Chapter 3 Going Nowhere

I did not sleep in the corridor.

I sat and waited until the stone had cooled down through my clothes and counted things to slow down my heart, while my back was against my own locked door. Doors in the passage. Nine. Torches. Twelve. The rifts that my breath caused in my bond. Too many to count.

Before the first bell, Tara found me.

She descended the passage in her work apron, holding a cloth of bread in her hand and her grey wool cloak over her arm, and did not use one single word to ask if I was sure. She handed me bread in my hands, a cloak over my shoulders, and held my face for one stony second.

She said that guards change at the dawn bell. “Clara, you always walk like you're sorry the floor is there, but not today. North gate. Go like you own the road!

I said, "Come with me, and she did, and she couldn't.

My mother is in the sewing room. Her lips trembled and tightened. When they're gone, one of us must remain to hear what they have to say and remember me when you eat, like a free woman. She pressed the bread at me once again. Eat. Walk. Don't stop for anybody. Don't stop for him.

I ate while walking. It was a thin grey light in the morning, and the court was awake around me, and the kitchen boys and the stable boys, and one priest with sleep in his eyes, and none of them looked twice at a servant in grey with a cloth in her hand. The north yard was filled with the odour of cold ash, horse and the gate brazier, and even in the north yard, even at the gate of the royal pack, the aroma that ascended from the coals was sweet and thin and wrong.

The gate bar was down.

The men who waited with the horses were all Emberfall, four of them, and they were dressed in plain dark coats, and one of them, when he saw me, turned his horse towards the guest tower and rode off with a message. In front of me and this bar were six royal guards, and in front of them was a man I recognised by his gait before I saw his face.

Felix Grant. Adrian's Beta. Twenty-seven polished, and he had a sword which he kept cleaner than his conscience.

"Miss Beaumont." He said it politely, like a horse that may spook. "Come to breakfast; you are wanted. The Prince will talk to you about your conduct at the feast. He looked at the cloak. At the cloth. With empty hands and green-stained nails. Everyone gets out of the court grounds this morning. His order. Go back to your room.

I told him that my room had a new lock. "My room has a new lock," I said. "Also a new name on it.

There was a light in him. Not pity. Knowledge. He knew who had ordered the room, and he knew about this one, and he was going to stand there and hold both of them like a good dog with two chains.

I said quietly, "Felix. You have been my friend since we were children behind this yard stealing plums; let me pass.

"Go back, Clara."

I pulled the iron token from my pocket and showed it to the men over the bar so that they could see the wolf's head cut into the metal. Then let them say it," I said. I obey Emberfall's command, North Gate, Dawn; it was sworn.

One of the men at the Emberfall stepped up to the bars. He glanced at the token, and then at me, and he bowed his head like a man before a banner. He shouted, "The token is true." Open the"

Hooves. On the yard stones. Fast.

Adrian ran around the corner of the stable in a loose white shirt and riding boots, his hair loose and his face as white as the sheet of paper he was holding in his hands and as full of rage as I'd ever seen on it, not even in the hall. He must have been called by a yard boy. Or it was when I was observed on the north road of the yard that I heard a word from Felix. It did not matter. He was there. That was the only thing that was important.

He told the guards, "Open nothing," and to me, who was directly in his way, "You. Inside. Now.

I told him that I was not going inside.

"You dare." He came to a halt an arm's length from me, breathing heavily, and the broken bond jumped in my chest at his proximity, a hook that was pulled by a reckless hand. It hurt. It did not warm. I want that known. After its first sweet week, only pain was all it gave me. You run to him; to him you pour wine at my feast with that face. All night I ask myself what my quiet little mate is hiding; at dawn I find it.

I said, "I was walking on my own feet, the way I walked out of your hall.

His hand reached out and wrapped around my right wrist.

The planet got thin. His fingers were long and hard and hot, and he ground the little bones of my wrist so that a sound came out of me that I could not stop, a small cut-off cry that embarrassed me more than the pain. The cloth of bread lay in the mud. It was as though Vega had risen in me like a wave in the sea.

'Adrian,' said Felix, sharply. "Your hand."

“She's my mate,” Adrian said, but his eyes never left mine, and he gripped the thing that was slipping off a table as tight as a man grips a thing that's slipping off a table. My partner is not coming along.

I saw his hand on my wrist. I gazed at the yard, at the guards who wouldn't look me in the face, at the bar across the gate, and at the road beyond it, which faded into the trees. I remembered the locked door behind me, the paint overboard and the cup of tea that stood cold on a washstand. I remembered my name in gold letters under another painter.

Then watch," I told him.

I let her rise.

I took the path of fire, the dry roof. My bones danced and cracked and reformed. The grey dress was ripped off. The cloak fell. The pain was clean, nothing like the bond, over one long shaking breath, and then I was standing on four feet on the cold stones in the yard, and the yard had gone very quiet, and the horses were screaming.

Vega was bigger than the gate horse. She had her shoulder higher than her back. Her coat was as silver as ash in winter, and her eyes were as gold as coins in a dark room when Adrian stumbled back from her. She did not lunge. She didn't show her teeth. She stood; she was big; she was breathing; she was what every wolf at that gate felt when he touched her, and she stood between my torn dress on the stones and the man who had held my wrist.

Felix put down his sword. I heard it ring on the stones. I heard it ring on the stones. One of the guards of the king was praying. The Prince of Silvercrest had no words at all; for the first time since I had known him, Adrian's hand remained lifted, still in the shape of a hold.

A quiet voice was heard at the guest tower yard gate.

Let her say what her law is.

Kellan entered the yard slowly, quietly, Beta at his shoulder, and he looked at Vega as he looked at me in the passage. Not afraid. Not hungry. Stable, as a man views the weather, he respects. "Clara," he said. “They need your human voice for this; come back to us.”

Vega swivelled her big head. I was standing behind her at the edge of the yard, with my cloak picked up off the ground, and I held it wide with both arms, and I didn't move my eyes, and Tara was there at the edge of the yard, with her cloak picked up off the ground, and she held it wide with both arms, and she didn't move her eyes. She wrapped herself around me and tied the cloak around my throat with her own hands, and from the stones at her feet, she pulled out two little things and put them in my hands. My father's spoons. The iron token. She had been like a woman who was extracting seeds from ash from my torn dress.

My right wrist was already purple from his fingers.

“Say it, love,” Tara whispered. "Loud."

I spoke to the gate. To the guards. With the empty hand up to the prince.

I am Clara Beaumont. I was rejected before this court, and I am unmarked. I ask the sanctuary of Emberfall freely, with my own mouth. I spoke with a tremble and found my voice. Let him who says he has the right say it here; let any wolf come.

No one said it. The yard, the guards, the praying man, even Felix looking at his sword in the dirt – no one said it.

Kellan placed his hand on the gatebar and spoke the old words as a man speaks to stone and to iron and to law.

He said that he had heard the term "Border Sanctuary Law. Any wolf who is rejected, unmarked, and asks the sanctuary of a visiting Alpha will be the responsibility of his pack for a period of thirty days, and no hand may hold her, no gate may bar her; the law is older than this court, older than its king. He gazed at Adrian then, his eyes grey as a frozen lake. " Take your hand off what is not yours, Prince. You already did. In front of three hundred witnesses. Or was the hall too loud for you to hear yourself laugh?

The court bell started to ring above us, awakening the king.

Adrian's face went from white to a colour I had never seen on any living face. However, the guards had already walked away from the bar. The law had a grip on them like it had on all the wolves who ever pledged to the old stones. Felix was slow to bend and lifted the bar by himself.

The north gate was opened.

I walked through it barefoot, in my best friend's cloak, with a bruised wrist, an iron token, and a ring of brass spoons. Smell of rain on the other side of the road, smell of pine, smell of cold clean air, hear Adrian call my name one time, like a man calling down a well.

I did not turn around.