She Wore My Twin's Hide, So I Carried Her Mate's Heir novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Shawl
Rowena strokes my sister's silver hide in the great hall and orders silence; I carry the wine tray and decide to stay. The steward says the heiress wants the new girl.
Rowena Marrow walked into the great hall wearing my sister's skin.
It hung from her shoulders as a shawl, silver fur with a white blaze down the left side.
I was standing by the wine table with a tray in my hands and a servant's apron over my dress.
Two hundred wolves of the Iron Wolf Clan were at the long tables for the Harvest Gathering, and not one of them looked away from her.
I knew that blaze.
Lena had it on her left shoulder in her wolf form, and she'd hated it as a pup because it made her easy to find.
"She's so brave," someone whispered behind me.
I didn't turn around.
That morning at dawn, Lena had come home with her boots wet and her eyes shining.
"I pulled a girl out of a hostile clan's hands at the edge of our land," she'd said. "She's the Alpha King's daughter, Brenna. The Alpha King's only daughter!"
"Was she hurt?"
"Scared, mostly. She held my hand the whole way home."
Then Rowena's guard captain had ridden up to our gate and bowed to my sister.
"The heiress wishes to thank you in private, Miss Cardross. Come alone. She's shy about being seen shaken."
I had looked at that smile of his and said, "People that polite want something."
Lena had laughed and kissed my cheek.
"You think everyone is scheming because you are," she said.
She was supposed to awaken her bloodline the next morning, on our twenty-fourth birthday.
I had spent twenty-four years telling myself I'd go with her to anything.
So I'd borrowed a grey dress from a laundry cart, filed my claws down to dull nubs with a kitchen whetstone, and walked in through the servants' gate behind her horse.
It was the last time I saw her alive.
Now Rowena reached the high table and stroked the fur at her throat.
Her father, the Alpha King, sat above her with his black mantle across his knees and his pale eyes fixed on his goblet.
"Daughter," he said. "That's a new piece."
"A gift from a loyal subject," Rowena said, and smiled.
The hall laughed.
I had a tray of full cups in my hands, and I knew every one of them would stay level if I kept breathing slowly.
Rowena looked down at the wolves in front of her, and her smile slipped for a moment.
"I'll say this once, because I've been told that some of you saw the guard bring her in."
Nobody breathed.
"Who asked that girl to meddle?" Rowena said. "She made it look as if she were better than me. I am the one and only heir of Roderick Marrow, the future ruler of this clan."
Her captain stood behind her, and on his thumb was a ring made from a single curved claw.
It was silver-white and as long as my smallest finger.
Lena's claws had been that colour.
"Nothing happened today," Rowena said. "No one is to speak of it. If I hear one word, that wolf's tongue will be cut out and burned."
Nobody laughed this time.
Beside me, an old servant with flour on her wrists set down her pitcher and said very quietly, "Keep your face still, girl."
I kept it still.
I looked at the hide on Rowena's shoulders, and I felt my grip loosen on the tray.
The next breath I took tasted like iron.
I had been Lena's shadow all my life, the calculating one, the one who said the cold things so Lena didn't have to.
Lena was the kind one.
She had walked into that room and gotten skinned for it.
I wanted to throw the tray at the high table.
I wanted to break every plate in the hall and let my teeth come out and take Rowena's throat in front of them all.
Then I looked at the guards along the wall.
A dozen men, watchful and armed.
The captain's hand was on his sword.
If I moved, I'd be a second pelt by midnight, and Lena would have no one.
So I stayed.
I walked the length of the hall with my tray steady and set a cup down in front of Rowena.
She didn't look at me.
Servants weren't people to her.
"A word of advice, wolf-girl," the Alpha King's steward whispered as I backed away. "Don't look at her too long."
"No, sir."
"And stand up straight. The physician checked your blood at the gate this morning, didn't he?"
"He did, sir."
I had let him.
It had seemed like a small thing, the cost of getting inside.
The steward looked at a slip of paper in his hand and then at me, and his eyebrows rose.
"Well," he said. "The Alpha's daughter wants you."
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