Lady Aveline

"Sit," Lady Aveline said, taking the room's only good chair herself, which told me everything about how this conversation was going to go before she said another word.

I stayed standing. It was my room. She could have the chair.

"I've known Cassian since we were children," she said. "Our fathers arranged the match before either of us could walk. I have spent twenty years learning this court the way you'd learn a second language — every alliance, every debt, every alpha who'd bend the knee to a queen and every one who'd need convincing. I was built for this, Sera Vale."

"That sounds exhausting," I said. "I'm sorry you spent twenty years training for a job someone else got."

Her smile thinned. "You don't understand what you've stumbled into. A wolfless bond isn't a fairy tale, whatever the ballads say. It's a security question. What happens the first time an assassin gets past the outer guard because nobody in this palace can smell a lie coming off him the way a wolf-blooded queen could? What happens when you're standing beside the King at a treaty signing and every alpha in the room can read the room by scent except you? You are, structurally, a hole in this kingdom's defenses, and you didn't even have to do anything to earn that — you were just born wolfless, the way some children are born blind, and nobody blinded you on purpose, and I'm not cruel enough to pretend that's your fault." She let that sit, then added, almost gently, which was worse: "It's simply what you are."

Seven times. I was counting, the way she'd apparently expected me not to.

Wolfless — once, twice, and building toward something she thought would land like a verdict.

"You've said that word four times in under a minute," I said. "I want to make sure you know I noticed, because I think you've been saying it so long you've stopped hearing it yourself. It used to work on me, Lady Aveline. Nine years, it worked every single time someone said it, because I didn't have anything to set against it except a childhood of last helpings and locked-out doors."

"And now?"

"Now I have a king who felt a bond hum through his chest strong enough to override a rejection, standing in front of five hundred witnesses, for a girl he'd never met. You can call that a security hole if it helps you sleep. I call it the single most inconvenient fact of your life right now, and I understand why you'd rather argue with the word wolfless than with that."

Aveline's composure didn't crack, exactly. It recalculated — the same flicker I'd watched at dinner, a woman doing fast arithmetic on a number that kept refusing to be small.

"You think surviving one dinner and one conversation makes you safe here," she said, standing now, smoothing her skirts with hands that weren't quite steady. "It doesn't. I lost twenty years of positioning to a bond nobody can explain, and I intend to find the explanation, Sera Vale, whether you hand it to me or I dig it out myself."

"Dig away," I said. "I'd like to know the answer too."

That, at least, seemed to unsettle her more than anything else I'd said — the idea that I wasn't hiding a secret so much as carrying one I hadn't unwrapped yet either. She left without a goodbye, the door clicking shut with more control than a slam would have shown, which somehow felt more dangerous.

I sat down hard in the chair she'd vacated, hands shaking now that there was no one left to perform stillness for.

A second knock came within the hour — no dark-haired rival this time. General Maren, still in her day clothes, arms crossed, looking at me like she already knew exactly how the last conversation had gone.

"Word travels fast in a palace with thin walls," she said. "I hear you handled Aveline without raising your voice once. Good instinct. Wrong tool for what's coming, though."

"What's coming?"

"Torren's petition. The council hearing, within the week — you'll be in that gallery whether anyone wants you there or not, and half that chamber is going to spend the whole hearing hunting for a reason to agree with him." Maren uncrossed her arms, and something in her stance shifted — less assessment now, more decision made. "You read rooms well. You held your ground with Aveline without a single wasted word. But this court doesn't just test words, girl. Sooner or later, someone in that chamber is going to test whether there's anything behind the wolfless title besides good instincts and a sharp tongue."

"And if there isn't?"

"Then we find out together, because I'm not letting you walk into that hearing with nothing to answer with but a stone from a creek bed and Cassian's hand around yours." She held out her arm, palm up, an old fighter's invitation. "I train you. Starting tonight. No easy version of the offer — I don't have one to give. You in?"

I looked at her open hand, and thought about nine years of nobody once asking what I might be capable of instead of what I cost.

"Yes," I said.

To be continued — Chapter 7: Maren's first lesson leaves Sera on the ground three times — and, on the fourth, Sera does something no wolfless girl in nine hundred years of recorded history has ever done.