Chapter 39 Stark
STARK
Noemi is staring vacantly at a pile of breakfast cakes and pastries when I find her in the common area. She looks fucking terrible; I assume she barely slept last night, given the circumstances.
I don’t think she’ll snap again. But I told Meryn I’d keep an eye out, just to be safe.
“Not hungry?” I come up behind Noemi and set a hand on her shoulder lightly, trying not to startle her.
Noemi turns and gives me a weak smile. “Just hunting for something I recognize.”
I turn to the platter. Glazed pastry twists are twined with sticky pastes and syrups of various colors. Some of the treats are studded with unfamiliar fruits or seeds.
I select one at random and hand it to her. “Here. Can’t be any worse than Gertie’s kitchen experiments. Come walk with me.”
The rear of Brightbane Castle is a gigantic maze of courtyards and gardens. We make our way out, and the sun blasts down on us like a furnace as we pass through the stone archways, even though the hour is still early.
The intense southern light makes the colors look kind of unreal: so many shades of green and pink and orange from the unfamiliar plants and flowers surrounding us. A complicated fountain gurgles at the courtyard’s center, tiled in a bright mosaic design that depicts many-colored fish.
Even the stonework is delicate. Archways and walls are carved with intricate patterns and shapes that must have taken stoneworkers a lifetime to create.
I guess if you’re a Siphon, you don’t mind waiting a century or two for your construction project to be complete.
It’s all a little over the top—but then, so is their asshole king.
Noemi keeps pace with me, but she’s uncharacteristically quiet, slowly pulling pieces off her pastry and popping them into her mouth.
We pass under another arch and into a smaller courtyard with no flowers, just deep green grasses and trees, thick and lush.
The stonework here is all painted in blues and greens, giving us the impression of being underwater.
The trees cast a little more shade, keeping the air cooler, adding to the effect.
I glance left at Noemi again. Her drained, tired expression makes me want to punch something.
My biggest regret is how I couldn’t protect her from what happened during her Trials. I was already serving at the front—already Alpha, for that matter.
The Daemos instructor that year was one of my Gammas. I told him to keep an eye on her, to watch out for her even though she wasn’t in our pack. I made it clear to him, or at least I thought I did, that she was my family.
Maybe it was too culturally ingrained in him, the way the king chose a companion. Maybe he looked at that frightened eighteen-year-old girl and somehow saw a woman eager to please her regent.
I can’t ask him for his reasoning. After I found out what happened, I enthusiastically divorced his barely functioning brain from the rest of his body.
Couldn’t undo the harm Noemi suffered, though.
“Mimi,” I ask now, hoping that my concern won’t shut her down further. “Are you okay?”
Noemi tilts her face up toward me. Her eyes are red and puffy, the circles underneath dark and ominous.
She’s stopped walking, and I stop, too, staying silent to give her space to answer.
“I thought I was okay,” she says finally. “I’ve done a good job just… not thinking about any of it. You know how it is at the front. There’s always some new crisis, some battle or defensive strategy, that needs your full attention. I could block it out and not deal.”
She ducks her head and gazes down at the patterned pathway beneath our feet.
“Even when we were home with my family,” she continues, “suffering their disrespect, listening to that awful misogynistic song about women’s tears, getting hassled by my cousin…
it felt outside of me somehow. Like something that happened in another life, to someone else. Some version of me that I used to be.”
Noemi looks around and then finds a seat on a shaded bench a few feet away. The tree above it has slender branches covered in silver-green leaves that cascade like a waterfall.
She toys with her pastry, eating some but letting most of the flakes drift to the ground.
“I know that Lucien isn’t… isn’t him,” she continues. “Maybe he’s just as bad, or maybe he’s an excellent ruler, who knows. But seeing him with that woman—suddenly I was back in Cyril’s lap in front of everyone, having to smile through what was happening to me because if I didn’t, I would die.”
My jaw clenches tightly, hands curling into fists. She’s barely wanted to talk about this since it happened, and who could blame her?
“All of it came rushing back. Just as strong as it was then. Turns out, I hadn’t moved on. I hadn’t left those feelings behind. They’ve been living inside me this whole time, festering and rotting.”
Her voice breaks on rotting, and I put my arm around her shoulders. Wishing I could somehow make her pain and trauma physical so I could battle it, defeat it for her. She lays her head against my shoulder and sighs.
“I wish I was strong like Meryn. That my hatred and anger could fuel me and drive me to vengeance. But mostly I’m exhausted. I’m tired, Valstark. I’m so tired.”
I take her hand, squeezing it between mine. “Surviving is its own strength, Mimi. You made it out. You’re here. That’s enough.”
Her body relaxes just a little bit next to mine. We sit on the bench together, gazing at a tiny blue-and-white bird that whizzes through the ferns in front of us, wings moving so fast we can barely see them.
“You know what Great-Aunt Gertie would say, right?” I ask, hoping to make her smile.
“What? ‘Don’t grow a gray beard’?” she guesses, and I laugh. Noemi’s face lightens a little.
“I never understood that one, did you?” I ask. Some of Gertie’s sayings were full of wisdom, once you figured them out. Others would just remain an enigma.
She muses, “Gray beard… I don’t know. Seems a little more helpful for men than women.”
“She had the weirdest sayings. No, I was thinking of ‘don’t let someone take the butter—’”
“‘—off your slice of bread,’” we both chorus, and Noemi even manages a soft chuckle.
She holds the remains of her pastry up in front of her face, examining it. “Pretty sure this thing is chock-full of butter. So maybe I’m doing okay.”
Noemi faces me, and the lines of pain in her face have eased up, at least a little. Something tight loosens in my chest at the sight.
“You know, the pastries here aren’t half bad,” she concedes.
I stand, offering her a hand. Just as she’s closing her fingers around mine, a searing, shooting pain shatters my vision.
I double over, hitting the ground heavily.
Distantly, I can feel Noemi’s palm on my back, can vaguely hear her calling my name. It’s as if I’m hearing her through layers of snow or from a long distance, echoed and distorted.
My vision blacks out completely.
When it comes back, it takes me a moment to realize it’s returned.
I’m fully surrounded by shadow.
Some kind of enemy magic? Killian using Meryn’s magic somehow?
Ignoring the pounding in my head, I raise both hands to gather up an impelling burst, ready to slam the shadows away and identify the threat. But… something is wrong.
I’m tapping into my power, pulling on that energy that lives inside me, but it’s strange, unfamiliar.
The well of power is deeper, so much deeper, than ever before. It’s strong and heady, tempting me to draw on it, fill myself with it, and damn the consequences.
It’s almost like being on the battlefield with Meryn, when she was channeling her overwhelming powers through me. And yet totally different, too, because while that power felt like Meryn in my head, it was completely and undeniably hers…
This power is mine.
I’ve always been strong, of course, adept at channeling the Daemos pack powers. But now it’s practically bursting out of me. And it’s something more.
Then from nowhere and everywhere: voices.
I spin around, squinting through the shadowy landscape, trying to figure out where they’re coming from, but it’s strange; they don’t seem to have any specific source. They’re just there in the twisting darkness around me, snatches of whisper, pieces of sound.
Floating by like wisps of wind or mist.
There’s the sound of someone crying, sobbing. Another cry—then a scream of pain. The sounds coalesce into battlefield noises, shouting and screaming and wailing and the clash of weapons.
And a clear full sentence: “The Sovereign Alpha is dead!”
My knees go weak.
Dead? Siegrid is… dead?
I fight to stay standing in this shadowy place as I realize what has happened—the intense mental links into other riders’ minds, riders from every pack and not just Daemos. The newfound power, strengthened Daemos magic, but also something else entirely, something I barely understand yet.
Siegrid is dead. I’m the Sovereign Alpha now.
Closing my eyes, I focus, then push it all away.
The light of the garden is almost blinding after that darkness; after a moment, my eyes adjust and I see Noemi squatting next to me, her face pale and etched with concern.
She has both hands on my shoulders and is repeating my name: “—all right? Valstark, can you hear me, are you all right? What’s happened?”
Even though the daylight is back, that raging power whirls through me still, stirring up my blood, asking to be used.
The rivers of pack bonds are there, too, within reach. I’m used to a single dark tributary to my pack, one stream branching off to each individual. But now four distinct pathways push and pull as I inwardly examine them, with countless individuals connected.
It’s so broad where they come together, like a sea instead of a river, and the sea is churning, violent. As if cast into sudden darkness by a deadly storm.
Noemi catches her breath as she senses what’s happened, too. From a distant part of the castle, the direwolves begin to howl.
I reach out to Cratos and meet his grief and resolve:
“Yes. The Sovereign Alpha is dead. You are the Sovereign Alpha.”
Confirming what I already know deep in my bones, deep in that shadowy place that now lives inside me.
“Siegrid is dead,” I say aloud, my voice calm, strange to me.
The riot of darkness inside continues. It’s as though there’s only a thin layer between that place and the bright daylight world outside of me. My inward vision and eyesight are divided by the merest boundary that could easily break.
Then Cratos is with me in my mind, supporting me through it, lending me strength.
I flex and tense my muscles and then, one by one, relax them. I slowly straighten.
Noemi and I settle heavily back onto the bench behind us. Now it’s Noemi’s turn to regard me with careful concern. More than anyone, she knows: Siegrid and I never had a familial relationship, not really.
I’m not sure what to feel.
I knew this day would come, of course. But Siegrid always seemed untouchable, almost godlike in her power and control. I never believed she could truly be felled, I realize. Certainly not this soon.
There may not have been any great love between me and Siegrid, but she was a powerful commander, an institution among the Bonded. Her loss is like a tilting of the universe, an imbalance. I will mourn her, I realize with a whisper of surprise.
Like a soldier mourns a respected commander.
“I’m okay,” I assure Noemi. “The transition was… unexpected.”
Doubt still lingers in her eyes, but she nods and lays a comforting hand on my arm.
I study the lines of her face, thinking—Siegrid may be dead, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have family. I have Noemi, for one. Cratos, of course.
And Meryn. Most of all, Meryn.
Meryn… If my magic reacted so strongly to Siegrid’s death, what might hers have done?