried her into a life I intended to spend every remaining year of protecting, properly this time, in the daylight, where I could actually watch her grow.

That was the last night I ever let her out of arm's reach without a ward standing between her and the world.

It was not, as it turned out, the last night either of us had to fear men with wolfsbane on their blades.

But it was the night I understood exactly what I was prepared to do about it, for as many years as I was given.