Ordering the Lycan Princess to Kneel? novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Order
At the Bloodline Banquet the Alpha orders Elowen to kneel for a spilled goblet, and her white lycan wolf rises and makes the whole hall kneel instead. He looks up and calls her his mate.
The Alpha of Ironwood pointed at the floor in front of his boots and told me to kneel.
Two hundred wolves stopped eating to watch.
I was holding an empty tray, and I had spilled nothing.
Ten minutes earlier, Lavinia had caught me at the kitchen pass.
She was in a red sequined gown, and she stopped to retie my apron strings before she said a word.
"Take my goblet to the head table for me, Elowen?" she said. "It's Mama's crystal, and you're the only one I trust with it."
"Won't you be at the table?"
"In a minute. If Dash growls at you, let me handle him. He's all bark with me."
She squeezed my hands and walked off, smiling at every wolf she passed.
My friend at the grill pushed the little brown bottle across the steel counter.
"Drink up," he said. "You look pale."
I took my swallow, the way I had every shift for three years.
Lavinia kept that bottle full for me herself, and it tasted of metal.
I was the only wolfless person on the Ironwood staff, and nobody had ever been kinder to me than she was.
I carried the goblet out under the sign over the hearth.
GOOD FOOD, STRONGER BLOODLINES.
The Bloodline Banquet fills that hall once a year, and every pack in the mountains sends its best.
Alpha Dashiell Harrow sat at the head of table one.
He did not look up when I set the goblet down in front of Lavinia's empty chair.
Then Lavinia came and sat beside him, and her hand went to the stem.
Her fingers pushed it.
The crystal tipped toward her own lap, and red wine ran down the sequins and across the white tablecloth.
She was smiling when it fell, and then she wasn't.
"Oh," she said, and the whole hall turned.
Dashiell stood.
His chair scraped back, and he looked at the wine and then at me, and he did not ask what had happened.
"At Ironwood, a server who stains a guest kneels and wipes it with her own hands," he said. "Everyone knows that."
I felt every eye in the hall land on me at once.
"Kneel, clean it up, and apologize to the princess."
Lavinia pressed a napkin to her dress and said nothing to stop him.
Behind her, my friend Fenn had come out of the kitchen door with a dish towel in his fist, and he stopped there, because a cook does not cross the hall.
I had knelt for dropped forks and spilled soup and wolves who snapped their fingers at me.
I had said sorry for standing in the way of men who wouldn't have noticed if I fell.
"She tipped it herself," I said.
Nobody at table one spoke.
"Elowen, it's all right," Lavinia said gently. "I know you didn't mean to."
That was worse than if she'd accused me.
Dashiell's jaw tightened.
"Kneel."
He used the Alpha's voice, and it rolled through the hall and bent two hundred necks.
The wolves near me gripped their chairs.
I was wolfless, so it should have done nothing to me at all.
My left arm began to burn.
The old scar on my forearm split open with light, and silver lines ran up my skin from the wrist, branching to my elbow.
Behind me, something very large drew a breath.
I turned my head, and I saw it.
A white wolf stood over my shoulder, tall enough to touch the beams, with a crown of frost on its head and eyes the color of a winter sky.
Somebody dropped a glass.
"I'm not kneeling," I said.
It came out of me in two voices, mine and something older underneath it.
"No."
The sound went through the hall and shook the glasses on every table.
Chairs went over.
Forks rang on the floor.
Every wolf in the room went down on both knees, the pack elders and the guards by the doors, and Dashiell hardest of all.
His knees cracked on the stone.
He caught himself on the table with both hands and the wine soaked into his cuff.
The old beta by the hearth whispered, "A lycan's No."
The hall had gone so quiet I could hear the candles.
Lavinia knelt last.
She waited a full breath after everyone else, and then she folded down, and her eyes never left my face.
Dashiell lifted his head.
His eyes had gone to gold, and they were fixed on me, and he looked afraid.
"Mate," he said, low, and he did not sound as though he had chosen to say it.
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