I Gave My Sister My Fiancé and Watched Them Fall novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Release
At the betrothal rite Yvaine speaks the Release before the whole pack and gives Melisande her place; a stranger at the gate says her wolf just woke up.
On the night the pack was to watch me be bound to the Alpha's heir, four hundred wolves filled the rite hall.
Silver lamps hung from the beams, and my mother had pinned white thistle in my braid herself.
"Stand straight," she had said that afternoon. "Your sister is watching from the front, and tonight she needs to see you happy."
My sister sat in the front row in her shawl, with a blanket over her knees and a cup of honey tea going cold beside her.
She had nearly died of fever when I was two and she was five, and her lungs had never healed.
Since then every house rule in our family began with her.
Before the rite, Tobias had found me alone in the robing room.
He had taken both my hands, and his were warm and steady.
"Whatever you hear tonight, you know it's you I'm marrying," he said. "Nothing changes between us."
"Why would I hear anything?" I asked.
"You wouldn't. I only mean it." He kissed my forehead and went out smiling.
I had heard it all already.
A week earlier I had gone to the herb shed behind the Reinhard house with a basket of comfrey for Melisande's chest.
Through the slats I had heard Tobias say, "Once the mark is on her instead, my father will stop asking questions."
And my sister had answered, in her soft, sweet voice, "Yvaine will understand. She always does. She's the strong one."
I had set the basket down on the step, and I had walked home and said nothing to anyone.
Now the Alpha climbed onto the dais and the hall went quiet.
"Tobias Reinhard, son of Cedarvale, stands before his pack," he said. "Who offers a hand in the betrothal?"
Tobias stepped forward and held out his left arm.
The silver ink was ready on the table.
My father, Edmund, stood at the edge of the dais with his council coat buttoned wrong, and he could not look at me.
I took one step toward Tobias.
Then Melisande coughed.
It was a small cough at first, and then it was not.
She bent over the blanket and the cup spilled, and the whole front row turned to her.
My mother was out of her seat in a moment. "Her breath, she can't get her breath, somebody help her."
Tobias ran.
He ran off the dais and knelt in front of my sister, and he held her face in his hands.
"Breathe, Melisande, look at me."
He had never knelt in front of me.
Not once in two years.
I walked down the steps and sat on the edge of the bench beside her, the way I had on a thousand nights.
I laid my palm flat on her back, between her shoulder blades.
The coughing eased almost at once, as it always did.
"The comfort of a sister," my mother whispered, wiping her eyes. "Thank you, Yvaine. Stay with her."
I stayed.
The Alpha cleared his throat.
"Tobias," he said, "the pack has waited for this rite. If Yvaine Halstead cannot go through with it tonight, I ask the Halstead daughters plainly. Will one of you take the mark?"
The hall was so quiet I could hear the lamps hiss.
Melisande lifted her wet face. She did not look at me.
She looked at the Alpha, then at Tobias.
My father shut his eyes.
"It would only be for the winter," Tobias said to me, softly, so only the front benches could hear. "Until she's stronger. Then we put it right."
Everyone on those benches heard him.
Nobody asked what the winter would put right.
I knew what a promise sounded like when the man making it was already looking at someone else.
I took my hand off Melisande's back.
She drew a deep, clean breath the moment my fingers lifted. I noticed that, and I put it away to think about later.
So I stood up.
I walked to the dais and stepped past Tobias without touching him.
"Alpha," I said. My voice carried to the last bench. "I step aside from this betrothal. I speak the Release."
The hall gasped.
"Yvaine," my mother said.
I did not turn around.
"The mark is mine to give up, and I give it to my sister. May she wear it in good health, and may Tobias Reinhard keep every word he has said to us tonight."
I pushed up my sleeve.
The silver line on my wrist burned white, and then it was gone, and a pale scar was left in its place.
It could not be taken back. Everyone in that hall knew the law.
Tobias stared at my wrist.
Melisande's mouth was open.
My father said, very quietly, "What have you done?"
"What you asked," I said.
I walked down the aisle between four hundred faces and pushed open the doors.
Cold night air came in off the river.
At the gate of the yard stood a man I had never met, with a scar through his left eyebrow and a wolf's stillness in the way he held himself.
He wore the grey of the Ashfall Pack, which no Cedarvale wolf was supposed to wear on our land.
He was looking at my wrist.
"Hamish Rathbone, of Ashfall," he said. "That wasn't a gift." "Your wolf just woke up."
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