The Alpha Postponed Our Wedding, So I Married Another novel · Chapter 16 of 32

Chapter 16: Grandmother

I waited to feel something break.

It didn't.

What I felt was tired, and a little cold, and very glad of her hands on my face.

"In front of the whole street," I said. "Father always did like an audience."

My grandmother laughed, one short surprised bark.

"There she is," she said. "I was afraid they'd scared her out of you."

The princess gave her the room beside mine in the west wing.

She slept until ten, which she said she hadn't done since the old King died.

Then she wanted to see everything.

I showed her the annex, and the cabinets, and the window desk.

She ran her finger along the spines of the Eastmarch logs and read the first page of one aloud, under her breath.

"Your accent's better than mine now," she said. "I'm furious."

At noon she asked to meet the shepherd.

He was sitting by the infirmary stove in a borrowed coat, eating porridge.

He looked up when she came in.

He looked at her for a long moment.

Then he put the bowl down and said something in valley Eastmarch that I had to replay twice in my head.

"You're the Highmoor girl with the red ribbons. You trod on my feet at the Coldwater wedding."

"You trod on mine," my grandmother said. "Fifty-one years, and you're still lying about it."

They talked for an hour.

I sat on the infirmary bench and listened.

They talked about the summer fairs in the high meadows, when the pass was open and the Highmoor village drove its sheep up to trade with the mountain packs.

About weddings that went on three days, where you couldn't tell a Kingdom wolf from an Eastmarch one by the end.

About the first raid, twelve years ago, and how the fairs stopped, and nobody from either side came down again.

"I taught you the tongue so you'd always have a door," my grandmother said to me, on the walk back across the courtyard.

"When you were small, your father wanted you to learn the harp instead."

"I remember. I was terrible."

"You were. It was a mercy."

She stopped under the cloister arch.

Alaric was coming toward us across the snow.

He was walking straighter today.

He had shaved the edges of his beard, and his hair was still wet, and he looked at my grandmother with his head slightly lowered.

She looked him up and down for a long time.

Then she spoke to him in Eastmarch.

"They say you're the Butcher of the Pass."

"They do say that."

"They say you broke a Redoak heir's arm."

"I did do that."

"Good," said my grandmother. "Show me your stitches."

He blinked.

Then he pulled up the hem of his shirt, there in the cloister, with two of the ten walking past pretending not to look.

My grandmother leaned in and examined the bandage, and the neat edge of the stitching at the top of it.

"Whose work?"

"Hers," said Alaric. "And the healer's."

"The last three are crooked," my grandmother said.

"I like the last three best," he said.

She let the shirt fall.

She looked at me over his arm with an expression I'd never seen on her face, and then she walked off toward the west wing without another word.

"Was that a yes?" Alaric asked.

"I think that was a yes."

That evening, she sat by my stove with her feet up and her shoes off.

"Your father struck you out of a book," she said. "I'm putting you in mine."

"You don't have a house book."

"I do now." She tapped her temple. "It's short. You're on the first page. That one's on the second, if you want him."

"I don't know if I do."

"You do," she said. "You just don't trust it yet. Six years of being told that wanting things was rude."

She closed her eyes.

"Go and find out. I'm too old to watch you wait for anything else."

I sat with that for a long time after she went to bed.

Then I got up.

I put my gray wool dress back on and my green cloak over it.

I went out across the courtyard in the dark.

The snow squeaked under my boots.

The north tower stairs were narrow and cold and smelled of him.

His door was open a crack, and firelight lay across the landing.

He was sitting on the floor in front of the fire, on a pile of sheepskins, with his back against the cot.

He had a book open on his knee. He wasn't reading it.

He looked up when I came in.

He didn't get up.

"Wife," he said.

"I've been thinking about your question."

"Which one?"

"Whether I want it to end."

He closed the book.

He set it down on the floor beside him very carefully.

"And?"

"I don't care about the contract tonight," I said. "I'll answer that one at Midwinter."

"I came about the other thing."

"What other thing?"

I crossed the room.

I knelt down on the sheepskins in front of him, and the fire was hot on one side of my face.

"You said you don't touch me unless I ask."

His eyes went silver.

All the way across, all at once.

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