The Alpha Postponed Our Wedding, So I Married Another novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: Postponed Again
Gareth postpones their wedding a third time for Lavinia, and Wynne goes to the castle and volunteers for the peace service's secret term, a treaty marriage to the man who broke Gareth's arm.
"Wynne, I'm afraid the wedding will have to wait again."
Gareth Stowe said it.
His face was a dim square on my phone.
He was calling from his rooms at the Council.
The lamp behind him was too bright for me to see his eyes.
"Lavinia's divorce was finalized this morning," he said.
"It's a hard time for her. If we marry now, it'll only remind her of what she lost."
I didn't say anything.
"She's been frail since she was a child, Wynne. What if the stress makes her ill?"
"People will say you have no regard for your own sister."
Behind him, I heard a soft cough.
A woman's cough.
I knew it the way I knew my own name.
I had grown up on the other side of a wall from that cough.
Lavinia was in his rooms.
"Wynne?" Gareth said. "Are you there?"
I was silent for a moment.
Then I nodded.
"Good," he said, relieved. "I knew you'd understand. You always do."
The screen went dark.
I sat on the edge of my bed with the phone in my lap.
This was the third time.
I was sixteen when our families signed the betrothal.
Gareth was twenty-two, the Alpha heir of the Redoak Pack.
Every girl in Kingsmere would have given a tooth for him.
The first time, he went to the Lakewood Pack for an advanced degree.
He stayed three years.
Lavinia was at Lakewood too, recovering from one of her mysterious fevers.
He sat by her bed every day. Everyone said how kind he was.
Then Lavinia married the northern border commander and followed him to the Ferris Pass.
A month later, Gareth asked for a posting at the border.
"I need to build my career first," he told me. "You understand."
Three more years.
Every winter ball in the capital, someone asked me when the wedding was.
Every spring, they stopped asking and started smiling.
By twenty-two I was the longest engagement in Kingsmere and the best joke at every dinner table.
Now Lavinia was divorced and home, and Gareth was home, and I was supposed to wait some more.
I stood up.
I took my green cloak off the hook.
I didn't let myself think about it until I was standing in my grandmother's kitchen on Tanner Street, dripping rain on her floor.
She looked at my face and put the kettle on.
"He postponed it again," she said.
"Lavinia's divorce."
My grandmother snorted.
She was a border woman from Highmoor village, and she had never pretended to like the Stowes.
"And what are you going to do about it?"
"You told me the princess is going to Highmoor."
She set two cups down very slowly.
"For three years. She'll take ten women from the Packs to serve the peace."
"They don't come home until it's done. Not for weddings, and not for funerals."
"I know."
"Your mother will scream."
"I know that too."
My grandmother looked at me for a long time.
Then she smiled, and it was the first time anyone had smiled at me that year without pity in it.
"I'll write the letter tonight," she said. "And I'll walk it up to the castle myself."
The princess saw me at nine that same night.
I hadn't expected that.
She received me in a cold stone office at the back of the Royal Castle.
She wore a plain wool sweater.
A map of the northern border covered one whole wall.
"Your grandmother says you speak Eastmarch," she said.
"Since I was five, Your Highness."
She switched to it without warning.
Where were you born, and what do you call the snow that falls after a thaw?
"Kingsmere," I answered in Eastmarch. "And we call it widow's snow, because it hides the ice."
She sat back.
"You'll do," she said in our own tongue. "I need a translator more than I need a clerk."
"Then I'll go."
"Wait. You should hear the rest before you say that."
She got up and stood by the map.
Her finger traced the Ferris Pass, where the Kingdom ends and the mountain packs begin.
"Twelve years of raids. We finally have a truce, and the treaty is ready."
"But Eastmarch asked for one thing more."
She turned.
"A marriage. One woman of this Kingdom, wed to their Alpha at Highmoor's gate, to show we mean it."
"A contract for a year. Either side may end it once the treaty is ratified at Midwinter."
The fire popped in the grate.
"I have asked every family on the Council," the princess said. "Not one of them will give me a daughter."
I thought of Gareth's dim face on my phone.
I thought of that cough behind him.
I thought of six years of dinner tables, and smiling, and understanding.
"I'll marry him," I said.
The princess didn't move.
"You're betrothed to Gareth Stowe."
"I'll send the papers tomorrow."
"You haven't even asked who he is."
"Does it matter?"
She looked at me with something close to sympathy.
"It might," she said. "His name is Alaric Kerne. Our papers call him the Butcher of the Pass."
She paused.
"Two years ago he broke your fiancé's arm in three places."
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