All Chapters of The King's Second Heart : Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Ysolde crossed the chamber to the bed.She sat down on the edge of the bed in the small careful place she had been sitting since the morning Elowen had first opened her eyes."Oh, my lady.""I cannot do this, Ysolde.""Oh yes you can.""I cannot. I — I have been awake all night. I have rehearsed every small first sentence I can think of and they are all wrong. I do not know how to greet him. I do not know how to — to be in a room with him when he is looking at me. I am not — Ysolde, you do not understand. I have spent four years learning to be small. I have spent four years learning to take up as little space as I could. I have not been looked at by any man in four years. The king of Velmoria is going to walk through that door at dusk tonight and he is going to look at me, and I do not know how to be looked at, and I am going to fail, and he is going to see, and—""My lady. Stop. Please."Ysolde reached forward and took both of Elowen's twisted thin hands and untwisted them very gentl

"He is in the corridor, my lady."Ysolde said it from the chamber door very softly, in the small steady voice of a young Lycan woman whose Lycan ears had picked up the small steady steps of a tall man at the far end of the long stone corridor of the king's wing perhaps thirty seconds before the steps would arrive at the door.Elowen's hands tightened in her lap.She was sitting in the high-backed chair by the tall window of the blue chambers in the dusk-blue velvet gown. The lamps had been lit. Ysolde had lit them one at a time around the chamber in the small soft careful way she did everything, and the small warm yellow light from the four bronze lamps fell on the deep blue and gold rug and on the painted vaulted ceiling and on the small white face of Elowen Vayne in the high-backed chair by the tall window with her thin hands folded in her own lap and the second heartbeat under her ribs hammering so hard now she could feel it in her own throat.She had practiced standing to greet hi

His hands were enormous. They were the hands of a warrior who had been holding a sword since he had been twelve years old, and the precise, long fingers and the meticulous, broad palms and the faded white scars across the back of the knuckles were the hands of a man who had used his hands for a great deal of delicate work in his forty-five years of life. The measured way the king of Velmoria folded his enormous hands on his own knees in the high-backed chair opposite hers, in the soft yellow lamp-light of the blue chambers, was the careful way a man folds his hands when he is trying very hard to take up as little space as possible in a room with a frightened woman.The chamber went perfectly quiet.The fire in the unseen hearth crackled. Outside the tall windows, somewhere in the soft, distant expanse, a lone bell rang the dusk hour in the lower city of the capital. The gentle yellow light from the four bronze lamps fell on the deep blue and gold rug, on the painted vaulted ceiling, an

She had been listening to his low voice, to the steady cadence of his plain words, for what felt like a long time. In her head, she had been carefully ticking off the pieces of the puzzle as he handed them to her—the wolf-debt, the binding, the western hedge-witches, the ancient working, the marriage cord, the four years, the breaking, the relief, the mending. She had counted them all the way through, and she knew he had not yet given her the one vital piece she had been waiting four days to hear.He had not told her about the second heartbeat under her ribs.The wolf-debt explained the bruises. It explained the dreams of dying men. It explained the deep, gnawing ache between her ribs and the terrible weakness in her legs. The wolf-debt explained almost everything about the slow, systematic killing of her body over the last four years.But the wolf-debt did not explain the second heartbeat.That second heartbeat had been with her since she was a young child. The flutter in her chest ha

He left. He left perhaps a quarter of an hour after he had failed to answer her question, and he left in the same careful low voice and the same careful slow steps he had used to come into the chamber. The careful failed answer had hung in the air of the blue chambers between them for a long quiet moment. The king of Velmoria had not tried to find another answer to put in its place. He had closed his mouth on the answer he did not have, and he had let the careful silence settle, and he had not looked away from her face. The careful silence had been the first careful honest thing the king of Velmoria had done with her since the morning at Ironbough. He had decided, in the careful private space of his own chest, that he was not going to give her any careful empty answer to a careful real question, and the careful decision had cost him something to make in front of her, and Elowen Vayne — who had been the wife of a man who had given her a thousand careful empty answers to a thousand