The Alpha King's Tribute

(Sorrel POV)

They washed me in cold water at dawn, dressed me in grey wool that had belonged to three dead women before me, and told me it was an honour.

That's Greywater for you. Twenty-two years of calling me mutt and witch-get, twenty-two years of the back rooms and the blamed-for-everything and the door shut in my face on the coldest nights - and now, the morning they hand me over to be killed, suddenly there's a comb dragged through my hair and a word like honour in Petra Mott's mouth like it didn't taste of vinegar going down.

"Stop fidgeting," she said, yanking the last knot. She'd wanted to do it. Of course she had. "You'll want to look pretty when the King puts you down."

"And here I thought you'd miss me."

She pinched me, hard, under the arm where the bruise wouldn't show. I didn't make a sound. That was the one coin I'd never let any of them spend - the satisfaction of watching me flinch. I'd gone hungry before I'd hand it over. I wasn't about to start at a King's teeth.

The whole pack came to watch me leave. That's the part I keep turning over, even now. Not one of them would share a fire with me on a winter night, but every last soul in Greywater dragged themselves to the muddy rise above the river to see the half-breed marched out as tribute. Garrick Mott stood at the front in the wolfskin he wore when he wanted to look like more than the small, mean Alpha of a small, mean pack. He didn't look at me. He looked past me, up the moor road, to where the King's men were coming.

You could feel them before you could see them. The air changed. Even the dogs went quiet.

I want to be clear about something, because the songs always get it wrong. Nobody in Greywater handed me over out of cruelty. Cruelty would've been a kindness; at least cruelty pays attention. They handed me over because Ashmoor demanded a tithe, the tithe was steep, and a barren year had gutted the stores. Somebody clever - Garrick, probably, in the one cunning thought of his life - realized you could pay a blood-tribute with blood nobody wanted. Send the mutt. Let the monster on the black throne have the witch-get the pack had been trying to be rid of since her mother died birthing her. Two problems, one road.

"You should thank me," Garrick had said last night, when he came to tell me. He'd had wine in him. "Anywhere else, you'd have starved."

I'd thanked him. I'd smiled while I did it. I've found a smile unnerves them more than spitting ever did.

The King's party crested the rise, and the whole pack lowered their eyes at once, like wheat going flat under wind.

I didn't.

I'd like to tell you that was courage. It was just the only thing I had left that was mine, and I wasn't about to lay it down in the mud for a man who'd come to kill me. So I kept my chin up and I looked at them - the King's guard in grey and black, the great rangy war-horses, the banners with the moon-and-thorn - and I looked for the monster.

He wasn't hard to find.

The stories said the Alpha King of Ashmoor was eight feet tall with a wolf's eyes and a man's cruelty, that he'd torn out a rival's throat at his own coronation, that the land itself had gone sick in fear of him. Half of that is the kind of thing frightened people say. The eyes, though. The eyes were true. Pale as river-ice, set in a face someone had carved while they were angry at stone. He rode at the front like the others weren't there. He didn't look bored, exactly. He looked like a man who had stopped expecting the world to show him anything new a long time ago.

Garrick stepped forward, all teeth and bowing. "Your Majesty. Greywater pays its tithe. We offer - that is, the girl, she's -" He floundered. He hadn't planned what to call me. Garbage didn't sound generous enough. "A tribute," he settled on. "Witch-blooded. We thought, given your hunt for such -"

He never finished, because that was when the wind shifted.

It came down off the moor and across the rise and it carried Greywater to him, wet wool and woodsmoke and horse, and it carried me. I felt the exact moment my scent reached him, because I watched it land.

The Alpha King of Ashmoor went still.

Not the stillness of a man listening. The stillness of struck stone. Of a held breath that forgets it's being held. Every line of him - the easy contempt, the carved boredom - just stopped, and those terrible pale eyes came around and found me at the edge of the crowd in my dead women's grey, and fixed.

And something under my breastbone answered.

I have no better word for it. A hook, set deep behind the ribs, in a place I didn't know I had, and then a pull, slow and enormous, like the tide deciding to come in. Heat washed up the back of my neck. The world went very loud and very quiet at once. And down in the dark of me, in the half of my blood Greywater had spent two decades trying to drown, something lifted its head for the first time in my life and looked back at him.

Mate, it said. The wolf I wasn't supposed to have. Mine.

I thought, with what I'll admit was not my finest dignity: oh, absolutely not.

He was off the horse. I didn't see him dismount - one breath he was in the saddle and the next he was on the ground, the distance between us closing, the crowd peeling back from him like skin off a wound. His men had gone rigid. One of them, a broad fair-haired wolf at his shoulder, said it low and urgent. "Kaelen -" And the King didn't so much as turn his head.

Garrick was still talking. Bless his small, doomed heart, he thought this was going well. "- so of course we understood Your Majesty would want to dispose of the creature personally -"

"Stop." The King didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to. The word came out of him with the whole weight of the crown behind it, and Garrick's teeth clicked shut.

He stopped an arm's length from me. Up close he smelled of cold pine and woodsmoke and something underneath it that my blood lurched toward like it had been starving its whole life and only now been shown the table. He was looking at me the way I'd never once been looked at - not past me, not through me, not with the flat scorn I'd worn so long I'd stopped feeling it land. He looked at me like I was the only real thing on a hillside full of ghosts.

"Say your name," he said.

It wasn't a request. It wasn't the voice he'd used on Garrick either. There was something raw under it, something that had cracked.

I should have been afraid. I was, somewhere, distantly, the way you know a cliff is there in the dark. But the thing in my chest had its claws in him and I could feel it. The answering pull in him. Whatever had reached out of me had reached out of him too and locked. The most feared wolf alive stood in the mud of the pack that had thrown me away, and he was the one who looked like the ground had moved.

"Sorrel," I said. "Sorrel Crowe."

Something moved behind his eyes when I said it, some old door swinging open onto a room I couldn't see. I didn't understand it yet. Right then I only saw it hit.

Behind me, the silence broke. I heard Petra's voice, thin and disbelieving. "Her?" I heard Garrick make a sound like a man watching his one cunning thought turn around and bite his hand off.

The King of Ashmoor reached out, slowly, like I might bolt, like he might, and took my chin in his fingers, tilting my face up to the cold light. His hand was warm. Of course it was. Then he turned, my chin still held in his grip so the whole pack could see, and he looked at Greywater - at Garrick, at Petra, at every single soul who had spat on me for twenty-two years - and he said the four words that would burn my whole life down to the foundation.

"This one is mine."