He Rejected His Luna. She Was the Lycan Princess. novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Greywater Hall

Willa meets the Regent in the great hall, who calls her a fraud, and then her father, who knows her by her mother's face. The Regent demands a Blood Trial.

Two hundred people stood along the walls of the great hall at Greywater, and they all turned to watch me walk in.

I wore Torin's coat over my clinic gown and a pair of borrowed boots that were too big.

My neck was still cold where the mark had been.

Torin walked half a pace behind me and to the left.

He hadn't touched me once since the border, though twice I had caught him reaching and stopping.

At the end of the hall, on a dais, stood a man in a grey suit with a silver chain across his chest.

He was in his fifties, with a handsome, tidy face, and he was smiling at me.

"The Regent," Torin murmured. "The King's brother."

"Captain Vance," the Regent said warmly. "You've brought us a stray."

"I've brought the princess, my lord."

"Of course you have."

The Regent came down two steps, and the smile stayed exactly where it was.

"My niece died as a baby, Captain. Her mother carried her into the snow and neither came out. We held a funeral. I wept at it."

"No body was ever found," Torin said evenly.

"There were wolves in those mountains." The Regent turned to me, kind and sorrowful. "My dear, I don't doubt you believe it. Someone has told you a sad story, and I'm sorry for whoever it was. But you are a woman with a mate mark on her neck."

"I had one," I said.

"I can see it, or the place it was. You were a Luna somewhere, and a rejected one. Do you know how many rejected she-wolves have walked into this hall claiming to be a lost princess?"

He turned to the crowd, and people laughed softly.

"Four this year," he said. "One had a very convincing locket."

My hand closed over my own locket.

"You don't have to say anything to him," Torin said, low enough that only I could hear.

I didn't know what to say.

I was twenty-four, I had lost my baby that same night, and I stood in a stranger's coat in a room full of people waiting for me to fail.

Then the doors at the end of the hall opened, and the laughter stopped.

Two guards were holding up an old man between them.

He had white hair and heavy shoulders that had once been broader, and his skin was the color of paper.

He walked with a cane, and each step was a decision.

The whole hall bowed.

I didn't, because I didn't know I was supposed to.

The old man stopped three paces from me and looked at my face.

He looked for a very long time.

"That face," he whispered.

"My name is Willa."

"You have her chin." His voice was thin and rough. "She tilted it like that when she was about to say something I wouldn't like."

My throat closed.

I had my mother's chin, and no one in my whole life had ever mentioned it.

"Edmund," the Regent said gently. "You're unwell. You should sit. People see what they long to see."

"Be quiet, Brother," the King said, without looking away from me.

The Regent's smile slipped, only for a moment.

"That locket," the King said to me. "May I?"

I held it out on its chain.

He took it in a hand that shook, and thumbed the clasp, and it didn't open.

"It only opens for her blood," he said. "I had it made the week she was born."

Nobody moved.

I looked around for a pin and found nothing, so I put the edge of the locket's hinge against my thumb and pressed until it cut.

A drop of blood ran into the clasp.

It clicked.

Inside, under a thin glass, was a tiny painted portrait of a laughing baby with dark fuzz on her head, held in the arms of a young man who was unmistakably the old one in front of me.

On the other side, in my mother's handwriting, it said: Our Willa, one year old.

The hall made a sound.

I couldn't hear it properly, because I was crying.

The King put his forehead against mine, carefully, and held it there.

"Twenty-four years," he said. "I never stopped."

His hand shook against my cheek.

I let him.

For the first time in two days, somebody was touching me because they were glad.

"Very moving," the Regent said at last, and all the warmth had gone out of his voice, though not the smile. "A locket can be opened by any child with a pin and a story. And I note it takes her blood, not her wolf."

"She walked across the Cedar Hollow border and forty wolves knelt," Torin said sharply.

"Forty wolves who all had a grievance against their Alpha, I'm told, and who felt sorry for a girl in a hospital gown."

"My lord..."

"No, Captain. The law is the law." The Regent raised his voice for the whole hall. "A claimant to the royal line is tried at the Hearthstone before the Hall. She must call her wolf and shift in front of the court."

"She's had a night," Torin said.

"Three days," said the Regent. "If she shifts, I will kneel to her myself."

He smiled at me.

"And if she cannot, my dear, she will have claimed the throne with a forged locket, and the penalty for that is the rope."

I looked at him, and at all the faces behind him.

Then I looked at the old man holding my hand.

Inside me, something had gone very quiet and very still.

"Three days," I said.

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