Greywatch

Nobody at the gate bowed to me.

Everybody bowed to him. A whole line of guards dropping in a wave down the wall as Cassian's horse passed, necks bent, eyes down — and then straightening again to look at me with nothing bent about it at all.

"Greywatch," Cassian said, riding up beside me at the gate, the way he'd been doing since the second day. "Home. Or it will be." He caught the guards' faces before I finished cataloging them and something in his jaw tightened, filing the same note I was.

I noted the difference and filed it under things I'd be changing, eventually, the way I'd filed last helpings and doors that don't lock years ago, except this time I had a feeling I'd get to do something about it. Behind him, the capital itself climbed out of the morning fog — towers instead of longhouses, a wall I couldn't see the end of, a smell of woodsmoke and cold stone that had nothing gentle in it.

Blackpine's whispers had been background noise my whole life — familiar enough to stop hearing, most days. Greywatch's were new, and new whispers, it turned out, you hear every single word of.

That's her? The wolfless one?

Nine years he looked, and this is what he came back with.

She won't last the season.

I let it land on my face like weather, same as Maren had taught me, and I kept my chin exactly where it had been before the whispering started.

The feast that night was the kind of test nobody announces as a test. Seven courses, unfamiliar cutlery laid out in a fan that assumed a childhood of formal dinners I'd never had, a hundred eyes doing math on whether the wolfless charity case from a border pack would embarrass the King before the soup was cleared.

I watched the woman across from me — older, silver rings on four fingers, a smile that had never once reached her eyes in the ten minutes I'd been observing her — pick up the wrong fork on purpose and use it correctly, clearly hoping I'd copy her and get it wrong.

I picked up the right fork. Not because anyone had taught me. Because I'd spent nine years reading rooms with my eyes instead of my nose, and a room this desperate to see me fail had already told me, without meaning to, exactly which fork was the trap.

Something flickered across the woman's face. Recalculation.

"You handle a formal table well," she said, "for a girl raised in an omega house."

"I handle most things well," I said, "for a girl everyone assumed wouldn't need to. It's been an interesting week for revised expectations."

A ripple of something moved down the table — not laughter, not yet, but the held-breath cousin of it, the sound a room makes when it realizes the joke didn't land where it was aimed.

Cassian, at the head of the table, did not smile. But his eyes, when they found mine, did something warmer than a smile, and he let it sit there a beat longer than protocol probably wanted, in front of everyone.

The silver-ringed woman didn't try the fork trick again.

Later — much later, the feast finally bled out into smaller conversations and I'd been shown to rooms that were, notably, mine alone, with a door that locked from the inside, the first one I'd ever had — I sat by the window and let the day catch up to me all at once, the way exhaustion does when you've spent every hour of it holding your face perfectly still.

A knock came. Not a servant's knock — three sharp raps, the knock of someone who expected to be let in rather than announced.

I opened the door on a young woman close to my own age, dressed for the feast still, dark hair pinned with a precision mine never achieved even trying, and a smile that reminded me instantly of the silver-ringed woman's — the kind built for rooms, not for faces.

"You're not going to invite me in," she said, already stepping past me into the room, "but I'm going to come in anyway, because you and I have a great deal to discuss, and I'd rather do it before you've had time to build any bad habits about how things work here."

"And you are?"

She turned in the middle of my new room, surveying it with the unhurried thoroughness of someone deciding how much of it she intended to let me keep.

"Lady Aveline," she said. "I was meant to be his queen before you fell out of a pine forest and into a bond nobody can explain. So." She smiled again, wider, colder. "Let's talk about that."

To be continued — Chapter 6: Lady Aveline says the word "wolfless" seven times in one conversation, and Sera counts every single one.