My scarf was the color of bruised plums, and it had survived three winters, two long roads, and the journey from my mother’s house to the gates of the Iron Keep.
It did not survive my first morning in the Alpha King’s palace.
I had been a seamstress at the Iron Keep for the length of one breakfast when an animal the size of a small horse walked into the seamstress hall, lifted my scarf off the bench beside me, and walked back out.
I want it on the record that I did not scream.
I stood.
I considered the door he had vanished through.
I considered the three other women in the hall, all of whom had stopped breathing.
I considered the fact that the animal in question had been, beyond any reasonable doubt, the Alpha King’s wolf.
The wolf the Iron Territories had been singing about since before I was old enough to understand the songs.
I considered, finally, my scarf.
Excuse me, I said to no one in particular, and went after him.
This is not the way a woman grown is supposed to begin her tenure at a royal court.
I knew that.
I was 20, and I had been raised by a mother who valued composure the way other women valued silver.
But the scarf had been my grandmother’s.
The wolf had stolen it in front of witnesses, and I have always been told I have a problem with what my mother calls letting things go.
I caught up to him in the long corridor outside the hall.
He had stopped halfway down it and was sitting on his haunches like a very large dog, the scarf draped neatly across his enormous front paws, looking, I’m sorry to report this, but it is the truth, extremely pleased with himself.
That is mine, I told him.
The wolf blinked at me.
He had eyes the color of new amber.
He was the size of a hearth, and he had stolen from me, and he was waiting to see what I would do about it.
I would like it back, I said.
He picked up the scarf in his teeth, very delicately, and walked another 20 paces down the corridor.
Then he sat back down and looked at me.
It took me a moment to understand.
When I did, I almost laughed out loud.
The Alpha King’s wolf, the most feared creature in three kingdoms, was making me chase him.
Absolutely not, I said.
He waited.
I walked toward him.
He waited until I was almost within reach, and then he stood and walked another 20 paces and sat down again.
I followed.
He moved.
I followed.
He moved.
By the fourth round, we had passed two startled servants, a man in livery who pretended not to see us, and a small white cat who hissed at the wolf and was ignored.
By the sixth, the wolf had led me into a wing of the palace I had not yet seen.
This, I told the wolf, is not how mornings are supposed to go.
He set the scarf down on the polished stone floor between his paws.
He looked at me with what I can only describe as expectation.
I bent to take it.
He picked it up again and trotted three steps away.
I straightened and put my hands on my hips.
You, I said, are a thief, and you have no shame, and I am going to tell on you.
The wolf wagged his tail.
That was the moment a door opened to my left, and the Alpha King walked into the corridor.
I had, until that moment, never seen Torvald of the Iron Territories outside of the descriptions other people gave of him.
Those descriptions had not adequately prepared me.
He was tall and broad, in dark wool and unpolished leather.
And he had the kind of stillness about him that men who have killed other men carry the rest of their lives.
His hair was the color of wet pine bark.
He had a faint scar along the line of his jaw.
His eyes, when they found me, were the same exact amber as his wolf’s.
I dropped immediately into the curtsy I had been practicing for 3 days.
Your Grace.
The Alpha King looked at me.
He looked at the wolf.
He looked at the scarf in the wolf’s mouth.
Then he looked back at me, and I watched a series of expressions move across his face that I do not believe he intended to show.
Surprise, confusion, a very specific kind of resignation, and at the end of it, something so close to amusement that for one instant I forgot he was the Alpha King and thought he was simply a very tall man whose dog had embarrassed him.
This is yours, he said.
It was not quite a question.
Yes, Your Grace.
And he has He has stolen it.
Yes, Your Grace.
The Alpha King looked at his wolf.
The wolf looked back at him.
Whatever passed between them in that look, the wolf was the one who broke eye contact first, and when he did, he sat down very carefully on top of the scarf.
He is not, the Alpha King said slowly, in the habit of doing this.
Then perhaps Your Grace could ask him to break the habit before it begins.
I had not meant to say it that way.
The words came out before I had a chance to consider them, and the moment they were in the air, I felt my whole face go hot.
You did not speak to the Alpha King the way you spoke to a baker who had shortchanged you on bread.
I knew that.
Everyone knew that.
The Alpha King looked at me for a long moment, long enough that I had time to imagine, in vivid detail, the various forms my dismissal might take, and how I would explain them to my mother.
Then he said, I will see what I can do.
He walked over to the wolf.
The wolf put his enormous head down on his paws and refused to make eye contact, like a child who has decided that being unable to see the adult means the adult cannot see him.
The Alpha King crouched.
He spoke a single low word I did not catch.
The wolf’s ears flattened.
After a moment, very reluctantly, he stood up.
The scarf was, by this point, somewhat the worse for wear.
The Alpha King picked it up.
He looked at it.
He looked at me.
And then, instead of handing it back, he folded it once, very precisely, over his arm.
I will have it cleaned, he said, and returned to you by the end of the day, with my apologies for my wolf’s behavior.
Your Grace, that is not It is the least I can do.
His voice was quiet and absolutely final.
I curtsied again.
He inclined his head.
The wolf made a small, deeply aggrieved noise that the Alpha King ignored.
And then both of them turned and walked away down the corridor, the scarf draped across the King’s arm like a banner he had won in a battle he had not fully understood.
I stood there for a full minute after they had gone.
Then I went back to the seamstress hall.
The other three women were waiting for me.
They did not say anything when I walked in.
They simply watched me, the way you watch a person who has just had something happen to them that you do not have the vocabulary to discuss.
I sat down.
I picked up the half-hemmed cloak I had been working on.
I threaded my needle.
Did you get it back? The eldest of them finally asked.
It is being cleaned, I said.
There was a long silence.
Then one of the younger ones, a sharp-eyed girl named Brin, said, By whom? I stitched two careful inches before I answered.
By the Alpha King, I said.
Brin dropped her thread.
The scarf came back at the end of the day.
It was clean and pressed and folded inside a small wooden box that had been carved with the wolf and iron sigil of the royal house.
There was no note.
There did not need to be.
The whole seamstress hall watched me open the box and then watched me close it and put it under my bench and pretend for the rest of the afternoon that nothing unusual had happened.
I had been at the Iron Keep for 1 day.
The wolf came back the next morning.
Not into the seamstress hall this time.
He had apparently been told that was beneath the dignity of his station.
Instead, he was waiting in the corridor when I left for the midday meal and he fell into step beside me as if we had agreed to walk together.
“No.
” I told him.
He paid no attention to this.
He walked me to the kitchens.
He walked me back.
When I sat down at the seamstress bench, he lay down across the doorway blocking the only exit and went to sleep.
The other women looked at me.
I looked at them.
None of us said anything.
This continued for a week.
The Alpha King’s wolf, it transpired, had decided that the seamstress with the plum colored scarf was now under his personal protection.
He escorted me to meals.
He escorted me back.
He slept across my doorway when I retired to the small attic room I had been given.
He growled once at a kitchen boy who had reached past me too quickly for a loaf of bread and the kitchen boy turned a color I had not previously known existed on a human face.
I tried on the second day to ask one of the senior household servants what to do about it.
The senior servant looked at me with the expression of a woman who had been at the Iron Keep for 40 years and was not paid enough for whatever was happening to me.
“Do.
” She repeated.
“Yes.
” “You wish to know what to do.
” She said.
“About the Alpha King’s wolf choosing to walk you to your meals.
” “Yes.
” “You wish me to tell him to stop.
” “I would not put it like that.
” “I would not either.
” She said.
“I would not put it any way at all.
I would simply enjoy being the most thoroughly guarded seamstress in the history of the Iron Territories and I would not ask any further questions.
” I did not after that ask any further questions.
The Alpha King himself I did not see again that week.
He was somewhere in the Keep, presumably ruling things.
His wolf, however, was always with me and his wolf, as far as I could tell, was approximately as good at hiding what he wanted as a child holding a stolen biscuit behind his back.
On the eighth day, I came back to the seamstress hall after the midday meal and found the Alpha King standing inside it.
He was alone.
The other women had been called away to fit a visiting noblewoman in the East Wing.
A coincidence, I was meant to believe, though I had heard the housekeeper take the message and her voice had been strange when she gave it.
The wolf was nowhere in evidence.
The Alpha King was standing by the window with his hands behind his back and an expression on his face that suggested he was running through a speech he had prepared and was not pleased with how it was holding up under pressure.
“Your Grace.
” I said and curtsied.
“Mistress.
” “Wren, Your Grace.
Wren of Halver’s Vale.
” “Mistress Wren.
” He cleared his throat.
“I owe you an apology.
” I waited.
“My wolf.
” The Alpha King said carefully.
“Has formed an attachment that is irregular.
” “He is very good company, Your Grace.
” The Alpha King looked at me.
He looked at me for long enough that I wondered if I had said something wrong.
Then he said in a voice that was almost flat.
“He has not done this before.
” “Walked anyone to the kitchens?” “Walked anyone anywhere.
” “Ah.
” There was a silence.
The Alpha King appeared to be conducting an internal argument that he was losing.
His hands behind his back opened and closed once.
“It is not.
” He said.
“Behavior that I have asked of him.
” “I had assumed not, Your Grace.
” “It is behavior.
” The Alpha King said more slowly.
“That I have asked him to stop.
” “And yet.
” “And yet.
” I looked up at the Alpha King of the Iron Territories who was standing in a seamstress hall at midday explaining that his wolf had developed feelings he had not authorized and I understood with the suddenness of a window being opened in a closed room that he had no idea what to do about it.
I should have been frightened.
I was a seamstress in his palace.
I was 20 years old, 3 weeks from my mother’s house, with no rank and no title and a scarf that had been stolen by a creature whose intentions I did not understand and whose master apparently did not understand them either.
I was not frightened.
I was, I am going to say it plainly, interested.
“Your Grace.
” I said.
“I do not wish to overstep, but may I ask a question?” “Yes.
” “What does it mean?” The Alpha King looked at me for a long, long moment.
“I do not know.
” He said finally.
“Yet.
” Then he bowed.
Actually bowed in his own seamstress hall and walked out.
If you have made it this far, please stay with me.
What happens next is the part I am still not entirely sure how to explain and I would love to know if you can see it coming any clearer than I could.
If her side of this story has held you so far, it would mean the world if you would tap subscribe and walk this corridor with me to its end.
There is more and the more is what matters.
I would like to say that I went back to my work and put it out of my mind.
I did not.
I sat at the bench for a long while with my hands in my lap and I thought.
I thought about the wolf and the scarf.
I thought about the Alpha King’s voice when he said the word “yet.
” I thought about my grandmother who used to tell a story about a woman who married a wolf and was not afraid of him and who would always end the story by saying “It was not the wolf she should have feared.
It was what he loved her into.
” I did not yet know what he loved me into.
I did not yet know whether love was the word.
But I thought about it.
The wolf came back at dusk and lay down across the door of my attic room.
I sat on the bed with the small wooden box on my lap.
I had not opened it again since the first evening.
I opened it now.
The scarf was inside.
Folded, clean, and lying on top of it where I had not noticed it before because I had not looked carefully enough was a single strand of pine needle.
As if he, not the wolf, the man, had carried it through the gardens before he had it cleaned and a piece of the gardens had come back with it.
I lifted the scarf out.
I looked at the pine needle.
I put it on my windowsill where I could see it.
I went to sleep that night with the wolf breathing slowly across my doorway and a strange warmth in my chest that I did not yet have a name for.
The court antagonist arrived the following morning in the form of Lady Idonea of House Valois.
Auburn haired, sharp cheekboned, traveling with an entourage of six and an expectation that the wolf would not, under any circumstances, be sleeping across the doorway of a seamstress when she arrived.
I knew who she was before anyone told me.
The other seamstresses had mentioned her in the way women mention a coming storm without details, but with a particular tightness of the mouth.
Lady Idonea had been understood for 2 years to be the woman the Alpha King was going to choose.
The fact that he had not chosen her yet was treated by everyone in the keep as a matter of timing.
She came into the seamstress hall on her second day.
She did not need a fitting.
She had come, I understood almost at once, to see me.
She walked the length of the hall as if she owned it.
She stopped at my bench.
She looked at me for a long, considering moment.
“You are the seamstress,” she said.
“Yes, my lady.
” “With the scarf?” “Yes, my lady.
” “How charming,” Lady Idonea said.
Her voice was the temperature of the well in winter.
I had heard the story.
I did not realize the story had a face.
“I am sorry, my lady, if the story has been a trouble to you.
” “It has not been a trouble to me,” Lady Idonea said.
“Trouble is what I become when something is troubling me.
You do not yet know me well enough to be sure of the difference.
” She smiled.
It did not reach her eyes.
“I am sure his grace will tire of his wolf’s enthusiasms before they become embarrassing.
He is a man of considerable discipline and of considerable judgment.
His judgment tells him that a wolf’s whims are not the same as a king’s choice.
I am told you are a sensible girl.
A sensible girl will understand the distinction.
” She inclined her head very slightly and left.
I did not move for a long time after she had gone.
The other seamstresses pretended very hard not to be looking at me.
The wolf, who had been lying across the doorway, lifted his head once Lady Idonea was out of earshot and made a sound deep in his chest that I had not heard him make before.
It was not quite a growl.
It was the sound of a creature who had been told to be polite and was reconsidering whether the policy was working.
“Down,” I said quietly.
He set his head back on his paws.
He did not take his eyes off the door.
I went back to my hemming.
My hands were not entirely steady.
I was thinking about the woman I had been at 16 who would have been frightened by Lady Idonea and the woman I was now at 20 who was not.
I was, however, paying attention.
The note arrived the following day.
It was not signed.
It was slipped into the seam basket sometime between the midday meal and the afternoon light when the wolf had been called away briefly by one of the keep stewards.
It said, “The kitchens at moonrise.
Bring the scarf.
” I did not recognize the handwriting.
I should have been more careful.
I was 20 and I was curious and I had spent the morning being told by the most beautiful woman in three kingdoms that I was a sensible girl and I had decided I was not interested in being sensible.
I went to the kitchens at moonrise.
The wolf was not with me.
He had been gone for hours by then and I had assumed, without examining the assumption, that someone had finally given him a real task.
I took a candle.
I took the scarf.
I went down the back stair.
The kitchens were not empty when I arrived.
They were not, however, occupied by anyone who had wanted to write me a romantic note.
Lady Idonea was there with two of her men and Lady Idonea was holding a small, unopened jar in her gloved hand.
And Lady Idonea was very surprised to see me arrive with a scarf instead of a flask of wine she had paid a kitchen boy to fetch from the cellars.
The shape of the trap rearranged itself in front of me.
The note had not been from her.
The note had been from someone who had wanted me to be exactly here when she was.
I understood in the half second before her face changed that I had been delivered.
She moved very quickly for a woman in court silks.
Her men moved faster.
The jar opened.
There was a sharp, herbal smell I did not recognize.
One of her men stepped between me and the door.
I want to say that I did something brave.
I want to say that I shouted or struck someone or knew at once what to do.
The truth is that I dropped the candle and the candle went out and in the dark of the kitchens, with the smell of something wrong rising in the air, I did the only thing I could think to do.
I screamed for the wolf.
I did not say his name.
I did not have a name for him.
I called for him the way you call for a friend in the dark, by reaching for him in my chest where the strange warmth had been growing for days without my permission.
I called and I felt something answer.
The kitchen door splintered.
He came in low and fast and silent.
And he was not the wolf who had stolen my scarf.
He was the wolf the Iron Territories had been singing about.
One of Lady Idonea’s men did not finish raising his hand.
The other dropped the jar.
Lady Idonea herself made a sound I will not describe and went very still against the wall.
The Alpha King came through the broken door 3 seconds behind his wolf, on two feet and breathing hard.
And his eyes, when they found me in the dark, were the same exact amber as his wolf’s.
And he was, the word is the only one that fits, afraid.
“Ren.
” “I am all right.
” “You are?” “I am all right.
” He crossed the kitchens to me in three strides.
He stopped a pace away.
He did not touch me.
His hands closed and opened at his sides and I watched the man who ruled three kingdoms try with everything in him to remember how to speak.
“I should have been faster,” he said.
“You were fast enough.
” He was.
He was the fastest.
“I know.
” He looked at me.
The wolf, who had backed Lady Idonea against the wall, was now sitting very neatly with his teeth showing and his eyes never leaving her throat.
The two men were on the floor.
I do not believe either of them was dead.
I am not entirely sure I cared in that moment what they were.
“How did you call him?” the Alpha King said quietly.
I did not have an answer that would have made sense to anyone.
I had only the truth.
“I do not know,” I said.
“I just reached.
” He closed his eyes for one full second.
When he opened them, something in his face had changed.
It was the look of a man who had been holding a question for days and had just been answered.
“Ren,” he said.
“I owe you a longer apology than I have ever owed anyone and I would like to give it to you somewhere that is not this kitchen.
” “All right,” I said.
He turned toward the wolf.
He spoke one word.
The wolf rose, walked to my side, and put himself between me and the room.
“Take her to the library,” the Alpha King said to the wolf.
[sighs] “I will be there in an hour.
” The wolf walked me to the library.
The Alpha King stayed behind to deal with Lady Idonea.
The library at the Iron Keep is the room I will love until I am old.
It has tall windows and a high vaulted ceiling and shelves that go up further than any ladder can reach.
And at that hour of the night, it had a fire going low in the hearth and three lamps lit and a chair pulled up to a small table where someone had been working.
There were letters on the table.
There were a great many letters on the table.
Some of them were sealed.
Some of them were unfinished.
All of them, I saw when I came close enough to look, were addressed to me.
Mistress Wren of Halver’s Vale, in his handwriting, in different inks on different days.
A stack of letters he had been writing to me and not sending.
The dates run back almost to the morning his wolf had stolen my scarf.
I sat down in the chair very slowly.
I read the first letter.
I read the second.
I read three more.
And then I stopped.
Because reading all of them at once would have been too much.
And because I needed to sit very still for a moment and let the thing in my chest do whatever it was going to do.
The wolf lay down at my feet.
The Alpha King came in an hour later, exactly as he had said.
He stopped in the doorway when he saw what I was holding.
He did not move for a long moment.
Then he closed the door behind him very carefully as if any sudden movement might break the room.
“I was going to send them.
” he said.
“Eventually.
” “When?” “When I had decided what I was.
” I had not decided.
My wolf had decided.
He was ahead of me.
“He stole my scarf.
” “Yes.
” “He has been escorting me to the kitchens for a week.
” “Yes.
” “You knew.
” “I knew.
” I looked up at him.
Torvald of the Iron Territories, the most feared man in three kingdoms, was standing inside his own library with his hands at his sides and an expression on his face that I had not yet seen on it.
Open and tired and unguarded and very very afraid that I was going to leave.
“You have been writing to me for 3 weeks.
” I said.
“Yes.
” “You have not sent any of them.
” “No.
” “Why?” He let out a long breath.
He came across the library to me and he did not stop a pace away this time.
He stopped where he could have reached for me if he had decided to.
And then very deliberately he did not.
He went down on one knee instead beside the chair so that his eyes were level with mine.
“Because the moment I sent one of them.
” he said.
“You would have had to choose and I had not yet earned the right to ask you to.
” I looked at him.
I looked at the letters.
I looked at the wolf at my feet who was watching us both with the kind of attention that suggested he had been waiting for this conversation longer than either of us.
“Your Grace.
” Torvald.
“Torvald.
” I said.
The word was strange in my mouth.
It was also the easiest word I had ever spoken.
“If you ever again decide what you are without telling me I will take my scarf and go home.
” His face did the thing he had been trying not to do.
It was the closest thing to a smile I had yet seen on him.
And it was small and crooked and entirely undefended.
“Understood.
” he said.
He took my hand.
He did not press it or hold it tight or pull me closer.
He simply took it as if he had been waiting to and was no longer pretending he had not been.
He held it for a long moment in both of his.
Then he leaned forward just enough and he kissed me.
I will tell you only this.
It was not the kiss I had imagined in the small ways I had been imagining anything at all.
It was steadier.
It was gentler.
It was the kiss of a man who had been writing me letters for 3 weeks and not sending them.
And it tasted like every word he had not been able to put on the page.
Something in my chest, which had been waiting for the name of the warmth, found it.
The fire burned low.
The wolf put his head down on his paws.
“Wren.
” he said quietly.
“Yes.
” “Stay.
” “Yes.
” I said.
“I will stay.
” Six months later, the spring came late to the Iron Territories.
And when it came, it came all at once.
The gardens that had been bare in the corridors of my first weeks were full of pale green and white.
The court that had whispered when I walked past now stood and inclined its head.
Lady Edana was no longer at court.
Her house had been stripped of three of its holdings and her father had been politely advised to take a long retreat in the south.
She had not been seen near the Iron Keep since the night of the kitchens.
And she would not be seen near it again.
I had been formally claimed 3 months earlier at a ceremony held in the great hall with the wolf thrown behind us and the Iron Territories assembled below.
Torvald had spoken my name in front of the pack and had bent his knee in front of his court.
A thing an Alpha King is not supposed to do and which he did anyway.
The pack had not protested.
The pack, it turned out, had been waiting.
The wolf was, on most days, lying in the library.
He had given up escorting me everywhere now that everyone in the keep understood the position I held.
Although he still appeared at meals more often than he strictly needed to.
He still occasionally made off with small items of mine.
A glove, a hair ribbon, once a slipper.
Torvald had stopped apologizing.
He had begun instead to ask me what I had lost before I had noticed it was missing.
I sat in the library on the first warm afternoon of the year, a letter from my mother open in my lap.
She had written to ask, in the careful way of a woman who could not bring herself to be direct, whether I was happy.
I looked at the windowsill where the pine needle from the box was still lying.
I picked up my pen.
“I am.
” I wrote.
“I am happy.
” I looked across the library to where Torvald was reading at the long table, the wolf asleep at his feet, the late sun on his hair.
He looked up at me the way he always looked up when I looked at him now, as if some thread between us had been pulled.
The corner of his mouth moved.
I smiled back.
If you have walked this corridor with me to the end, tell me, did you see it coming? Did you guess what was in the box or what was on the table in the library or that the wolf knew before either of us did? Tell me in the comments where you are listening from tonight.
And if her side of the story is the one you want, tap subscribe and stay close.
The Iron Keep is full of doors.
There are more I would like to open with you.
