Rejected, Replaced and Forgotten novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Still Room

The Alpha grips his chest and whispers 'No' when he sees her; his stepsister offers her a lifetime lease to mix a tonic and stay silent; her feet find the still room alone, and a jar label in her own handwriting carries a name she does not know.

The guards did not touch me, and somehow that was worse.

They walked me up the steps.

The old gatekeeper's crying followed us until a door shut on it.

My father had already gone inside.

I had not asked him anything, and he had not answered it.

Eleven healers stood in a line along the wall of a long stone gallery.

There were hedge-witches in shawls and a young doctor in a clean coat.

At the far end stood a woman with a goat's bell round her neck.

I took the last place in the line and counted my own breaths.

Through the double doors at the end I saw long tables and grey jackets setting out cups for a feast.

Nobody there looked at me.

Not the guards, not the women with the cups.

It was the not-looking of people who have been told to.

"Alpha on the floor," someone said.

A man came down the gallery with six wolves at his back.

He was about twenty-four, tall and athletic, with gold hair swept back.

He wore a pale blue quarter-zip that did not belong in a stone hall.

He might have been very handsome once.

His skin had a grey cast and his cheeks were hollow.

One hand was pressed flat against his breastbone.

He walked the line, nodding at each healer.

Then he reached me, and he stopped.

For a second nothing in his face moved at all.

His pupils swelled and a shape moved behind his eyes, a wolf's shape, rising to the glass.

"No," he whispered.

His other hand flew to his chest as well.

Something deep in me answered that sound with a pull so hard I swayed.

I did not know this man.

My whole body wanted to run to him or run from him, and I could not tell which.

"Alpha."

A woman had slid between us, tall and thin, with grey in her brown hair and a ring of keys at her belt.

She did not touch him.

She stood with her back to me and spoke.

"A Ferry's End herbalist, Edgar. A common girl in an apron."

"The King wants every healer. You're tired. Go and sit."

His eyes slid to me over her shoulder, wet and furious and lost.

"She's not..."

"She's no one," said the woman, in a voice with no give in it.

He turned and walked away, stiff as a man on stilts.

Six wolves went after him, and the gallery began to breathe again.

"That's the Alpha's wasting," said the goat-bell woman, leaning down the line.

"Five years now. He hasn't had a good day since."

"Why?" I said.

"Curse, they say."

She looked me up and down.

"You look nothing like a curse, love."

I was still shaking when the tall woman came back and looked me over.

"Come along," she said.

She took me through a servants' door into a corridor lined with coats.

At the end stood a young woman in a white dress, with waist-length brown hair in perfect waves and a silver comb above one ear.

She was smiling at me.

It was a lovely smile, and it made my stomach turn over.

"My daughter Sabra," the tall woman said. "Our Luna."

"You're the Ferry's End girl," said Sabra warmly. "Please, call me Sabra, we're all friends here."

"Betony," I said.

"What a pretty name."

Her eyes were not smiling.

"I'll be direct, because I can see you're clever. The King is looking for the woman who bandaged him five years ago."

"The pack believes it was me."

"Was it?"

"The pack believes it," she said again, very sweetly.

I saw what she was asking before she asked it.

"You want me to make you a tonic and stand behind you while you take a bow."

"I want a clever girl to help her Luna."

She tilted her head.

"Your Maud's lease is up in spring. Stonefall could extend it for her lifetime."

My mouth had gone dry.

Maud coughed into her handkerchief every night, and Sabra knew how little lifetime that was.

"Where's your still room?" I said.

"I'm sorry?"

"If I'm making a tonic, I need your still room."

The mother and daughter looked at each other.

"Down the east stair," said Sabra slowly. "Second door past the larder. One of the girls will show you."

"I'll find it," I said.

I found it with my eyes shut.

I turned left at the pillar with the carved wolf and went down the stairs, finding the worn stone by memory.

I ducked a low beam without looking up and put my hand on a cold iron latch.

It was only when the door swung open that I realized no one had followed me.

I had never been in this hall in my life.

The shelves ran to the ceiling, row on row of jars, and every jar had a label.

The writing on them was small and slanted and quick.

I knew it the way I know the back of my own hand.

I took one down.

"Yarrow for the heir's sleeping draught," it said. "Lenna W."

Under it, in the same hand, was a date.

It was the eve of the First Moon, five years ago, days before Maud found me in the snow.

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