The Alpha King's Tribute

rel

me in grey wool that had belonged to three dea

or-everything and the door shut in my face on the coldest nights - and now, the morning they hand me over to be killed, suddenly

She'd wanted to do it. Of course she had. "You'll

thought yo

That was the one coin I'd never let any of them spend - the satisfaction of watching me f

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 h

u could see them. The air cha

e 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

night, when he came to tell me. He'd had wine

did it. I've found a smile unnerve

the whole pack lowered their eyes at

idn

ay 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

't hard

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

that is, the girl, she's -" He floundered. He hadn't planned what to call me. Garbage didn't sound

because that was wh

er to him, wet wool and woodsmoke and horse, and it carried me. I fe

ng of Ashmoo

's being held. Every line of him - the easy contempt, the carved boredom - just stopped, and those te

under my breas

e 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 h

wolf I wasn't sup

admit was not my finest di

distance between us closing, the crowd peeling back from him like skin off a wound. His men had gone rigid. One of them,

thought this was going well. "- so of course we understood Yo

d to. The word came out of him with the whole weight o

d 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 throug

r name,"

'd used on Garrick either. There was someth

s 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. Th

said. "Sor

old door swinging open onto a room I couldn't see. I

isbelieving. "Her?" I heard Garrick make a sound like a man wat

and 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

one is