The King Is Dead
CHAPTER ONE - The King Is Dead
The bells began before Lavender could see the palace. They rolled across the valley in slow, measured strokes, each one separated from the next by just enough silence to make the sound feel deliberate. Not grief exactly. Something older than grief. Something ritualised and heavy, meant to remind every wolf within hearing distance that a king had died and that, despite death, the kingdom would continue.
Lavender sat very still inside the carriage. By the seventh bell, the palace appeared through the rain. Black stone rose from the cliffs above the river, towers disappearing into low clouds, narrow windows blazing gold against the grey afternoon. The same walls. The same iron gates. The same banners snapping in the wind. Nothing had changed, yet everything had.
Beside her, June shifted closer. “You can still tell them the wheel broke.”
Lavender turned her head. June’s expression was perfectly serious. “The wheel?” Lavender asked.
“Catastrophically. Completely beyond repair.” June glanced toward the carriage door as though assessing the likelihood of jumping from it while they were still moving. “We could be stranded for weeks. Months, if necessary.”
Despite herself, Lavender almost smiled. “The gates are twenty yards away.”
“Then it broke twenty-one yards ago,” June urged.
Another bell sounded, and the smile disappeared before it could fully form. June reached across the seat and took Lavender’s hand. She did not say anything else. It was one of the reasons Lavender loved her. There were people who believed grief needed filling with advice, reassurance, or sentences beginning with at least. June had never done that. She seemed to understand that some things became smaller when words were placed around them.
Lavender looked down at their joined hands, black gloves covered hers. The dress beneath her travelling cloak was black too, although she had stopped wearing mourning colours almost a year ago. Yet it felt appropriate today, not only for Alexander, but for this place, and for herself, perhaps.
Three years. It had been three years since she had crossed those gates as Evander’s wife. Three years since she had left them his widow.
The carriage slowed, but her heartbeat did not. June squeezed her hand. “You don’t have to prove anything to anyone in there.”
Lavender looked toward the rain-streaked window. “I know.” It was easier to lie when she spoke quietly.
The royal crest came into view above the gates, carved deep into black stone: a wolf beneath a crescent moon. Lavender’s stomach tightened. Once, she had thought the symbol beautiful. Once, almost everything here had seemed beautiful. She had been younger then. Young enough to confuse grandeur with goodness.
The gates opened. The palace courtyard was crowded despite the rain. Nobles stood beneath black umbrellas. Pack representatives in ceremonial cloaks gathered beneath the colonnades. Royal guards lined the stairs in two silent rows, dark uniforms immaculate, expressions carefully blank. Lavender descended from the carriage and immediately smelled wet stone, pine smoke, horses and wolves.
Home, some buried part of memory whispered. She crushed the thought before it could settle. This had never been her home - Evander had been. That was different.
A footman reached for her hand, but Lavender barely noticed him. Her attention had gone to the palace doors. For a single absurd second, she expected Evander to come through them. He had always noticed when she arrived. It didn’t matter whether there were fifty people around him or five hundred. Somehow his eyes would find her, and the rest of his face would change. Not dramatically. Evander had been raised in rooms where emotion could become currency, and he had learned young not to spend it carelessly. But Lavender had always seen it, that tiny softening, the private smile, the: There you are. Her chest hurt, and she looked away.
“Lady Lavender.” A palace steward bowed deeply. The title felt wrong now. There had been other titles: Princess, Royal widow, Future queen, once, for eleven hours. She had stopped answering to most of them. “His Majesty’s household is honoured by your presence.”
His Majesty. Alexander was lying in a coffin, and already the phrase belonged to someone else.
“No,” Lavender said softly. “It isn’t.” The steward lifted his eyes, and June coughed into her hand. Lavender walked past the steward without a second glance.
Inside, the palace smelled exactly as she remembered- wax, old wood, fireplace smoke, and stone chilled by centuries. Lavender had not expected scent to be the thing that hurt most. She had prepared herself for portraits, for corridors ...for faces belonging to people who had watched Hassan reject her and later watched Evander marry her, with all the delighted cruelty of a court that survived on stories about other people’s pain.
She had not prepared for the smell of beeswax on the floors. Evander had once slipped on those floors while chasing her. The Crown Prince of the kingdom, nearly twenty-one years old, reduced to pursuing a laughing girl through the eastern gallery because Lavender had stolen his favourite book and refused to give it back. He had caught her near the windows and picked her up, threatening to throw her into the fountain. She had screamed loudly enough for three guards to appear. For one heartbeat, the memory was so vivid that she could feel his arms around her waist. Lavender stopped walking.
June stopped with her. “Lavender?”
“I’m fine,” Lavender said automatically, and June’s mouth tightened - she hated that answer.
Lavender started moving again. Servants had draped black cloth over every royal portrait in the main corridor. Every portrait except one - Samantha. Queen Samantha looked down from the end of the hall in silver and pale blue, one hand resting lightly on the back of a carved chair, her ash-blonde hair arranged beneath the royal diadem. Her blue-grey eyes possessed the peculiar coldness of portraits commissioned by people who wanted history to mistake composure for peace.
Black ribbon crossed the frame. Samantha had been dead for two years. At least, that was what Lavender had been told. She had not attended that funeral. She had sent flowers... and Hassan had sent nothing back.
June followed her gaze. “You never met her properly, did you?” June asked.
“I did.” Once. Lavender remembered Samantha taking her face between cool hands, studying her for a strange length of time after Hassan’s rejection, not comforting her, just studying her.
Then the queen had said, Some wounds are kinder than the futures they prevent.
Lavender had hated her for it. She still didn’t know what Samantha had meant. “Come on,” she said.
The bells had stopped, and that somehow made everything worse.
Alexander lay in state in the Hall of Kings. Hundreds of candles surrounded the raised black bier. Wolves carved from pale marble stood at each corner, heads lowered. The royal standard hung behind him, its golden thread muted beneath mourning cloth. The old king looked smaller in death - Lavender hated that. Alexander had never been small. Even in his later years, when grief and age had hollowed the skin around his eyes, he had occupied space the way only kings and very large predators seemed able to.
He had frightened her when she was younger until one winter when she’d found him alone in the library, sitting before a fire with his crown on the table rather than his head. She had been nineteen, still Hassan’s rejected mate then, and not yet Evander’s wife.
Alexander had looked at her for a long time before asking, “Does my son deserve you?”
Lavender had assumed he meant Hassan. “No.”
Alexander had laughed, a real laugh, startled and rough. Then he’d said, “Good. At least one person in this palace isn’t afraid of us.”
Months later, when Evander asked Alexander’s permission to marry her, the king had opposed it. Then supported it. Then refused to explain why he had changed his mind.
After Evander died, something inside Alexander had closed. He had spoken to Lavender only twice before she left the capital. The second time, he had kissed her forehead; that was all.
Now she stood before his coffin and wondered how many things the dead took with them simply because the living had waited too long to ask. Lavender removed one glove, as June remained a respectful distance behind her. Lavender placed her bare fingertips against the edge of the bier. The wood was cold. “Goodbye,” she whispered.
Nothing dramatic happened, no rush of grief, no supernatural sign, only a strange sadness for an old man who had once laughed in a library and later forgotten how. She withdrew her hand, and someone moved behind her. Lavender knew who it was before she turned. Perhaps because the room changed. Perhaps because she had spent too many years training herself to notice him before he noticed her. Or perhaps some humiliating part of her body still remembered what her pride had worked so hard to forget.
Hassan stood at the far end of the aisle, and for one suspended moment, neither of them moved. Three years disappeared ...and did not. He had changed; that was the first thing Lavender understood. The Hassan she remembered had already been tall enough to make most men look unfinished beside him, but something about him now seemed larger. Harder. His black ceremonial coat fitted closely across broad shoulders before disappearing beneath the dark fur mantle reserved for the royal heir. Gold embroidery caught the candlelight at his collar and cuffs.
His hair was still black, still slightly too long to remain perfectly disciplined. There was more severity in his face than she remembered, deeper angles along his jaw, faint exhaustion beneath amber-brown eyes - Alexander’s eyes. But there was something else there now, something Lavender could not name. He looked like a man who had spent three years sleeping badly. She despised herself for noticing.
Then Hassan saw her, really saw her. His entire body went still, not court stillness, or politeness. This was something more violent. A muscle moved in his jaw, his fingers curled once at his side, and his eyes— For half a heartbeat, the amber in them burned almost gold. Lavender’s breath caught. His wolf - Kairo. She remembered Kairo only from a distance. A monstrous charcoal-black wolf with eyes that had always seemed too intelligent. Hassan’s wolf had hated her ...or so she had believed. He had certainly made no argument when his human rejected her.
The old humiliation came back with astonishing precision - a summer courtyard with too many witnesses. Her heart racing because everything inside her had recognised Hassan before she even understood what was happening.
Mate. The word had ripped through the gathering with gasps, smiles, and whispers. Lavender had been terrified and happy and eighteen kinds of foolish.
Hassan had looked at her as though she’d become an inconvenience between one breath and the next. Then he had said the words that had divided her life into before and after: I reject Lavender as my mate.
He had not done it privately. He had not done it kindly. And when she had stood there staring at him, unable to make herself understand what had happened, he’d added: Whatever the Moon intended, it made a mistake.
Lavender had dreamed of that sentence for years, but not anymore ... well, at least not as often. She straightened now.
Hassan looked at her across his father’s coffin. There were hundreds of people in the hall, yet somehow the distance between them felt private. He was the first to look away - a tiny victory. But it did not feel like one.
The funeral procession moved at dusk. Rain had stopped, leaving the palace terraces shining beneath a clouded sky. Torches burned along the path leading to the royal crypt, their flames bending under the wind. Lavender walked with June among the high-ranking mourners. She should not have been so close to the royal family anymore. But widowhood was strange at court. Death did not release a person from rank. Sometimes it made rank harder to escape.
Ahead of her walked James, Hassan’s Royal Beta. He had changed less. Sandy-brown hair. Broad shoulders. The same alertness that made it seem as though half of him was always listening to something nobody else could hear. He glanced back once. His clear blue eyes settled briefly on Lavender. Then June.
June leaned toward her. “He’s still irritating.”
Lavender almost smiled. “You’ve exchanged six words with him in your life.”
“Seven.”
“That changes everything.”
“One of them was ‘move.’”
“You were standing in front of a charging horse,” Lavender reminded June.
“It was his tone,” June protested, and Lavender actually smiled this time. It lasted perhaps three seconds.
Then she saw the empty chair. The royal family had been seated before the crypt. Alexander’s coffin rested beneath the stone arch. Hassan stood to one side with James behind him. And beside the place where the king’s wife should have sat was a single empty ceremonial chair draped in silver mourning cloth - Samantha’s. They had done the same at her funeral for Alexander.
Tradition - A dead king’s dead queen represented beside him until burial. Lavender looked at the chair longer than she meant to, and something about it unsettled her ...recognition, almost. As though something in the scene was incorrect and her mind had noticed before she had.
June touched her elbow. “What?”
Lavender shook her head. “Nothing.”
The ceremony began. Priests spoke of the Moon, of duty, of blood, of kings returning to the ancestors. Lavender listened to almost none of it, but her gaze kept drifting toward Hassan. She hated that too.
He never looked at her, not once. He stood before his father’s coffin without moving, his face composed, shoulders square beneath black fur. But Lavender noticed his right hand. His thumb repeatedly moved across the edge of a ring on his smallest finger - a habit; Evander had had the same one.
No. She corrected herself immediately. Not the same. Brothers shared habits. Children imitated each other. Grief made patterns where none existed.
She looked away, as the priest began reciting the names of Alexander’s bloodline. King after king. Dead men reduced to titles. Then: “Evander Alexander, first son of the crown, beloved prince—”
Hassan moved just barely, but Lavender saw it. His head turned toward the stone wall behind the coffin, toward the royal memorial. Evander’s name had been carved there three years ago. Hassan stared at it, not like a brother remembering, but like a man listening. Lavender’s skin prickled.
Then the priest continued. “Hassan Alexander, surviving son, heir of the blood—” Hassan’s attention snapped back. Surviving son. The words sounded ugly. Lavender wondered whether he heard that too.
The final prayer began, and everyone lowered their heads. Lavender tried, but she couldn’t. The sensation returned - someone was watching her. Not the ordinary court attention she had endured since entering the palace, not curiosity, not gossip ...this felt closer. Her gaze moved slowly across the mourners - council members, pack leaders, servants, guards - no one was looking directly at her. Lavender turned toward the palace. Dark windows stared back, revealing nothing. Yet every fine hair along her arms lifted. Her pulse quickened.
Someone is there. The thought came with such certainty that she almost stepped backwards.
June sensed the movement. “Lavender?”
“Did you—” She stopped.
Across the coffin, Hassan’s head had turned sharply toward the same dark stretch of palace windows. His eyes narrowed, and Lavender forgot to breathe. He had felt it too. For one impossible second, they stood on opposite sides of a dead king and stared at exactly the same empty place.
Then something moved behind the glass, a shadow with a human shape- gone before Lavender could be certain she had seen it. Her eyes flew to Hassan. He was already looking at her. And this time, there was no contempt in his face, no coldness, no memory of rejection, only alarm.
The royal bell sounded once. Deep beneath their feet, something answered. And Lavender knew, with the terrible certainty that precedes every disaster, that returning to the palace had been a mistake.
