Chapter 1 The Hall Laughed

My fated mate rejected me in front of the whole royal court, and he did it while looking at my body, not my face.

I, Adrian Ravenscroft, Crown Prince of Silvercrest, refuse to take you, Clara Beaumont, as my mate and as my Luna.

The Moon Ceremony Hall was filled with his voice. It was calm. It was clear. It was the voice of a man who had repeated these words in his mind many times but who had felt nothing when they had emerged from his mouth at last.

Then he smiled, a little, as he smiled for paintings.

Too fat to be my Luna.

The hall laughed.

It wasn't loud at the beginning. It began as a cough in the back rows, a laugh that one lord attempted to stifle in his hand, more laughter, more, until it rolled over the stone floor and struck me all around. White fans laughed at the ladies. The mouths of young wolves were open in laughter. There was a guard near the door, who looked down at his boots, and even he was smiling.

My bond cracked.

I could hear that sound no one else could hear. It was a thin, hard crack of ice on a lake in the first days of spring, inside my chest under my ribs. There was a straight path of pain that went through me. My knees shook. The white lilies in my hands trembled with them. I could smell them, sweet and heavy, and I hated that smell, and I could not put the flowers down, because if I moved, I knew my legs would give way, and I would fall in front of all of them.

So I did not move. I was in the middle of that hall in my ceremony dress; my mate bond was ripping at me, and I breathed in little careful sniffs like I did when I got a scented mixture that hit me like a hot knife in the flesh in the warden tower.

Seven days. All the Moon Goddess gave me was that.

When Adrian walked past the warden's benches 7 days ago, at the ceremony rehearsal, my wolf lifted her head inside me. It was like it had hooked me to the bond. I had come home, shaking and happy and stupid. My mother was crying at the table. Not from joy. From fear. She had glanced at my plate and then at me, and she had said, in her soft court voice, that a prince might still change his mind and that I should eat less this week, just in case.

I had eaten less. There had been no changes. The dress was let out at the seams before Tara sewed me into it tonight, because my body is my body, wide in the hips, thick in the thighs, soft at the stomach, and no week's thin soup could make me into my sister.

The family of the bride stood 3 steps away from me; on my left, Aurora stood.

My sister was beautiful, like a winter's morning. Lots of hair, pale gold, down her back. Blue eyes. A dress of silver silk that fit her like water. She hadn't laughed at all. That was the worst thing. Aurora didn't make fun of me in front of others. She only looked on with a little tilt of her head, pity on her face like a jewel.

Then she stepped forward and put her hand on Adrian's arm.

She said "Adrian" softly enough for the first rows to hear, sweetly enough for all of them to love her for. Don't be mean to her; she can't help it.

What she is.

The hall was hushed in a warm, happy manner. Look at Aurora. So kind. So fit to be Luna. My sister lowered her eyes as she had been taught to do in mirrors since she was twelve, and a murmur went up like wind in dry leaves from the court ladies.

Adrian put his hand over her hand. He kept it there.

“It's something you can see with your own eyes,” he said to the court. He wasn't talking to me at this moment. I was no longer a person, but a point he was making. A Luna runs by the Alpha, a Luna stands with the Alpha, and a Luna carries the future of this crown in her body and shows the other packs our strength. Slowly he looked me over from head to foot and back, and his mouth curled. "Look at her. Would you go to war for this? Would the Stonehaven wolves bow to this?

In the front row my mother looked at her hands.

She didn't lift her eyes from the ground. Not once. She was seated in her good blue dress with her hair pinned back, beside my father, whose burned hands were clenched in his lap so that they could not be seen shaking. He looked up. I saw him lift his eyes and I saw his mouth open and I saw my mother's hand close around his wrist like a little white trap. His mouth shut. He glanced down at the ground.

The rejection was not as painful as that. I want to tell you the truth about it, now. Adrian was a hook in my chest that the Goddess had put there. My father was the father. At the age of six I had been carried on his shoulders in the warden's garden. He had blindfolded me and taught me the names of herbs by their smell, and I laughed, and all the names were right. But he sat in the front row in the largest hall of Silvercrest, and he said nothing while his younger daughter was taken apart in front of three hundred wolves, while my mother held his voice down.

King Roland did not say anything on the high seats. He was seated as a black and silver mountain, with his hands on the arms of the throne, his face of stone. Queen Isabel, with green eyes and a small, satisfied calm, beside him, watched me, like a woman watching a table she has set herself to come out exactly as she planned. But near the council seats, old Viktor Sloan folded his hands in his dark robes, and for one short moment, he did not look at my face. At my hands. Stained with a shade of green at the nails at my warden's hands, of the evening mix.

I saw that in the midst of the pain. A warden's sense of smell comes before all else. I saw the ceremony brazier as well, the large brass bowl that burned next to the thrones during the blessing of the mating. It should have smelled deep, bitter, and clean. Nightbane, pine, and ash. Tonight it was sweet-smelling. Thin. Wrong. I had never burned my mix in that bowl before. There was some other mix, a pretty mix, a nice-smelling mix, and a mix that did nothing.

The mix that Aurora had signed or the mix they had mixed with Aurora's name.

Even half broken, my mind did that. It stretched out towards the labor. The work had always been the place where my body didn't count, where my nose had more value than any slender waist in the room, where the border remained safe at night because at two in the morning Clara Beaumont stood over a copper pot and got the layers right. For years they had been signing her name to that work. Tonight they had burned her weak copy at my mating, and three hundred wolves breathed it in, and they felt blessed, and none of them knew.

Adrian continued to speak. He spoke of responsibility. He talked about the crown. He spoke about the mistakes of the goddess during the war and how a wise prince rectifies the mistakes.

Then he turned back to me, and his voice fell, and for the first time that night, he spoke to me alone, though the hall leaned in to drink it.

You will not make a scene, Clara," he said. You've been a quiet girl all your life; be quiet now.

I had my hand around the stems of the lilies, and one broke and snapped with a little green sound.

Quiet. Eat less. Make yourself smaller. Sit at the back. Sign nothing. Apologize first; don't wait for the other person to ask you to. I had been trained in quiet, as Aurora was trained in walking. My whole life of quiet had brought me here, to a stone floor, in a dress that hurt to breathe in, while the man the goddess chose for me explained my body to a court of laughter like a fault in a horse he would not buy.

There was a stillness in me. Not weak. Still. Like deep water.

I lowered myself down slowly; no one could say I fell. I spread the white lilies on the floor at Adrian's feet, one at a time, for my hands would shake if I didn't have something to do. The one that was broken I laid last. Then I lifted up my hair and removed the white lily pin that denotes a Luna candidate and placed that on the stones as well.

Then let it be written, I said, true.

I was shocked at the sound of my voice. It was not loud. It didn't have to be. The torches were like little rain in the dead quiet of the hall.

You turned your back on me," I said. Here, before your father and your court, say that I heard you, and I will walk on my own feet out of this hall, and I will not make your scene for you.

Adrian's eyes narrowed. This was not on his agenda. In his plan I wept. In his plan I ran, or fainted, and Aurora put a kind hand on my back for the painters.

At last he spoke coldly and flatly, "You heard me. Clara, go home; your family will take care of you.

"Yes," I said. “They've got a lot of practice.”

There was a sound in the hall at that time. Not a laugh. A breath. Aurora's fingers gripped his arm tightly. The calmness of Queen Isabel was only slightly diminished at the edges. I felt my wolf pressing against my ribs, inside, hard, like I'd never felt before, huge and warm and furious, and I pushed her down with all my strength. Not here. Not in their line of sight. The oldest of Mother's rules came to me like a bell. Avoid moving from side to side at court. Your size shames this family.

Adrian stepped close. He was perfumed with wine and cold air and the sweet, wrong incense. He spoke low, for my ears only, and he smiled, and this was the cruelest of all, crueler than the word "fat" and crueler than the laugh.

“Tomorrow night I'll be announcing my pick of the Lunas,” he said. “And you will be servants in grey at my table, to be known by the difference, and rejoice at the court.”

I didn't have a chance to respond because he turned his back on me. He took Aurora's hand and lifted it, and the hall, glad and fed and finished with me, started to clap.

I was in the middle of all the clapping, and I had a torn bond and no hands. The pain in my chest pulsed once, twice, and altered. It was under it, beneath the hurt and the shame and the thin soup and the years of sorry, that something huge shifted in the dark of me and opened its eyes.

And this time, I did not push it back down.