I Will Never Be Yours novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Probation

The King questions the prisoners without hitting anyone, Sorcha lies that the Ironcrest woman is dead and takes the Beta's offer of probation, and her first job is the Luna's wing, where her own wedding veil lies on the chair.

They brought us up into the east yard at first light.

A guard unlocked my cell, looked at the bruises on my face, and swore under his breath.

"Who threw her down those stairs?" he muttered.

Nobody answered him.

I walked out on my own.

The yard was washed in grey light, and the prisoners stood in a line along the wall with their wrists tied.

Autumn was at the end of it, coughing into her shoulder.

A healer in a white coat was holding a small brown bottle under her nose.

"Better?" he asked.

"No," Autumn croaked. "But I'm alive, so I'll take it."

The healer actually smiled.

I had expected the dungeon to be worse than this.

The King stood at the far end of the line with Alder and a clerk, and he questioned the prisoners one at a time.

He did not shout.

Nobody was hit.

When a man at the front lunged at him, two guards took the man down and held him, and the King said, "Let him up. He's frightened, that's all."

I watched his hands.

The right one had the white line across the palm, and he kept it open when he spoke.

My own palm ached under my fist.

"Name," he said when he reached me.

"Sel."

"Where from?"

"The Blackwater camp. Four months. Before that, wherever the road was."

"Look at me."

I raised my eyes.

I had been dreading this for a whole night.

He was thinner than I remembered from his voice, with shadows under grey-green eyes, and he had not slept in days.

He looked at me for a long moment.

There was nothing on his face but tiredness.

The wolfsbane held.

He didn't know me.

My chest went hollow, and I hated that it did.

"I'm searching for a woman who ran from Ironcrest three years ago," he said. "Dark hair. Grey eyes. Did you ever meet anyone who came off that mountain?"

"No."

"You haven't heard her name? Sorcha?"

It was strange to hear it in his mouth.

"No, my King."

"Did you hear what happened to her?"

"Everyone knows what happened to her," I said. "She burned in the hall with the rest of them."

His jaw tightened.

"There was no body," he said quietly.

"There wasn't much left of anyone."

He was silent for a second too long.

Then he said, "Is she dead?"

It was not a question for me.

He had asked it of the air, in a voice I wasn't meant to hear.

"Yes," I said. "She's dead."

He nodded once and moved on to Autumn.

Alder stayed a half step behind him and glanced at me.

I looked at the ground.

When the questions were done, the King walked out of the yard and left Alder to speak to the line.

"Listen up," Alder said, and his voice was easy and kind.

"The King doesn't hold anyone who hasn't hurt someone. Anyone with no blood on them gets a choice."

He waited until the murmuring stopped.

"You can go back out the gate with a day's food and a map to the nearest pack that takes strays. Or you can work here, on probation, for your bed and your meals, with a healer for anything that's wrong."

Autumn grabbed my sleeve with her tied hands.

"Sel," she whispered. "Please."

I looked at her cracked lips and her dirty face.

If I walked out the gate, I would never get another look at this keep.

Somewhere inside it was proof of who had sent wolves in the Crown's black and silver to kill my father.

I had run from the Crown for three years because I couldn't touch it.

Now I was inside it with no one watching me.

"We'll stay," I said.

"Smart girl," Alder said.

He cut my wrists loose himself.

His hands were warm, and he was careful of the bruises.

"You're on housekeeping," he told me. "Autumn goes to the kitchens, where it's warm and she can sit down when she needs to. The housekeeper will give you clothes and a bed."

"Thank you," I said.

"Don't thank me yet. The work's hard."

He smiled.

I let myself believe it was a friendly smile.

The housekeeper was a stout woman with grey in her braid who clicked her tongue at the state of me and put me in a plain brown dress.

She gave me a bucket and a cloth and walked me up three flights of narrow stairs, then across a long gallery of dark portraits.

"The north tower," she said. "Nobody does it properly anymore. The King likes it left as it is, so mind what you move."

"What is it?"

"The Luna's wing."

My bucket scraped the floor.

"The Luna?" I said.

"His wife. She died three years back, before anybody got to know her."

The housekeeper opened the tall door at the end of the gallery.

"He has it dusted every week, and he won't have anyone in it but me."

The room beyond was bright, with a bed turned down and a window open on the mountains.

A white veil lay folded over the back of the chair by the window.

I knew the lace, and I knew the tear in one corner where I had caught it on a nail at the Ironcrest hall, before I lost it in the smoke.

It was my veil, and he had kept it.

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