Chapter 5: Highcrown

Highcrown was built of grey stone on the side of a mountain, and I saw it first through the truck window at dawn.

It had towers and a wall, and a courtyard with a hundred wolves in it.

They stood in rows in the snow and bowed as the trucks came through the gate.

I was too tired to be afraid of it.

The king's healer took me straight to a room on the third floor with a window over the valley.

Two cradles stood by the bed, and a woman in grey scrubs was already unwrapping my son.

"Warm hands," she said. "Strong cry. He's a king's grandson, so he'll be loud."

I let her check them both.

When she was finished she turned to me with a small glass tube in her hand.

"I took a sample of your blood in the truck," she said. "I need to take a strand of your hair too."

"Why?"

"Because wolfsbane tells its own story," she said. "It stays in the hair. Each inch of growth is a month."

She cut one long strand near the root and laid it against a ruler.

She looked at it for a long time.

Then she took a second strand.

Then a third.

"Your milk is clean, and so are the babies," she said. "The dose was small enough that it never reached them. That is the kindest thing I can say."

"And the rest?"

She turned the ruler toward me.

"Every inch of this hair is dosed," she said. "I can see it back to the end. That is more than ten years of it, and I'm cutting short."

Keep reading free with an account. Start Rejected in Labor: The Lycan King's Stolen Daughter from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.