He Dethroned His Queen, Now He Wants Her Home novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Driftwood Chair

On Willowmere a challenger asks if she is still a wolf, Linnet shifts into her white wolf and wins the Alpha seat, and the elders say a letter from the Queen Mother waits for the king the day he comes asking for her.

Willowmere came up out of the fog at dawn as a long grey shoulder of rock with a village tucked into its lee.

I stood at the rail with Biscuit in his basket and breathed.

The wind smelled of salt and wet gorse and fish.

There was not one sprig of lavender on the whole island, and I had not known how tightly I was holding my shoulders until they came down.

"Home," Edith said.

"Home," I said, and it felt strange in my mouth.

There were forty people on the quay, and none of them had come for the ferry.

They were men in oilskins and women in wool, and a row of children sitting on a wall.

At the front stood an old woman with a stick and a weathered, deeply lined face.

"Linnet Faraday," she said. "Your mother's chin, your father's temper. We've been told to expect you."

"By whom?" I said.

"By a dead queen. Come up to the stones."

The stone circle stood on the hill above the village.

At its centre sat a chair made of driftwood and whale rib, grey with weather, with a cushion nobody had sat on since the spring.

The three elders stood around it, and the whole pack stood behind them in a ring.

"The seat is yours by blood," the old woman said. "It's also ours by custom, and the custom is that any wolf on the island may ask the claimant a question at first light."

"What kind of question?"

A big young man pushed forward through the crowd.

He had a broken front tooth and a grin that went right up to his ears.

"My name's not important," he said cheerfully. "I'm the ferry captain's nephew. Our alpha's daughter has been a queen for eleven years, and she's never once shifted for us. So here's my question. Are you still a wolf?"

A few people laughed.

Nobody laughed unkindly.

I looked at Edith, and she lifted one shoulder as if to say that it was up to me.

Biscuit had lifted his head in the basket and was watching with one yellow eye.

I put my coat down on the grass.

I had not shifted in four years.

A white wolf at court made the Council nervous, and Beatrix had told me gently to keep mine quiet.

I took off my shoes.

I thought of the vet's table and the steel under the lamp.

I thought of the sound Biscuit had made against the tree.

Then I let the wolf come up.

It came up fast and white and enormous, nothing held back, and the ring of villagers fell a full pace backward.

The nephew did not step back.

He was already changing.

He was a heavy dun wolf with a scar over one ear, and he came at me low and quick and bit the air by my shoulder.

I turned inside it and struck him on the flank with my full weight.

He rolled, and came up, and came again.

I let him come.

I caught his foreleg in my jaws, not to break it, and drove him down onto the turf and put my teeth against his throat.

He lay still.

I held him there until I was sure he understood.

His ribs heaved once, and he made the low sound that means he was yielding.

I let go.

Silence lasted a long moment.

Then somebody on the wall whooped, and the whole hill went up.

The nephew shifted back on his hands and knees, grinning at me with blood on his mouth, and the old woman threw him a blanket without looking.

"Right answer," he said. "I'll carry your bags."

I changed back, shaking, with grass in my hair and every muscle singing.

Edith had my coat open for me before I asked.

"Eleven years," she said quietly, "and you looked better in the last four minutes than in all of them."

"Don't."

"I'm only saying."

The old woman put a cold, hard hand on my arm and walked me into the circle.

She lowered me into the driftwood chair herself.

It was too big.

It fit.

"Alpha of Willowmere," she said, and the whole hill said it back.

I sat there with my hands on the grey wood and could not speak.

Down at the edge of the circle, Biscuit had pulled himself up on the lip of a fish crate someone had put there.

He sat with his bound ribs and his bad mouth and watched me with the look of a cat who has seen everything and approves of this.

I laughed then, properly, and wiped my face.

When the crowd began to move down toward the quay the old woman stayed beside the chair.

"There's something else," she said. "Beatrix left it with us when she wrote. A letter, sealed, in her hand."

"For me?"

"For the king."

I went cold.

"She said we were to give it to him the day he came here asking for you," the old woman said. "Not for a queen. For you."

"He won't come."

"She said he would," the old woman said. "She said in about a month."

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