I Was Never Their First Choice novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Gate Key

Solveig reaches the Frostmark Hold, where the Alpha tells her she can leave at any dawn for a month. At dinner, a girl her pack buried is alive.

The gates of the Frostmark Hold opened at dusk, and the first thing I felt was the cold.

It was a dry cold that made my teeth ache.

The envoy drove the wagon through the arch and into a courtyard full of lantern light and trampled snow.

She had not said ten words to me in four days.

I had spent them looking at the cloth tag on my bag strap.

My father had written my name on it two weeks ago, before the bowl, before the list, before I had said a word.

I had asked the envoy about it once, on the first night.

She had looked at the tag, then at the road, and said nothing at all.

"Get down," she said now. "He's waiting."

I climbed down with my bag and my braid half frozen to my collar.

A man stood at the top of the steps with his hands behind his back.

He was tall, with short black hair and a scar along his jaw, and he wore plain wool with no badge on it.

He was the Alpha.

I knew it before anyone said so, because every wolf in the courtyard had gone quiet around him.

"Solveig Sandiford," he said.

"Yes."

"I'm Kjell Branvik."

He did not offer his hand.

He looked at me for a while, and I stood there and let him.

Something low in my chest turned over and settled again, and I decided it was the cold.

"You volunteered," he said.

"I did."

"Nobody volunteers."

"Then you've never met my family," I said.

A big red-bearded man behind him made a noise that was half a cough and half a laugh.

"Bram Iversen," the man said, coming down the steps with his arms already open. "I'm the Beta, which means I do everything he won't. You look frozen. Give me that bag."

"I can carry it."

"You can carry it tomorrow," Bram said, and took it.

Kjell turned and went inside without another word, and Bram nodded for me to follow.

"He's like that with everybody," Bram said, low. "Mostly."

The hall inside was warmer than I had expected, all stone and dark beams and fires built high.

Bram led me down a corridor and stopped at a heavy door.

"Yours," he said.

I opened it.

There was a narrow bed with three blankets, a lamp already lit, and a table with a jug of hot water on it.

A grey cloak hung on a hook by the window.

I took it down and held it against my shoulders.

It fit me exactly.

"Who wore this before?" I asked.

"Nobody," Bram said. His face did something quick and careful. "We keep a few in the stores. Different sizes."

I looked at the stitching on the hem.

It was new.

"There's one rule you should hear tonight," Kjell said from the doorway.

I hadn't heard him come.

He stayed in the corridor and did not step across the threshold.

"For the first month, you can leave at any dawn," he said. "The gate key hangs by the kitchen door. You do not need to ask me. If you take it, nobody will follow you, and nobody will write to your father about it."

"And after the month?"

"After the month the trial begins and you stay the four years."

"Why tell me about the key?"

"Because you did not choose to be here for the right reasons," he said. "I would like you to choose it again."

I opened my mouth and had no answer.

"Eat," he said. "Then sleep."

He left.

Bram let out a low whistle. "That's the most he's said to a new wolf in three years."

He took me down to the long hall.

A fire burned at each end.

Four tables ran down the middle, and at the farthest one sat three people about my own age, eating bread and stew, laughing at something one of them had said.

They wore the Hold's grey, and they looked well fed, tanned from the snow, and strong.

One of them was a girl I recognized.

I had been sixteen when she walked out of Silverbrook with the envoy, three winters ago, and my mother had told me never to speak her name.

The pack had held a funeral for her without a body.

She looked up, saw me in the doorway, and dropped her spoon.

"Solveig?" she said. "Little Solveig Sandiford?"

She was alive.

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