2
Chapter
The Invitations
Liora
The rider from the citadel arrived on the fourth day, while frost still crusted the boards of the well.
He rode a long-legged bay that blew plumes of white steam against the morning chill.
Dry mud spattered his cloak to the shoulders, and a silver brooch bearing the Crown wolf pinned it tight at his throat.
He didn’t dismount. Instead, he struck the iron knocker twice with the butt of his crop—a sharp crack that scattered the hens near the shed and forced me to drop my armload of firewood onto the bench by the door.
Mina opened the service door, wiping her hands on a clean apron, but the courier didn’t spare her a glance.
“For the lady of the house,” he said, his voice raspy with road dust.
He held out two thick parchment rolls, bound in copper thread and sealed with the scarlet wax of the royal chancery. They were official dispatches of the highest order, the sort couriers never surrendered to estate hands.
Maevra was already coming down the main staircase.
Her hair was pinned with a comb of dark bone, a black wool shawl cinched tight at her elbows.
She walked without haste, yet her fine leather boots fell with the measured, even pace that always made the stable boys avert their eyes before she reached them.
“Thank you, soldier,” Maevra said, taking the scrolls with a steady grip.
“By order of the Council of Elders, my lady. The proclamation is to be read in every noble house of the district before noon.”
The man turned his mount and set off at a trot toward the royal road. Frozen mud crunched beneath the hooves.
I remained standing by the bench, my forearms still indented from the weight of the logs, my palms raw from the cold. The brass collar, its half-dose still dulling the nape of my neck, pulled at my skin with every turn of my head.
Maevra cracked the first seal with her thumbnail. The snap of wax echoed sharply through the entry hall.
Celene drifted out of the parlor with a mug of hot milk cradled in her hands. The hem of her flannel-lined silk robe swept across the scrubbed floorboards. She smelled of bitter almonds and the expensive soap she kept on her vanity.
“Are they from the citadel?” Celene asked, and for the first time in weeks, she made no effort to disguise the haste in her voice.
Maevra unrolled the larger document. The black ink caught the light under its drying glaze.
“The Winter Solstice Gala,” she read in an undertone, weighing each syllable as though appraising a lot of grain. “Sovereign Darian Corven opens the halls of Vhal to receive the registered houses of Eryndor. Freeborn Alphas are summoned for the formal presentation of alliances.”
Celene set her mug on the console table with a thud that spilled a drop of milk.
“All Alphas?”
“Those whose rank and bloodline certifications are current,” Maevra clarified, looking up at her elder daughter. “The Council will not permit the guard to admit suitors without land or standing. Lord Corven must secure a marriage pact before the northern packs breach their tribute accords.”
“And the second roll?” Celene pressed.
Maevra smoothed open the smaller parchment.
“An escort pass for a household Beta.” She looked down the corridor, where Oria had poked her head out of the pressing room, a skein of wool between her fingers. “For you, Oria. You will attend your sister during the presentations.”
Oria didn’t smile. She merely nodded, hunching her shoulders inside her workday dress as though the invitation were just another chore on the pantry ledger.
I didn’t move from the doorway. I knew precisely where I fell on that inventory.
According to the Asterian chancery records, three women remained in House Valen after my mother’s death: Maevra, its widowed administrator; Celene, the Alpha heir from her first marriage; and Oria, her younger Beta daughter.
My name appeared on none of the social presentation rolls.
To the court, I was a distant relation taken in out of charity—a sickly girl with no certified rank, whose presence in the royal halls would have breached protocol or insulted the pure bloodlines.
Maevra folded the scrolls with care. Her gaze drifted to me—to my rolled-up sleeves and the firewood piled at my boots.
“Liora.”
“My lady.”
“The winter wardrobe trunk is in the attic. Bring it down to the sewing room. Celene’s green gown needs its pleats let out, and the ermine lining on her traveling cloak must be replaced. You have three days before the dressmaker arrives with fabrics from Asteria.”
“The fur in the attic has taken damp,” I said. “It will need to be scrubbed with salt and a stiff brush before it can be stitched.”
“Then begin now.” Maevra tucked the invitations into the pocket of her shawl. “Celene will not appear before the sovereign looking like a provincial.”
The sewing room was always a disaster of fabrics that inevitably gathered dust and wax shavings from the candles that burned through long nights of needlework.
Over the next two days, the floorboards vanished beneath scraps of ivory silk, clippings of forest-green velvet, and satin ribbons Celene discarded with a click of her tongue.
The hearth fire never died; it fed on pine logs that popped with a resinous smell and left a fine coat of ash over the windowsills.
I was kneeling on the boards, half a dozen pins caught between my lips and my knees aching. The hem of Celene’s ball gown draped over my shoulders while she admired herself in the three-way mirror dragged down from the master bedchamber.
“Higher at the waist,” Celene ordered, turning on her embossed leather heels. “The cut needs to show I could wear parade armor if called upon. Court Alphas despise women who look made of glass.”
I pulled a pin from between my lips, careful not to prick my tongue, and adjusted the fabric over her hip. Celene’s scent, carried by that herbal dryness she shared with her mother, filled my nose with every breath.
Beneath my collar, the brass band warmed with the exertion. The half-dose Oria had given me in the blue room was fading; a faint tremor ran through my wrists, and a dull ache throbbed at the roots of my teeth, as if my body were straining to push past the suppression.
“Don’t move,” I told her, my voice muffled by the remaining pins.
“Do it right and I won’t have to.” Celene checked her profile in the glass, tilting her chin.
“They say Darian Corven stands over six feet tall and his wolf is twice the size of any guard officer’s.
A primal Alpha isn’t looking for some meek creature.
He wants a consort who can hold the border while he negotiates with the Council. ”
“They say the Council has already prepared three candidates from the northern bloodlines for him,” Oria remarked from the window nook, where she was patiently unpicking an old strip of lace.
Celene curled her lip.
“The Council puts forward names; the beast decides. If none of those Alphas has managed to stir his interest in two years, it’s because none of them is suited to him,” she said with haughty certainty.
“Or because marriage is a political contract, not a bard’s tale,” Maevra said, entering the room with a brown-leather ledger.
She sat down at the cutting table, reading spectacles hanging against her chest by a thin chain.
“The court is not a spring ball, Celene. It is an auction. Families present certificates of purity, property deeds, and troop pledges. Lord Corven will not choose a consort for the slope of her shoulders; he will choose her if her dowry can keep the western packs from choking off his grain supplies this winter.”
“Our dowry will suffice,” Celene insisted, lowering her arms so I could pin the left armhole.
Maevra opened the ledger, turning a page with a dry rasp of paper.
“The dowry will suffice if the appraisal on the eastern parcel is registered in time at the Asterian chancery.”
I pushed a pin into the green velvet. The point pierced through and grazed the pad of my index finger. A bright red bead welled instantly.
I brought my finger to my lips before the blood could touch the ivory silk lining. The coppery taste pulled me straight back to the office: the empty recess behind Elayne’s portrait, the pale line in the dust, and the flake of blue wax hidden in my hem.
“Watch that fabric,” Celene snapped without glancing down. “It costs more than you make in a year.”
“I don’t make anything in a year,” I answered, finger still pressed to my tongue. “You pay me in cold broth and a leaking room.”
Celene whirled so fast her skirts whipped across my cheek.
“We give you a roof your mother didn’t know how to keep.”
“My mother paid for this roof,” I said, looking up from the floorboards. “And for the land you’re trying to sell.”
Sometimes my tongue outran my sense. Usually I could rein in my temper, but now and then I spoke before remembering that caution served me better.
Silence dropped over the sewing room like a wet cloth. Nothing stirred save the crackle of pine in the hearth and the evening wind lashing the wooden shutters.
Maevra didn’t raise her voice. She removed her spectacles, laid them across the ledger, and rested both palms on the table.
Her Alpha presence rolled through the room, thick and suffocating, crowding the air into the corners.
Oria bowed her head over her lace. Celene stepped back half a pace, yielding to her mother’s command.
I felt the heavy weight clamp against my chest, an unseen hand squeezing my ribs, but I didn’t lower my eyes.
“Your mother,” Maevra said, with a calm that sounded like a verdict, “was a reckless woman who believed titles were inherited on a whim. The law of Eryndor is unambiguous, Liora. An estate without a certified heir passes into Crown guardianship or to whoever shoulders its tax levies.”
“I am her heir.”