Bound to the Alpha King novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Binding
Hedda shoves past her brother to take the blood oath to the conqueror king, and when a poisoned bolt hits him she names the poison and saves him, so he decides she is the one who sent it.
The king who killed my father wanted a Carrow child on its knees before sundown.
He did not care which one.
The throne hall at Greywater was cold enough to see my breath.
Two hundred wolves of the Stone Court lined the walls and watched my people kneel on the flagstones.
I knelt at the front with my hands folded, my healer's pouch on my belt, and a vial of black-root sewn into my left cuff.
I had stitched it in myself, the night the Fen elders told me to bring nothing sharp.
Black-root is quiet.
One drop in a cup and a man falls asleep at his own table.
Rorik Stane sat on the stone seat above us.
He was bigger than the stories.
He had short dark hair, a short beard, pale grey eyes, and the top of one ear missing.
He looked at us.
"The old law is simple," said the blind rite-keeper beside him.
Her voice carried to the back wall.
"A conqueror binds himself to a child of the beaten Alpha, or the Moon does not call his crown lawful."
"Blood to blood, life to life."
"If the king dies, the bound one dies with him."
A murmur went down the room.
My little brother Tobren knelt beside me, nineteen years old and shaking with hate.
I could feel him gathering his legs under him.
He meant to take the oath, and then he meant to put a knife in the king the second his palm was cut.
He would be dead before the blood dried, and the Fen would burn for it.
"Tobren," I whispered.
"Don't," he said.
"Stay down."
"I'm the Alpha's son."
"You're a boy with a temper," I said. "I'm the one with a cool head."
I stood up before he could.
Every wolf in the hall turned to look.
My knees hurt from the stone, and my voice came out steadier than my hands.
"I am Hedda Carrow, daughter of Brannick," I said. "I'll take the oath."
The king's eyes went to me, then to Tobren, then back.
"You are the healer," he said.
"Yes."
"You tended the wounded on the Whitford, after."
"I tended everyone, yours too."
Somebody in the gallery snorted.
The king did not smile.
"Come up," he said.
I climbed the dais steps with my pouch knocking against my hip.
Close up, he smelled of cold iron and woodsmoke.
The rite-keeper put a bone cup into my hands and a bone knife into his.
He took my right palm in his huge, scarred one.
His fingers were warm.
That annoyed me more than the knife.
"Say the words," said the rite-keeper.
I said them.
They were in the old tongue, and I had learned them from my grandmother as a child, never dreaming I would use them.
The blade opened my palm with one clean pull.
It stung, and I did not look away from his face.
He cut his own hand next without blinking and pressed it flat against mine.
The blood ran down both our wrists into the cup.
Something small and hot turned over in my chest.
His heartbeat knocked once inside my ribs.
Mine was running fast, but his was slow, and I felt both of them.
His grey eyes widened by a hair.
He felt it too.
"It's done," said the rite-keeper.
The wolves of the Stone Court began to roar their approval.
Then a string twanged in the gallery.
I saw it before I heard it, a dark line across the torchlight.
The crossbow bolt took Rorik Stane high in the left arm and spun him half around.
The roar became a scream.
Guards ran for the stairs.
Rorik gripped the shaft and snarled, and I caught the smell from his wound.
Wolfsbane, thick and greasy, mixed into marrow fat so it would cling.
"Don't pull it," I said.
He pulled it.
"Idiot," I said, and grabbed his sleeve.
I dropped to my knees and tore open the pouch on my belt.
Ash charcoal went into the wound first, then goat's rue chewed to paste in my own mouth.
My hands were already glowing a faint orange where they touched his skin.
The king hissed through his teeth.
"What is that?" he said.
"Wolfsbane in marrow fat. Hold still."
"You know it by smell."
"I know it because it's the first thing a healer learns not to touch."
I pressed the paste in with both thumbs.
His blood was running warm over my wrists.
The bound heartbeat in my chest slowed, and then it steadied.
My shoulders came down.
When I looked up, the whole hall had gone still.
Rorik Stane was looking down at me with his pale eyes narrowed.
"You named it before you saw it," he said, so quietly that only I heard.
"I'm a healer."
"Healers carry antidotes."
His good hand closed around my wrist, hard enough to hurt.
"So do the people who poisoned the cup in the first place."
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