The Alpha's Unwanted Luna novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Chair
At the Harvest Moon Feast Eamon seats Dacia in Ismay's chair, and Ismay finishes her toast, lays her signed rejection by his plate and walks out the gate as the wards go slack.
My chair had stood at Eamon's right hand for thirteen months, and tonight a different woman was sitting in it.
I stopped in the doorway of the great hall with the wine tray still balanced on my forearm.
Nobody looked up.
Three hundred wolves were eating at the long tables.
Every Alpha who had ridden in for the Harvest Moon Feast sat along the dais.
Dacia Renshaw lifted her glass to me across the candles.
She wore cream silk and the pearls she kept for important rooms.
She sat the way you sit when you have waited a long time for a seat.
Eamon didn't lift his eyes from his plate.
He was my husband, and he had not looked at me properly since the morning after our wedding.
A girl from the Garland row took the tray out of my hands and whispered, "Luna, I'm so sorry."
"Don't be," I said.
I walked up the length of the hall, and the noise thinned out around me until I could hear my boots.
An Alpha from the east range stopped chewing.
The Elder, Gwendolen Haskett, sat at the end of the dais with her blackthorn cane across her knees.
She kept her eyes on her bread.
"There's a mistake at the head table," I said.
Eamon set down his knife.
"There's no mistake, Ismay."
He said it low, the way he said everything to me.
"Dacia has run this house for a year," he said. "Tonight she sits where she's earned."
Somebody near the back laughed, and somebody else shushed it.
Dacia's smile didn't move.
I had renewed nine ward stones around this territory by hand on every new moon for a year.
She had never once asked who did it.
This pack's grain, lumber and fuel were all paid for through accounts that carried my signature.
Nobody had ever asked about that either.
I had sat in the small east room and not made a sound.
I had told myself that silence was what a treaty wife owed.
My father had died believing it was a good bargain.
I looked along the dais at the visiting Alphas.
This was the first time all of them had ever watched me at once.
So I made it worth watching.
"Then I'll make my toast from here," I said.
A server put a glass into my hand.
I held it up, and I kept my voice as even as water in a basin.
"To the Blackmoor pack," I said. "May it be as well kept as it has been for the past year."
Dacia's smile slipped by a hair.
Eamon heard something in that line, and his jaw set.
I drank.
Then I took the folded papers out of my cardigan pocket and laid them beside his plate, squarely.
They were creased from carrying and thick with three signatures.
Mine, in the black ink I used for the ledgers.
Gwendolen's witness line, which she had signed at noon without asking me one question.
And the pack seal, pressed in red wax I had melted myself in the east room at four o'clock.
"What is this?" Eamon asked.
"My rejection of you," I said. "Signed, witnessed, and sealed."
The hall went so quiet that I heard the candles.
Under pack law a Luna can end a treaty marriage with her own signature and an Elder's witness.
The Alpha's countersign is not required.
I had read the old books, because I was the only one who ever had.
"You don't mean this," Eamon said.
He stood up so fast the chair legs shrieked across the floor.
He was six foot four, and he had never in his life been told no by a woman in his own hall.
"I mean it," I said. "You never wanted a wife. Now you have a free chair instead."
An Alpha from the northern range muttered, "Goddess."
Dacia put her hand on Eamon's sleeve.
He shook it off without looking, which told me he was angrier than I had guessed.
I turned and walked back down the hall.
Nobody stopped me.
Children stared from under the tables, and the Garland girl who had taken my tray pressed her fist to her mouth.
At the iron arch of the main gate, a wolf I'd known for a year looked at the floor.
I stepped over the threshold with my braid over my shoulder and my carrying bag in my fist.
The first boot print I left on the road outside was the lightest I had ever made.
Something under the gravel went slack.
I felt it through the soles of my boots, as plainly as a held breath being let go.
Every ward line I had ever bled onto sagged at once, nine stones deep, and the old gate lamps flickered along the whole ridge.
Behind me, Eamon's voice carried out of the hall, loud enough for the road to hear.
"Let her go," he said. "She'll be crawling back by the new moon."
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