Rejected While Pregnant: The Alpha's Hidden Heir

I was going to tell him at midnight, when the Cold Moon stood over the hall and he put the Luna’s ring on my hand. At eleven, in front of three hundred wolves, Lachlan Redfern rejected me instead.

At four o’clock that afternoon I was still practicing.

“I’m carrying your child,” I told Mother Wynne’s empty chair.

The infirmary was cold and the stove was low, and the chair said nothing, which was more than Mother Wynne would have done. She’d have told me to sit down before I fell down. She’d been dead since April, and I still talked to her chair.

I tried it another way. “Lachlan. Sit. I have something to tell you, and you’re going to laugh, and then you’re going to need to sit down again.”

That was better. That sounded like me.

I had a knob of ginger root in my apron pocket, and I bit a piece off and chewed it, because the smell of the feast coming up from the kitchens had been trying to kill me since noon. Eight weeks. I’d counted it on my fingers so many times the number had worn smooth. Eight weeks since the eclipse, since the Moon Lodge, since the red moon over the river and his voice asking me a question I’d answered before he finished it.

The door banged. Alfie came in sideways behind a basket of clean linen bigger than he was. He was ten, Mair the cook’s grandson, and he went everywhere in Redfern House at a run, as if somebody had sent for him.

“Gran says the dressings are dry,” he announced. “And the Dowager’s woman is coming up with your dress, and you’re to be in the hall by eight.” He put the basket down and looked at me. “You’re green.”

“I’m not green.”

“You’re a bit green. Round the mouth.” He leaned closer. Alfie looked at people the way he looked at the pantry shelves, counting what was there and what had gone missing. “Is it the mutton? There’s mutton tonight. You don’t like mutton anymore.”

“Who says I don’t?”

“You left it Tuesday. And Thursday.”

“Out,” I said, and he grinned and went, and I sat down on Mother Wynne’s stool with my hand flat on my stomach and laughed, because if a ten-year-old boy could see it, surely three hundred wolves would smell it any day now.

Except they couldn’t. That was the thing. Nobody could.

Greer came up at five with the gown over her arm. She was the Dowager’s maid and had been since before I was born, a tall gray woman who moved without sound and spoke as if every word cost her money. She hung the gown on the screen. Winter blue, silver at the hem, cut for my shoulders by Lady Honora’s own seamstress. A gown to be crowned in.

“Lady Honora says you’re to wear the pearls,” Greer said. “She’ll send them down.”

“Thank her for me.”

Greer didn’t go. She stood by the screen and looked round the infirmary, at the shelves and the stove and the herb chest under the window, the way you look at a room you mean to remember.

“Was there something else?”

“No,” Greer said, and went.

I went to the chest for willow bark, for the headache that had sat at the back of my skull all week, and stopped. The lid was on the wrong way round. The hinge had broken years ago and Mother Wynne had mended it with a leather strap, and the lid only sat flat one way, with the knot at the back. The knot was at the front.

Someone had been in it. Alfie, I thought, after the licorice root. I turned the lid round and took my willow bark and forgot about it, because at eight o’clock I was going to put on a winter-blue gown and walk into the hall, and at midnight I was going to be a Luna, and in my pocket I had four words on a scrap of paper in case my voice failed me.

I’m carrying your child.

The hall at Redfern House is the oldest room in the valley. Black beams, fir boughs over every door, two hearths you could stand up in, and the great east window where the full moon climbs into view at midnight in December, if the sky is clear. That night it was clear. Every table was full. Three hundred wolves in their good clothes, and the smell of roast mutton and pine sap and candle wax so thick I breathed through my mouth.

I sat where the healer sits, halfway down the north table, until midnight. That was the custom. At midnight he’d come down from the high table and take my hand and walk me back up it.

He sat in the center of the high table with his mother on his right and his uncle Cedric, the Lawkeeper, on his left. At the far end were the Larkhill guests who’d come up for the feast: an escort of two warriors and the Alpha of Larkhill’s daughter, Aveline, small and fair and very quiet, with her hands in her lap.

Lachlan didn’t look at me. All evening, he didn’t look at me once.

I noticed it the way you notice a draft. A little cold place where something warm should be. I told myself he was nervous. He’d been Alpha for six years, since he was twenty-two, and he still hated speeches.

Elsie found me before the mutton came. She was six, Selwyn’s girl, and she’d escaped her mother and come down the north table in her best red dress with a fistful of roasted chestnuts.

“Are you going to be the Luna?” she whispered. Half the table heard her. Half the table had been wondering the same thing all week.

“That’s a secret.”

“Everybody knows.”

“Then it’s a very bad secret.” I took the chestnuts off her and peeled one and gave it back. “Small bites. Chestnuts are sneaky.”

“Will you have a crown?”

“No crowns. Just a ring.”

“I’d want a crown,” Elsie said, and her mother came and scooped her up, smiling at me over her head the way the women of the pack had smiled at me all week, as if they knew. Across the hall, Selwyn didn’t smile. He was watching the high table with his jaw tight, and I didn’t think anything of it.

I thought about the ring.

Mair’s girls brought round the mutton. I didn’t eat. I held my water glass and watched him, and at a quarter to eleven, he stood up.

The hall went quiet slowly, table by table, the way a pond goes still. He had a folded paper in his hand.

“Clemency Wynne,” he said. “Stand up.”

I stood. Some of the young warriors grinned and nudged each other, thinking the crowning had come early. For one heartbeat I thought so too. Then I saw his face.

“On Saturday night,” Lachlan said, “Selwyn’s patrol saw you at the crossing below the Moon Lodge, after midnight, with a cloaked wolf from Highfen. Do you deny it?”

The hall made a sound like wind going through a wood.

I looked for Selwyn. He was at the warriors’ table with his wife and his little girl, Elsie, and he was looking at his plate.

“I was at the crossing,” I said. “I can explain why.”

“Then explain this.” He unfolded the paper. “It was in your herb chest this morning, under the willow bark.” He read it aloud, and his voice didn’t shake. “‘Come to the Lodge when the moon is dark. I’ll wait as long as it takes.’ Signed, M.”

“That isn’t mine.”

“It was in your chest.”

“I’ve never seen it in my life.”

“The Lodge,” he said, and for the first time something cracked in his voice. “Of all the places in this valley. You chose the Lodge.”

I opened my mouth to say it. The four words were in my pocket, written down in case. And then I looked at the hall, at three hundred faces, at Cedric Redfern leaning forward with his scarred hands folded, and I heard what they would hear. Not his. A Highfen wolf’s. An enemy’s pup in the Alpha’s house, in the middle of a feud, with a love letter to prove it.

I shut my mouth.

“I, Lachlan Redfern, Alpha of Redfern,” he said, “reject you, Clemency Wynne, as my mate and my Luna.”

It goes through you like a rope pulled through your ribs. Four years of the bond, since the autumn I turned eighteen and carried a tray into his office and he looked up and the whole world went quiet. Four years, and it came out of me in one long tearing pull, and my hand went to my stomach without my meaning it to, and held on.

At the high table, Lady Honora’s eyes went to my hand. I saw them go there. I saw them stay.

I took the hand away.

“Who found it?” I said.

Lachlan looked at me as if I’d answered in another language.

“The letter. Who found it?”

“Does that matter?”

“It matters to me.”

He didn’t answer. That was the answer. He was the Alpha, and he’d decided, and the deciding was done.

There are words you have to say back. Every girl in the pack learns them at twelve, giggling behind the laundry, never once thinking she’ll need them. I said them now.

“I accept your rejection.”

Nobody breathed. I didn’t cry. I’m not sure what they were waiting for, three hundred wolves holding their forks. Begging, maybe. I had sat with dying wolves and screaming pups and a woman opened up by a bear, and I had never once given anybody a scene, and I wasn’t going to start in front of Cedric Redfern.

Lachlan turned to the end of the high table.

“The Luna of Redfern will be crowned at the Wolf Moon,” he said. “Aveline Larkin, of Larkhill. If she’ll have me.”

The girl went white to the lips. She looked at me, not at him. One of her father’s men stood up behind her and bowed for her, because she didn’t seem able to.

The hall began to clap. Slowly at first, and then all of it, because the Lawkeeper was clapping.

I sat down. My legs did that for me. Mair was suddenly behind my chair with a cup of water and a face like a shut door, and Alfie was beside her with his mouth open, and across the hall Lady Honora was looking at me with such sorrow that I nearly wept after all.

I didn’t. I sat in the winter-blue gown that had been made for my crowning, and I held the water, and I thought about the four words folded in my pocket.

The moon was coming up in the great window. It would stand there at midnight, exactly where I’d known it would.

He didn’t know he’d just rejected his heir. Nobody in that hall knew. Under the eclipse, the moon had hidden my baby from every nose in the world, and I’d been going to tell him at midnight.

I left the hall the back way, through the kitchens, and on the servants’ stair I met the Lawkeeper coming down.

Cedric Redfern was sixty-one and built like a gatepost, red going gray, with a scar from a Highfen claw that pulled one side of his mouth into a permanent opinion. He stopped two steps above me so that I had to look up at him.

“Healer,” he said.

“Lawkeeper.”

“Servant-born,” he said, as if he were reading it off a list. “Back to service. The moon keeps its books, girl. I told him that four years ago.”

“I’m sure you did.”

He looked at me a moment longer, and I think he was waiting for me to cry so he could despise it. When I didn’t, he grunted and went on down, and the stair creaked under him all the way to the bottom.

Fergus caught me at the linen press on the landing. He was the Beta, twenty-nine, red-haired and freckled and the worst liar in Redfern, which was why Lachlan trusted him with everything.

“Clem.” He didn’t know w