The Alpha's Unconquered Queen

Dawn came up grey over Ashen Valley.

No sun. Just light.

Thin. Cold. Enough to see by. Enough to die by, if it came to that.

I stood on the broken ridge above the camp and counted again.

Three hundred.

Give or take the ones who couldn't stand. Give or take the boy by the water barrels who kept throwing up and wiping his mouth like nobody had seen. I had seen. I didn't say anything. If I was sixteen and waiting for a battle, I'd throw up too.

I'm not sixteen. I'm twenty-three. And I'm nobody.

That's the joke the valley was playing on all of us that morning. Grey rank. No house worth naming. No wolf worth fearing, not on paper. Nora Gray, file her under spare.

Except everyone above me was dead or gone.

Captain Holt — gone since midnight, and nobody would say the word dead out loud, so we all just said gone and looked at our boots. The lieutenant with the kind eyes — dead, I had seen that one myself. The two sergeants who actually knew the signal flags — one dead, one with his leg packed in snow and his teeth chattering so hard he couldn't give an order without biting his tongue.

So. Me.

Three hundred wolves looked up the ridge at a grey-rank girl and waited for me to tell them how not to die.

No pressure, then.

"Again," I said.

My voice didn't shake. Small mercy. My hands did. I kept them behind my back where the front rank couldn't see, fingers locked so tight my knuckles ached.

Bran's replacement — a broad lad called Ellis, too young for that scar through his eyebrow, too old to be scared of me — cleared his throat.

"Orders, Gray?"

Not ma'am. Not captain. Gray. Like always.

Good. If they'd started calling me ma'am, I'd have known we were really finished.

"Shield line holds the dip," I said. "Not the ridge. The dip. Archers — what we've got left of them — behind the rocks, not in the open like last time. And nobody — nobody — shifts unless I say. A lone wolf is a dead wolf out there. We stay packed. We stay ugly. We stay alive."

"And when they charge?" Ellis asked.

"Then we find out if I'm clever or just loud."

A couple of them laughed. Short. Real. It helped. It helped more than a speech would have. Speeches are for Alphas with clean armour and a father who taught them how to stand. I had mud up to my ankles and somebody else's blood drying under my nails. It wasn't mine. I kept noticing that. It wasn't mine, and I hadn't washed it off, and now it was too late to bother.

Below us the camp moved the way camps do before a fight. Quiet, mostly. Buckles. Straps. A whetstone going shhk, shhk against a tired blade. Someone praying under his breath, same three words over and over, too low to make out. Someone else arguing about a strap, because men will argue about a strap on the edge of the world if it stops them thinking.

My wrist itched.

No. Itched is a lie. It burned.

I pulled my sleeve down without looking. I already knew what I'd see.

The mark Maera left on me five years ago — a thin dark line round my wrist, neat as a bracelet, neat as a lie — had cracked in the night. Not all the way. Not yet. Thin lines of light showed through the cracks, white-gold, pulsing slow. Like something breathing under my skin. Like something waking up and stretching.

Five years. That was the bargain. Five years hidden. Five years small. Five years as Nora Gray, grey wolf, grey girl, nobody's daughter, nobody's heir, nobody's problem.

The five years were nearly up.

I could do the maths even scared. I had done it in the dark, in the tent, with my fingers counting hours against my thigh while the wounded groaned two canvas walls away.

One hour.

Roughly. Give or take the witch's sense of humour — and Maera Quill had never, in my experience, found anything funny except other people's pain.

In one hour, the spell would let go of me. My blood would stop hiding. My wolf would stop being small. My face — this borrowed face I'd worn so long I'd started answering to it in dreams — would go back to being Seren Vale's face.

Seren Vale. Dead girl. Burned girl, if you believed the pack story. The Alpha's lost daughter of Frostvale.

If that happened here, in front of three hundred witnesses and a valley full of enemies who'd pay gold for a Vale head —

Well.

It would save the enemy the trouble of killing me in the charge. My own side might do it first, just for the shock.

"Gray."

I turned.

Dorian Pike stood twenty steps away, down the slope where the ridge flattened into trampled snow and ash.

God. Dorian Pike.

If you'd asked me five years ago to name the man I'd least want beside me at the end of the world, I'd have said his name without stopping to think. He'd made the academy a smaller, meaner place for girls like me. Grey ranks. Nobodies. He'd tripped me in the yard and laughed. He'd called me gutter-wolf in front of a whole training line and waited, grinning, for me to cry or swing.

I hadn't cried. I had swung. We'd both bled for that one.

Now he was standing twenty steps away with his sword out and his shield half-raised, looking up past me — not at me — at the far tree line, and his face had gone the colour of old snow.

"Pike?" I said. "What —"

"DOWN —"

He didn't finish. Or he did, and the arrow took the rest.

It hit him high in the chest, just under the collarbone, where the armour gapped when a man raised his arm. Such a small thing. An arrow. We'd seen thousands. It punched through and the point came out his back, red and bright in the grey light, and Dorian looked down at it like he was honestly surprised.

Then his knees went.

I was moving before I thought. Snow kicked up round my boots. My bad ankle — twisted two days ago, still swollen inside the boot, still lying to me every step — screamed and I ignored it the way I'd ignored it all night.

Twenty steps. It felt like two hundred.

He was on his side when I got there. One hand pressed round the shaft, useless, blood coming between his fingers in pulses. Too fast. Too bright. Everyone learns that colour in their first real fight and nobody forgets it after.

"Don't pull it," I said. Stupid. Obvious. My voice did shake then. "Pike. Dorian. Don't — leave it, leave it in, the healers —"

"There aren't any healers left, Gray." He coughed. Blood on his teeth. He almost smiled. Almost. "You know that."

"I know a lot of things. Shut up and breathe."

"Bossy. Even now."

"Especially now."

His other hand found my wrist. The marked one. His grip was wet and already weak, and where his fingers closed over the cracked mark, the light under my skin flared — I felt it, hot through his palm — and his eyes went wide.

He stared at my wrist. Then at my face. Really stared. Like the pain had burned something clear in him.

"Gray," he said. "Your —"

"Don't."

"I —"

"Dorian. Don't say it. Whatever you think you see, you don't —"

He shook his head. Small. Once. Blood in the snow under him now, spreading, steaming a little in the cold. Such a waste. Such a stupid, ordinary waste. Twenty steps from me. Close enough that I could count the freckles he'd probably have hated anyone noticing.

"Should've —" He coughed again and it was worse. "Should've been nicer. In the yard."

"Yeah," I said. My throat hurt. "You should've."

"Tell —"

"Tell who? Tell them yourself. Breathe. That's an order, Pike, breathe —"

He didn't.

There wasn't a big moment. No last grand speech. His hand went loose on my wrist and slid off into the snow, and his eyes stayed open, looking past me at a sky that wasn't even blue yet. One second he was a person giving me trouble. The next he was just — gone. The valley did that. It didn't care who owed who an apology.

I closed his eyes. My hand was shaking so hard I nearly missed.

Somebody behind me said his name. Somebody else said mine. Or Gray's name. The name that wasn't mine.

I stood up.

Snow on my knees. Blood on my hands — his now, on top of the older blood, and I still didn't wipe it off. My wrist burned like a brand. Under the sleeve, light leaked between my fingers when I pressed my hand over it to hide it. An hour. Maybe less now. Maybe the crack had jumped when Dorian grabbed it. Maybe grief did that. Maybe dying men do.

Think. Think, Seren.

If the mark broke here, before the battle, I lost the army. Not to the enemy. To confusion. To fear. Three hundred wolves who'd followed Nora Gray would not follow a dead Vale heir with light coming out of her skin. Not today. Not without answers I couldn't give standing in Dorian Pike's blood.

If I ran, I lost them too. And they'd die in the dip without the orders only I — stupid, stupid — only I had worked out in the night.

If I stayed. If I stayed and the spell broke mid-charge —

Then it broke. And whatever I was, I'd be it in front of everyone, and maybe that was always how it was going to happen.

My mouth was dry. I swallowed anyway.

"Ellis." My voice came out steady enough. I have no idea how. "Take Pike's shield line. Jonna —" a girl, seventeen, steady hands, dead brother yesterday — "you take his left. Nobody steps over him to fight. We step round. We remember him after."

"Gray," Ellis said quietly. "The mark on your —"

"You didn't see anything."

He held my look for a beat. Then he nodded, once, and turned away and started shouting the line into place, and I could have kissed his scarred, lying face for it.

The light under my sleeve pulsed. Once. Twice. Counting with me.

One hour before I stopped being Nora Gray.

One hour to win a battle as a nobody, in a valley full of ash, with a dead bully's blood on my hands and a dead girl's name rising in my throat like floodwater.

Across the valley, bright and brazen and impossibly loud in the dawn quiet, the enemy horn sounded.

And under it, rank on rank, colour on colour, the banners began to move.

Five years earlier, I still ate at the wrong end of my own father's table.

The feast hall at Frostvale was built to impress people who already feared us. Long hall. High beams. Wolf heads carved into every pillar, snarling down at the diners like even the furniture wanted a fight. Fires in two great hearths, and still the cold got in under the doors. It always did. Frostvale was named honestly, I'll give it that.

That night the hall was full and loud and golden.

It wasn't for me.

It was for Mirelle.

My stepsister — no, say it properly, because my father did, three times that night with his cup raised — Mirelle Moreau, soon to be Vale by his blessing, had shifted for the first time that morning. Eighteen years old, same as me, and her wolf had come in silver-grey and sleek and perfect for showing off. The pack had watched her run the yard. The pack had cheered. My father had wept, actually wept, in front of everyone, and put his own cloak round her shoul