Bought by the Lycan King

They dressed me in white. The white of a lamb that has been washed and ribboned and brought out to the block, where everyone in the room knows what happens next and nobody says it. My bare feet had stopped feeling the wood an hour ago.

They put me up at dusk, before the sale, so the buyers could look at me. Turn, they said, and I turned. Show your neck, they said, and I showed my neck. By then I had learned that the doing was smaller than the dreading, and that the men who looked longest were the ones who would bid least.

I had been on a block once before, three weeks earlier, in a barn outside the Ashwood, and it had gone badly, and I had thought about that barn every hour since. In the barn there had been four men and one of them had touched my hair and asked whether I could cook. Here there was a man with a book who wrote the lots down in a column, and a girl in front of me sold for a cow, and I stood in line and watched the cow change hands and understood that I was in the same column as the cow.

“Lot forty-one,” the auctioneer said. He had saved me for last, when the hall was loud and loose. “Omega, unbound. Eighteen years. No living kin of standing. Debt-transfer, all rights surrendered.”

All rights surrendered. He said it in the same voice he had used for the starting price, which was two hundred.

Two hundred. I did the arithmetic, because I always did the arithmetic, even when it did no good. My father had owed four thousand, and I was going for two hundred, which meant the men who held the debt had already decided they would not be paid and were selling me for whatever the room would give. A breeding cow went for six in that country. I had watched one go for six an hour ago. I stood on the block and I worked it out and I knew exactly what I was worth, and I still had to stand there.

I kept my chin up. In the cellar where they had kept me the last three weeks I had made myself one promise, and it was this: I would not look at the floor.

The other lots had taken hours. Siblings sold in pairs. A girl my age with a scar through her lip went for eleven hundred and smiled the whole time. There was an old man who was not sold at all, and when the hammer did not come down he stood on the block and looked at the crowd like a man reading a verdict, and then he walked off it himself, out through the side door, and nobody stopped him and nobody looked at him, and I understood that being unsold was worse than being sold and that he would be dead by spring. Everyone in the hall already had people. They had come to settle the score my father left behind, and tonight that score had a face.

Aldric Vane. Say the name in any pack from the Ashwood to the coast and the room goes quiet in a particular way. Not the quiet of respect. The quiet of a wound someone is still deciding how to avenge. Nine years ago my father did something so unforgivable that the only honest word for my life since is aftermath. I had grown up inside that quiet. I had learned to hear it come into a room the moment I walked into it, the way you learn to hear weather.

“Two hundred,” the auctioneer said. “Do I hear two hundred?”

“A hundred,” someone called from the back, and the hall laughed.

“Fifty,” said another.

They had told me in the cellar that the lots nobody wanted went to the river houses, or to the northern ranches, which are worse in winter and the same in summer. I told myself it did not matter who bought me. I had built that lie very carefully and I was still standing inside it when the hall went quiet.

The doors at the back had opened.

I could not see him at first. I could only see the crowd turn. Men who had been laughing a moment ago were on their knees, facing the back of the hall.

“The Lycan King,” the auctioneer said. His voice had gone thin. “Nobody sent word. We were not expecting you.”

The man who came down the aisle did not look like a king. That was my first thought, and I was ashamed of how badly I wanted it to be true. No crown, no fur, no gold. He was tall and young, younger than the men kneeling for him, and he walked as if nothing in the room concerned him.

His eyes found me before he reached the front.

I have to explain what happened then and I only have wolf words for it. I am an omega. I have never shifted. My wolf has been silent my whole life. The elders blamed my father’s blood. They said it kindly, most of them. They said it like a diagnosis.

When the Lycan King looked at me, the lamp came on.

The rope went slack in a way that had nothing to do with rope.

I do not have a name for what that was. It was as if someone had put a key into my chest and turned it, and every locked thing in me came open at once, and then shut again, and left me standing on a block with my heart going wrong and nobody in that room I could explain it to.

He stopped at the block. Up close he was worse. There was grey in his face that his age had not paid for, and his eyes were the pale wrong color of a winter sky before snow, and one hand trembled. Only slightly.

“I will take this one,” he said.

He said it to the auctioneer and to the hall at once. He did not raise his voice.

The auctioneer’s mouth opened and closed. “Two hundred,” he managed.

“A hundred thousand,” the Lycan King said, “and every debt in this room cleared. On one condition.” Nobody breathed. “That no one here speaks her father’s name to me again.”

The silence afterward had teeth in it. I watched the room decide, all together, that it had never known Aldric Vane. That it would not be able to pronounce the name if asked.

The hammer came down. The auctioneer did not look at me.

The Lycan King climbed the two steps to the block. No one stopped him. He looked at me a long time, and whatever he had come for, I was not it.

“You do not know what you are,” he said. Quiet. Only for me. “That is going to be a problem.”

They led me out through the back, past the pens, to a carriage with black windows. The lamp in my chest was still burning. Four horses. Six guards. Two hundred and eleven steps from the auction house door to the carriage door. At the end of them, a man I had never met who had just paid more for me than my father’s whole life was worth.

I looked back once, at the top of the steps. The auctioneer was still at his block with his hands flat on the ledger. Behind him the hall had already filled up with noise, men talking too loudly about nothing, the way a room talks when it has just watched something it would rather forget. Nobody in that room was going to remember my face by spring. That was the thing about being sold for a hundred thousand in a room full of men who came to buy a debt: I had been the most expensive thing that ever crossed that block and I was still, to every one of them, a line in a column that had just been closed.

The guard on my left took my arm above the elbow and it was not rough and it was not gentle and it did not matter either way. I walked down the steps between the pens and I did not look at the floor, because that was the promise, and I kept it, and it is the only thing I kept from that whole week.

I got in. Someone locked the door from the outside, and the carriage pulled away.