Page 37 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

He comes to me first with his hand out. “Valen.” I take it then step back level with her. He has Nyxiana by both hands and is talking before he’s finished arriving, easy with her.

“Your people are our people,” he says. “That makes the pair of you family, and family doesn’t get walked to a guest house.”

Natalie greets us the same way he does. I watch him the whole time he’s talking to Nyxiana. He means every word of it. That’s the part I can’t do anything with.

The Great Hall runs longer than the whole Ash Hollow compound. The walls carry tapestries that won’t hold still, the figures in them going through what they’re doing and then starting it again, one length of fae history after another the whole way down the room. Lights the size of my fist drift through the air over everyone’s heads, in no hurry, going nowhere. At the far end there are two thrones with King Finnian and Queen Aoife in them.

I go through the doors first and have the room twice before she’s all the way across the threshold.

Lachlan presents us. The crown receives us the way Briarstone received us, and Briarstone had a reason. Niko is her uncle. Nobody on that dais is any blood of ours yet the welcome is the same size. When the presenting has finished I fall back to the wall where I can hold the doors and the room together. Every face in here belongs to Faelan’s kind. I work the crowd one at a time the whole way around. Nothing. I start again from the other end going the other way. The same nothing comes back. She goes out into the middle of the room. I stay on the wall.

Nobles close around her inside a minute and she lets them. She’s a head shorter than every man in that ring, turns her face up to whoever’s talking. The light in this hall gets right into her eyes and the violet in them shows from across the room. She’s trading the first courtesies while I’m still on the wall counting doors, three steps into the politics of this room before I’ve finished my second pass. Watching her is harder work than watching the room. I can’t get to her from the wall. I walk over to her, stand so the doors are behind me and there’s nothing in front of me but whoever gets close to her.

A council fae in worked robes asks her what the pack came to Doria for. She tells him. When she’s finished, he doesn’t know anything new. I keep my eyes on the room. Lachlan takes me aside with a host’s excuse about wine and then asks me something real.

“How bad was the North Range? What came down to us here was thin.”

“They set a price at the border. I paid it.”

Lachlan waits to see whether there’s more. There isn’t.

“Your rooms are ready,” he says. “Come and eat.”

They put us inside the castle on the same corridor, four doors apart. I walk hers before she’s in it and don’t ask her first. Two windows open onto a balcony. It’s twenty feet off that balcony to a stone walk with no cover on it. The door is heavy and the bolt is strong. I do my own next. Then I walk the corridor between the two rooms.

The welcome meal runs long. They eat at long tables down the length of the hall. Light gathers over them in slow turning patterns. Nobody put it there. Down at the far end somebody starts singing and others come in. It keeps going under everything else for the rest of the night. They drink to Ash Hollow. Then to Lyanna, Nova, Lachlan, the three who tie the pack to this valley. Nyxiana sits inside all that warmth and works it. My attention goes to her instead of the room more than once, and every time I have to bring it back myself.

I’m not eating. I don’t eat in a house until I know what’s in it. Nobody in this valley has asked us for one thing back. I keep waiting for the catch. It doesn’t come. The trouble isn’t that I found something - it’s that I can’t.

I walk her to her door at the end of the night. She opens it and stands there. She took the court dress off with one pass of her hand on the stairs, the same way she put it on. Her hair is down again. There’s still no color in her face. I’ve been putting this off since the gates.

“This is the most dangerous place we’ve been.”

“Go on.”

“It’s his kind, all of it, top to bottom. They’ve given us the road, the escort, the hall, the crown. Rooms four doors apart. Nobody has asked us for one thing back.” I keep my voice down. “A welcome that size has a price on it. I haven’t found it.”

She doesn’t tell me I’m wrong.

“You’re right,” she says. “The warmth is real. So is the price. We’ll find out what it is soon enough.”

She looks at me for a while without saying anything. She’s near enough now that one step would close it. The last time one of these got this close she put a step of rock between us. I don’t take the step. Neither of us says goodnight. She stands in the open door while I stand a stride off it and it runs on too long before I walk away.

I check the latch on the window, set my boots where my hands will find them in the dark, then I sit where I can see the door and keep watch inside the most beautiful place I’ve ever stood.

Chapter 24

Nyxiana

Morning in Castle Dubhshláine comes in gold, spreading across the guest chamber floor in long bars picking out the grain in pale stone, veined with something that holds the light after it’s moved off.

Somebody from the household left breakfast on the table by the window before I was up. I’ve finished it. I dress, and catch myself back in the memory of last night, how far away from my door he stood, and who put the width of it there. I stop that thought and open the door. An empty tray sits on the floor outside his. He’s already in the corridor, standing where he can see both ends at once, the way he’s stood in every corridor of this castle since we walked in.

I look at him for whatever last night left behind. His eyes come to me first, gray, steady, staying there. It’s the same stillness he had the first day at Ash Hollow.

He falls in beside me and matches my pace, doesn’t say a word the whole way down. Lachlan is waiting in the Great Hall. Morning has come through the high windows onto the tapestries and every figure in them is already at work. The thrones at the far end are empty at this hour. He takes us past them and down a stair set into the wall that I walked by twice yesterday without seeing.

“Finnian and Aoife opened this for you,” he says. “What’s in here is older than the library. Older than most of what we teach.”