The Alpha's Slave-Born Daughter Made Kings Kneel novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Right of the Guest

King Evander stays the axe by Crown guest right and takes Linnea as his table servant, then closes his door and says: show me your wrists.

Nobody answered the King.

The axe still hung over my hand, and the axeman had forgotten how to breathe.

"I asked a question," King Evander said. "Who put iron on her?"

"I did," said my uncle Osric from his knees. "By the Alpha's order, Your Majesty, when she was a child."

"Stand up. I don't speak to the top of a man's head."

Osric stood, and the pack got up behind him in pieces.

My father stayed in his chair, still looking at the roof beams.

"She's a thrall's whelp," Osric went on. "She struck my daughter and broke her skull. The law of Greyhollow takes the hand that struck."

"Your law," the King said.

"Our law, Your Majesty. Older than the Crown's."

The King turned his head and looked at the cloth on my cousin's head.

Then he looked at me, and I did not look away, though everything in me wanted to.

His eyes went to my cuffs again.

They were still warm, and I could not tell if he knew it.

"It's the Tribute Gathering," he said. "Four kings are on the road to this Hall. By the oldest custom, no blood is shed under the Alpha's roof until the last of us leaves."

"The custom covers guests," Osric said. "Not thralls."

"Then I'll make her my guest's servant."

The Hall rustled.

"Your Majesty can't," Osric said.

"I can," the King said. "I've brought no maid. She'll serve my table at supper for the three nights of the Gathering. After that, argue about her hand with whoever's left alive to argue."

"And if the Alpha says no?"

"Then argue it with my twelve."

The soldiers in black behind him did not move, and they did not need to.

Osric looked up at the Alpha's chair, and for the first time that day my father's eyes came down from the roof.

They landed on the King.

They did not touch me.

"Take her," my father said. "She's a thrall. She's no use to this pack."

The Hall laughed, and some of it was relief.

It was the first thing he had said to me in twenty years, though he had not said it to me.

The axeman lowered the blade.

The guards let go of my arms, and I took my hand off the block.

It was shaking, and I hid it in the folds of my skirt.

"And my mother?" I said.

I had not meant to say it aloud.

The King turned.

"Your mother?"

"Ilse. By the kitchen door." I pointed with my chin, because my hands were not mine to point with. "She was cut three times in the yard today."

The King looked across the Hall at the thin woman with her face to the wall.

"The woman goes to the healer," he said to my father. "Her wounds need seeing to."

"The Alpha's thralls stay where the Alpha puts them," my father said to the ceiling. "Even for a king."

Even for a king.

I watched the King's jaw tighten, and I watched him decide that this was not the day.

Two guards took my mother by the arms and walked her out through the kitchen door.

She went without a sound.

At the door she looked back at me, and her lips moved.

I could not hear what she said, but I knew the shape of it, because she had said it to me every night of my life.

Count with me.

"Come," the King said.

I followed him because there was nothing else to do.

The pack opened a path for me.

My cousin glared from her bench, and Sunniva watched me go with an unreadable face and her hands folded at her waist.

Nobody spoke until the doors closed behind us.

In the long stone corridor the cold off the lake leaked through the windows, and the King's twelve soldiers fell back and left us with five paces between us.

"You're not going to thank me," he said without turning.

"No."

"Good."

"Why did you do it?"

He did not answer.

The guest rooms were on the top floor of the east tower, where Greyhollow put kings.

His soldiers took the stairs and stopped on the landing.

He opened the door at the top and held it for me.

I did not go in.

"I serve at supper," I said. "I don't serve in bedrooms."

"I'm not asking you to."

"Then why am I standing here?"

He looked at me then, fully and for a long moment, and his wolf looked out of his eyes.

I had never been looked at that way, not by anyone, and my face went hot, and I hated it.

"Because I need to see something," he said. "Come in. Shut the door."

I went in.

The door shut behind me.

The room was cold and bare, with a fire laid and not lit, and a bed made with the Storrow crest on the blanket.

He stood in front of the window with the last of the light on his back.

"Show me your wrists," King Evander said.

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