Rejected While Pregnant Returned As The Silver Queen

Chapter 3

Chapter 3 — The Dying King

They had dressed her in silk while she slept, and that frightened Sierra more than chains would have.

Chains she understood. Silk meant somebody wanted something.

Her hand went to her belly before her eyes were fully open. She pressed her palm flat and waited, not breathing — and there it was. Faint. Stubborn. Still drumming.

"Three days of fever," said a voice by the door. The golden-eyed captain from the river stood there, older in daylight, gray threading his beard. "The healers stitched your side. The little ones held on. You're a hard family to kill." He inclined his head. "I'm Orin. Captain of the King's guard. Can you stand?"

"That depends," Sierra said, "on what's waiting when I do."

Something like approval crossed his face. "The King has waited thirty years. He'd rather not wait past breakfast."

They walked through a fortress built inside a mountain — no banners, no crests, corridors of pale stone lit by lamps that burned silver-white. Every guard they passed had eyes of gold.

"Where am I?" Sierra asked.

"Nowhere," Orin said. "Officially, this place burned down thirty years ago. We find that useful."

He stopped at a tall door, knocked once, and opened it into firelight.

The room was all maps and old books, and in the middle of it stood an old man more silver than the snow on the peaks outside. His mane of hair, his beard, the fur on his shoulders — all of it winter-colored. His hands trembled around the head of a cane. But his eyes, when they found her, were quick as lightning, and they went through her like a blade.

For a long moment the King of every wolf alive simply stared at a half-drowned servant girl.

"Great gods," he said softly. "You even scowl like her."

"Like who?"

Instead of answering, he crossed to the wall and pulled a cloth from a portrait.

Sierra's legs stopped working.

The woman in the frame wore silver and white, a thin crown resting on pale braids. She was perhaps fifty. And she had Sierra's face — her exact face, her stubborn jaw, her storm-colored eyes — thirty years older.

"Who—" Sierra's voice cracked. "Who is that?"

"My daughter. Celeste Thorne, Princess of the Silver Court." The old man's cane creaked under his grip. "Your mother."

"No." Sierra shook her head slowly. "My mother was a laundress. Mara Bennett. She died when I was six, she never— she was nobody, she—" Her throat closed. "She used to sing. When the storms came. Silver on the water, silver in the pines—"

"—the moon keeps her daughters," the old king finished, very quietly, "all down the line."

Sierra sat down without deciding to. The chair caught her by luck.

"No one else knew that song," she whispered. "No one. I thought she made it up."

"Her grandmother made it up. Who had it from hers." He lowered himself into the chair across from her, joints cracking like old ice. "Thirty years ago, this court was full. Children in these halls. Music. Then in one night — one — every Thorne under this roof was hunted room to room and slaughtered. My sons. My daughters. Their little ones." His voice didn't shake. It had gone somewhere past shaking, years ago. "A dying guard carried the youngest princess out through the smoke. Six years old. He hid her among common folk and died before he could tell us where. I have spent thirty years tasting the wind for my own blood." His eyes glittered. "Three nights ago, the river gave you back to me."

"Who did it?" Sierra asked. "Who kills children over a crown?"

"Old enemies. Old debts. That lesson will keep until you're strong enough to hate properly." He coughed then — a deep, tearing sound — and pressed a cloth to his mouth. When it came away, he folded it quickly, but not quickly enough. Red.

"You're dying," Sierra said.

"Observant. Poison. Slow, patient, salted into my cup for years by a hand I trusted and never caught." He smiled without humor. "Months, the healers say. They've been saying it a while. I am stubborn." The smile faded, and what was under it was naked and old. "Child. You are the last Thorne alive. Everything I have — this crown, this court, the loyalty of every pack from the ice to the southern sands — it is yours by blood. But you have been hurt, and you are with child, and if what you want is to be safe, then be safe. Rest here. Hide here. No one will ever—"

"No."

The word came out flat and final. The old king blinked.

"My mother hid," Sierra said. "Hiding bought her a washtub and an early grave. Hiding bought me a mattress in the Pierce family's attic and a rejection in front of three hundred wolves." She rose, and her hand settled flat against her belly, and her voice came out level as still water. "I don't want your safety, Grandfather. I want the power. All of it. The crown. The law. The armies. What this blood in my veins can do. Teach me everything."

Firelight moved in the old king's eyes. "And in return?"

"One condition." She held his gaze. "No one who broke me ever learns what I became — until I decide they kneel."

The silence stretched long. Then King Alaric Thorne began to laugh — a rusty, wet, wondering sound — and the laugh broke apart, and Sierra realized the most powerful wolf in the world was weeping into his silver beard.

"Thirty years I prayed one of mine survived," he said. "And the gods sent me one with teeth."

He pushed himself up. From a case on the mantel he lifted a thin circlet of pale silver, plain and worn bright with age.

"Your mother wore this at your age. Kneel, girl."

Sierra knelt. The old king's trembling hands came to rest on her head, and he spoke words in a tongue older than any pack — and deep inside her, in the dead space where her wolf's voice used to live, something faint and silver stirred. Like an eye, opening after long sleep.

"Bennett was the name they hid you under," Alaric said. "Thorne is the name they tried to bury. Take it back. Rise — Sierra Thorne."

She rose. The circlet was cold as river water on her brow.

It fit.

The royal healer came at dusk — a small, ancient woman with warm hands who bowed low and then bullied Sierra onto a couch as though queens were a kind of laundry.

She pressed her palms to Sierra's belly, closed her eyes, and listened the old way. Slowly, her white eyebrows climbed.

"Twins," she confirmed. "Both strong. Both—" She stopped. Pressed again. Her face lost its color. "That cannot be right."

Sierra's blood went cold. "What's wrong with them?"

"Wrong? Nothing is wrong, Majesty. That is what's impossible." The old woman's voice dropped to a whisper. "They have auras. Both of them. Alpha-born force, pushing back at my hands — unborn pups do not do that. In nine hundred years of records, none—"

By the door, leaning on his cane, the old king made a sound that was half wonder, half grief.

Then the healer went very still. Her hands stopped moving on Sierra's stomach. She tilted her head as though straining after something almost too quiet to catch.

"Your Majesty," she said slowly. "There is a third heartbeat. Faint. Hiding behind the others — as if it already knows to be afraid."