Forced To Bear The Alpha's Son novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Accord

In the pack-house Sorrel learns the law that holds her, the elder calls her a breeder to her face, and a rider brings House Lark's writ.

They unlocked my chain at dawn, and I was not killed.

Anselm Garrow walked me up the dungeon stairs with one hand held out in case I fell.

I did not fall. I limped, and I counted the doors we passed.

There were nine guards between the cell and the courtyard, and not one of them looked at me twice.

"The room is on the second floor," Anselm said. "It has a bath, a bed, and a window you can open."

"Does the door lock?"

"From the inside. The key is on the table."

I stopped on the step.

"You're giving me the key."

"Alpha's order." He rubbed the grey in his beard. "I'd take it before he thinks better of it."

The room was bigger than the dormitory I had slept in for twenty-six years.

It had a quilt on the bed, a fire already burning, and a bath with steam coming off the water.

I stood in the doorway and waited for the trap.

"Eat," Anselm said, and left a tray on the table. "Wash. The Alpha wants you at the long table at noon."

"Why would I sit with them?"

"Because the whole pack wants to see the breeder who made a deal with the Alpha." He grinned without humor. "Better they see you walking in than hear about you through a wall."

I ate everything on the tray, and I locked the door, and I slept for an hour on top of the quilt with my hand under the pillow, wishing it held a blade.

At noon the great hall smelled of roast meat and wet dogs.

Two hundred wolves in human skin stopped talking when I came in.

I kept my chin up and my red hair loose, because there was no hiding it.

The Alpha sat at the head of the long table. Anselm pulled out the chair on his right and I took it.

Matvei did not look at me.

A grey-haired man at his left leaned forward on his elbows.

"So this is the thing from the border," he said.

I did not answer.

"Thirty years I have served this pack," the elder went on, "and I never thought to see a breeder in the Alpha's second seat."

"She sits where I put her," Matvei said.

"She's a bred animal with a brand on her back. She carries nothing but the Madam's stock."

The hall had gone so quiet I could hear the fire.

Matvei set down his knife.

"Say that again," he said, "and finish it."

The elder opened his mouth, shut it, and sat back.

"Good," Matvei said, and went on eating.

I stared at my plate.

I had expected him to humiliate me himself. I had not expected anyone to stop it.

I decided not to be grateful.

After the meal Anselm walked me to the library and sat me down with a fresh loaf and a jug of milk.

"The elder is the council's voice," he said. "He wants the Alpha to take a wolf mate before winter. You've upset his plans."

"What did I upset?"

"The Accord." He tore the bread in half. "You know it?"

"Only that it's the law between the packs and the Houses."

"A House owns its breeders and every child they bear, and the pack must honor that. Except one thing." He held up a finger. "If an Alpha claims a breeder and she carries his child, she leaves the House. So does her family."

My mouth went dry.

"Her family."

"Blood kin. Sisters, brothers, parents." He watched me over the bread. "The midwife has to seal the pregnancy by first snow, or the claim fails."

"And then the Madam can take me back."

"And then the Madam can take you back."

He didn't say the rest. He didn't have to.

I chewed my bread and looked at the shelves.

The deal in the cell had sounded like a cruelty. Now it sounded like a clock.

"Why would he do it?" I asked. "For a stranger who crossed his border?"

Anselm shrugged, and it was a careful shrug.

"You'd have to ask him."

"I'm going to."

"Then take this." He drew a short knife from his belt and set it on the table between us. "Alpha says a woman should have something to hold in a house of wolves."

I picked it up.

It was a plain blade, cut for peeling apples.

It was the first thing anyone had given me in my life that I could keep.

A horn sounded at the gate.

Anselm was on his feet before I understood what it was, and he went to the window and said a word I had never heard a Beta say.

"Rider," he said. "House Lark colors."

The messenger came up the steps with a rolled paper and a wax seal, red, in the shape of a rose.

I knew that seal. I had licked it shut for the Madam a hundred times.

Matvei read the paper at the head of the table with the whole hall watching.

When he finished, he looked at me for the first time that day.

"The Madam of House Lark," he said, "claims her property under the Accord. She will come to my gate herself, and she wants you ready to leave."

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