The Mate He Gave Away novel · Chapter 1 of 40
Chapter 1: The Gift
At the Midsummer feast the Alpha King gives his 'barren' wife to his brother for the season to breed him an heir, so Clem rejects him with a silver knife in front of the court, leaves her crown with his mistress and walks out, and learns on the steps exactly why he chose his brother.
My husband gave me away between the roast and the honey cakes.
Three hundred wolves sat in Ravenscar Hall for the Midsummer feast.
Osric stood at the head of the high table and lifted his cup, and the hall went quiet for its king.
"Three years," he said. "Three years I've kept a Millward in my bed, because Millward women breed twins like rabbits."
A few people laughed.
"And my Luna has given me nothing. Not a pup. Not the promise of one."
I kept my hands folded in my lap.
I had learned that at court. Fold your hands and nobody sees them shake.
"So I'm doing what the old kings did," Osric said. "Under the Brother's Debt, I'm lending her to my brother for the season."
The laughter got louder.
"If Corvin can get a pup where I couldn't, the child is mine, and the Greywold has its heir."
At the foot of the hall, a man set his cup down on the bench very slowly.
Corvin Ravenscar had ridden in an hour ago, still in his mud-splashed sheepskin.
I had met him twice in three years. Once at my wedding, once at a funeral.
He was looking at his brother like he wanted to see him on fire.
"Stand up, Clemency," Osric said. "Let him see what he's getting."
I stood up.
My red gown was gold at the hem. The Luna's circlet sat on my hair, three garnets heavy as stones.
Osric reached over and lifted my braid off my left shoulder.
The mate mark sat below my collarbone, a pale crescent where he bit me on our wedding night.
"So my brother remembers whose she is," he said.
On his other side, Lady Ondine Adderley laughed loudest of all.
She wore green silk and the gold serpent of her house at her breast, with two emerald eyes.
"Is she even warm?" she asked. "I'd hate for Corvin to freeze."
The table roared.
I thought of the bitter teas.
The cold hands of three different physicians.
The court ladies who patted my belly at chapel and said, "Next year, dear."
Two years ago Osric stopped coming to my bed at all. He said looking at me put him off his food.
In front of me lay the honey cakes and the silver knife for cutting them.
I picked up the knife.
Somebody near the fire stopped laughing.
I pressed the flat of the blade against the crescent on my shoulder.
Silver burns a wolf. It burned me, cold and then hot.
"I, Clemency Millward," I said, loud enough for the doors, "reject you, Osric Ravenscar, as my mate and my king."
Something snapped inside my chest.
Osric's cup hit the table.
Wine ran across the cloth and into Ondine's lap.
He bent over the table with both hands flat on the wood, his face gray, breathing.
Nobody in the hall moved.
I looked down at my shoulder.
The crescent had gone white and flat.
I set the knife down next to the honey cakes.
Then I lifted the circlet off my hair.
I walked around Osric's chair and set it on the cloth in front of Ondine, in the puddle of wine.
"Here," I said. "It pinches. You'll get used to it."
Her mouth opened and nothing came out.
Osric straightened up one inch at a time.
He was the most handsome man in the Greywold, golden from his hair to his rings, and right then he looked like a dead fish.
"You think anybody wants you?" he said. "A barren miller's girl with no crown?"
"I think I'll find out."
"Go north as nothing," he said. "See who feeds you."
I walked down the length of the hall in my gold-hemmed gown.
Three hundred faces turned to follow me.
The queen mother sat by the fire with her lips pressed white. She had never once called me by my name.
I didn't stop for her.
I didn't stop for anyone until I reached my chamber in the east tower.
The gilded birdcage hung by the window, where it had hung since my wedding.
The queen mother's gift. A linnet inside, brown and small, singing to nobody.
I opened the little gold door and the window behind it.
The bird sat on the bars for a long moment.
Then it was gone into the dark over the river.
I took my wool cloak and nothing else.
Down in the stable yard, Corvin was already saddling a gray mare by torchlight.
He didn't look surprised to see me.
"I'm not a gift," I said.
"I know."
"I'm a passenger. You're going north anyway. I'd like to go north too."
He tightened the girth.
"Can you ride in that dress?"
"I can ride in a sack."
The corner of his mouth moved. It wasn't quite a smile.
"Why didn't you say no?" I asked. "In there. You could have said no."
"I was standing up to say it." He looked at me over the saddle. "You were faster."
"Then why does he want you? Why not some lord with a big family?"
He was quiet so long I thought he wouldn't answer.
"Because I'm his heir," he said. "Until he has a pup, the throne comes to me."
"So?"
"So under the Debt, a pup I sire on his Luna is his, in law. And the brother who sires it gives up his own claim. Forever."
The torch hissed in the wind off the river.
"He gets a Ravenscar heir," Corvin said, "and I'm never king."
Above us, a shutter opened in the high windows of the hall.
Osric stood there with Ondine tucked under his arm, watching me.
"So that's why he picked me," Corvin said.
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