Aldric had been awake since before sunrise, which was not unusual.
Sleep, in his experience, was a negotiation.
Some nights it came easily and some nights it did not come at all and most nights it arrived late and left early, like a guest who had somewhere better to be.
He had long since stopped being bothered by this.
He rose when he woke, dressed in the dark by habit, and went to work because work was the one thing in his life that had never required negotiation.
This morning the work was laundry.
He stood at the washing line behind the Mercer household, three streets over from his own, a solid merchant family with more children than sense and a quantity of linens that suggested they considered cleanliness a competitive sport, and moved through the task with the quiet efficiency of a man who had been doing this particular thing since he was twelve years old.
Lift, wring, hang.
The motion was almost meditative.
The morning air was cold and carried the particular smell of early autumn, woodsmoke and turned earth and the distant suggestion of rain.
His hands were good for this work.
Large, capable, accustomed to cold water and repetition.
They were, he had been told on more than one occasion, not the hands of a laundry boy.
He had never been entirely sure what that meant or what the person saying it expected him to do about it.
They were the hands he had.
They worked.
That seemed sufficient.
He reached for the next sheet and caught his reflection in the still water of the washing basin.
He looked away.
He always looked away.
Not out of vanity, the opposite of vanity, maybe.
His reflection was simply a thing he had never known what to do with.
The grey hair that had been grey since birth, silver-pale in certain lights, the colour of winter sky before snow.
The eyes that people noticed and then looked at for too long and then became uncomfortable about, that particular shade of blue that his mother “Grace” called lovely and that strangers called unsettling and that Aldric himself called inconvenient, because it was difficult to move through a world unobserved when your face insisted on being observed.
He did not look like anyone in his family.
He had never looked like anyone in his family.
He had spent twenty-seven years not thinking about what that meant, which was different from not knowing what it meant, which was different again from not caring.
He had arranged these distinctions carefully in his interior architecture and visited none of them if he could help it.
He finished the last sheet, dried his hands on the rough cloth at his belt, and headed home.
✦ ✦ ✦
Home was a narrow house on Cotter’s Lane.
It was not a beautiful house.
It had never been a beautiful house.
The roof had been patched three times in the years Aldric could remember and would likely need patching again before winter arrived.
The front step was uneven.
The garden was more functional than decorative, vegetables in neat rows, a small herb patch that Grace tended with disproportionate affection, a wooden bench beside the door where Gibson sat in the evenings and watched the lane with the contemplative air of a man who had seen enough of the world to find a quiet street entirely satisfying.
It was, despite all of this, the only place Aldric had ever felt anything resembling settled.
Which he did not think about too carefully, because thinking about it too carefully led to other thoughts, and those thoughts led to the pendant sitting against his sternum, and the pendant led nowhere good.
He pushed open the front door.
The smell hit him first, bread, and something savoury on the fire, and underneath both of those the warm particular scent of the house itself, the one that had no name and needed none.
“You’re back early,” Vivian said, without looking up from the table.
She was sitting with a length of fabric spread across her knees, needle in hand, working at something with the focused intensity she brought to everything she decided to care about.
Vivian was twenty, small and sharp-featured, with their mother’s brown eyes and their father’s stubborn jaw and an opinion about almost everything that she had never once been persuaded to keep to herself.
She was not his blood.
He knew that.
She knew that.
It had never once mattered.
“The Mercers only had two loads today,” he said, hanging his coat on the hook by the door.
“Where are they?”
“Mother is at the market. Father is fixing the Holloways’ fence.” She glanced up at him.
“There’s bread.”
“I can smell the bread.”
“I made it.”
“I know. It smells good.”
Vivian looked pleased in the way she always looked pleased when she had made something, briefly, genuinely, and as though she resented being pleased.
She returned to her sewing.
Aldric cut himself a piece of bread and ate it standing at the counter, looking out the small window at the lane.
It was a Tuesday.
He had the Holloways’ laundry this afternoon, and then the widow Marsh wanted her winter curtains beaten and rehung before the cold settled in properly, and if there was time before the light went he had promised Gibson he would look at the loose shutter on the upstairs window.
Full enough day.
He did not mind full days.
Full days left less room for the kind of thinking he preferred not to do.
“There was a letter,” Vivian said.
He turned.
She was not looking at him.
She was still looking at her sewing.
But her hands had slowed, and Vivian’s hands never slowed when she was just sewing.
“What letter,” he said.
“It came this morning while you were out.” She set the fabric down.
Reached across the table to the folded piece of paper sitting beside the bread basket.
Held it out without meeting his eyes.
He took it.
Looked at the seal pressed into the red wax.
The royal mark.
He had seen it before, on official notices posted in the village square, on tax documents, on the kinds of correspondence that arrived at poor households to inform them of obligations rather than opportunities.
He had seen it and felt the particular feeling he always felt when he encountered anything connected to the crown, a low cold thing that settled in his chest like stones dropped in still water.
He broke the seal.
He read the letter once.
Then he set it on the table with the careful deliberateness of a man placing something down before he did something with his hands that he would regret.
“No,” he said.
“Aldric….”
“No.”
“It says attendance is not optional.”
“Everything the crown says is not optional.” He moved to the window again.
Stood with his back to her, looking out at the lane.
The same lane.
The same quiet ordinary Tuesday lane that had nothing to do with palaces or queens or the particular humiliation of being summoned like livestock to be inspected by royalty.
“It is still a choice.”
“It is not a choice. It is a royal summons. If we don’t go…..”
“Then we don’t go.” He turned.
“Viv. Think about what you are saying. They want to bring every alpha in the kingdom to the capital so that the princess can pick one. Like selecting fruit at a market stall.” He heard the edge in his own voice and did not particularly try to soften it.
“I am not going to the capital to be looked over.”
“You are not being asked to be looked over. You are being asked to attend a ball.”
“A ball at which I will be looked over.”
Vivian stood up.
She was considerably shorter than him, which had never once prevented her from facing him directly when she had something to say.
“You are being asked to attend a ball at which you will wear a mask and eat food that is better than anything we have eaten in a month and possibly dance with someone who is not me or Mother, which would be a significant improvement for everyone involved.” She paused.
“Also it is not optional.”
“You said that.”
“I will keep saying it until it penetrates.” She crossed her arms.
“Aldric. I understand why you don’t want to go. I do. But this is the queen’s summons and we are a family in this village and if we ignore it there will be consequences for all of us, not just you.” Her voice was steady but her eyes were serious in the way they got when she was not arguing but simply telling the truth.
“Please.”
He looked at her for a long moment.
He thought about what it would mean to walk into that palace.
To stand in some gilded ballroom with his village clothes and his wrong-coloured hair and his face that people stared at.
To be assessed and found adequate or inadequate by people who had decided before he walked in the door that he was less than them because of what he was born.
He thought about the queen.
About the crown.
About the way the summons had arrived at his door the same way tax notices arrived, as a statement of power dressed in formal language.
He thought, despite himself, about Vivian’s face when she said “please”.
“Fine,” he said.
Vivian’s expression did something complicated.
Relief and victory and the particular look of someone who had won an argument they had expected to be much harder.
“Fine,” she said.
“I am not wearing the brown coat.”
“Absolutely not. I have been planning to burn the brown coat for two years.” She was already moving, already turning toward the small chest at the back of the room with the focused energy of a woman who had been mentally preparing for this conversation and had contingency plans.
“I have something better. It will need adjusting but I can do it tonight.”
“Tonight.”
“The ball is in two days.” She was already rummaging.
“Sit down. I need to measure your shoulders again.”
“My shoulders have not changed since last time.”
“Your shoulders are never where I left them.” She emerged with a bundle of dark fabric and shook it out with a snap.
Deep charcoal, well cut, considerably finer than anything Aldric had ever worn.
He looked at it.
“Where did you get that?”
“I have been working on it. For an occasion.” She met his eyes briefly.
“I always thought there would be an occasion.”
He did not say anything.
He sat down and let her measure his shoulders, which were, as far as he could tell, exactly where he had left them.
✦ ✦ ✦
Grace and Gibson came home to find Vivian pinning the coat on Aldric in the middle of the kitchen and the royal letter open on the table.
Gibson read it standing up, still in his work clothes, and said nothing for a long moment.
He was a quiet man by nature, broad and weathered, with calloused hands and a straightforward way of looking at problems that Aldric had spent twenty-three years trying to learn from.
He set the letter down.
“Right then,” he said.
That was Gibson’s way.
Two words, or three, carrying everything that needed to be carried.
Grace read it after him.
She was a small woman, grey-haired now, with capable hands and the particular quality of warmth that some people had, not performed, not effortful, simply present, the way sunlight was present on a good day.
She read the letter twice and then folded it neatly and set it beside the bread basket.
“I’ll press your good shirt,” she said to Aldric.
“Mother…..”
“The blue one. It brings out your eyes.” She was already moving to the fire to check whatever was on it.
“We’ll hire the Patton carriage. They run to the capital for the market days, they’ll take us.”
“We don’t need to all go,” Aldric said.
“We are your family,” Grace said, without turning around, in the tone that closed debates.
“We go together.”
Gibson sat down at the table.
Picked up his tea.
Looked at Aldric over the rim of it with the steady, uncomplicated gaze of a man who saw him clearly and without complication.
“You’ll be all right,” he said.
Two words.
Carrying everything.
Aldric looked at his family, Grace at the fire, Gibson at the table, Vivian on her knees adjusting the hem of a coat she had made for an occasion she had always believed would come.
The narrow kitchen with its patched ceiling and its smell of bread and woodsmoke and the quiet ordinary life that was the only life he had ever known.
His hand moved, without thinking, to his chest.
To the pendant beneath his shirt — the chain worn smooth from twenty-seven years of handling, the pendant itself small and solid and warm from his skin.
He had touched it so many times it had become a reflex.
A habit with no cure.
He did not take it out.
He never took it out in front of people, not even these people, not even this family.
It was the one thing that was entirely and only his, the one thing that predated everything else, and he held it the way a man holds the one question he has never been able to answer.
He let his hand fall.
“Right then,” he said, borrowing Gibson’s words because his own were not available.
✦ ✦ ✦
The Patton carriage left the village before dawn on the morning of the ball.
It was not a comfortable carriage.
It was a working carriage, built for the weekly market run to the capital, and it smelled of hay and old leather and the accumulated journeys of people who had sat in it going to and from the city for ordinary reasons.
The seats were wooden.
The suspension was more of a suggestion than a reality.
Every rut in the road announced itself personally.
Vivian sat across from Aldric with her hands folded and her chin up and the expression of a woman who had decided this was an adventure and was going to maintain that position regardless of what the road had to say about it.
Grace sat beside him, small and warm, occasionally patting his knee in the way she had done since he was a child and which he had never once asked her to stop doing because he was not entirely without sense.
Gibson sat beside Vivian and watched the road through the window with the contemplative air of a man who had somewhere better to be and was at peace with not being there.
The capital rose out of the dark ahead of them, slowly, then all at once, its lights multiplying as the road widened and the buildings gathered on either side.
Aldric watched it come.
He had been to the city before.
Not often, the market, twice, and once when he was sixteen and had gone with a group from the village for reasons he no longer remembered.
He had not liked it particularly.
Too loud.
Too many people in too small a space, all of them wearing their social standing like a second set of clothes, assessing and being assessed at every corner.
Tonight it will be worse.
Tonight the city’s grandest ballroom would be full of every alpha in the kingdom, and somewhere in that room a princess would look at them all from behind a mask and decide their fates.
He leaned his head back against the seat.
The pendant sat against his chest.
Warm.
Familiar.
Silent, as it had always been, on the subject of everything that mattered.
The carriage rolled on.