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Rejected By My Mate Claimed By The Lycan King Hot Trend Hot Trend
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00:00:00The rejection happened on a Thursday. Not that the day of the week mattered, in the grand scheme of ruined
00:00:07lives and shattered destinies.
00:00:09But there is something particularly insulting about having your soul cleaved in, too, on a Thursday.
00:00:16Mondays, people expected disaster. Thursdays were supposed to be unremarkable.
00:00:22Claudia had been standing in the great hall of Ironspire Keep when it happened.
00:00:27She remembered every detail with the kind of precision that pain carves into memory and refuses to let go.
00:00:35The way the torches made the gray stone walls amber.
00:00:38The way the hounds near the hearth lifted their heads when she walked in, as though they already knew.
00:00:45The way Alpha Darren Ashford stood with his back to her for a long moment before he turned around.
00:00:50And the way his jaw was set like a man who had already decided something, and was merely getting through
00:00:56the formality of saying it aloud.
00:00:59She had just turned 20.
00:01:01She had walked into that hall wearing her best riding cloak, because her mother had told her to look presentable
00:01:07when she met her mate for the first time.
00:01:09She had spent the morning trying to tame her dark hair and had failed, and had decided it did not
00:01:15matter because fate was fate and surely fate did not care about hair.
00:01:19She had been so young.
00:01:21I reject you, Darren said.
00:01:24Three words.
00:01:26The same number of words as I love you, as I need help, as pass the salt.
00:01:31Three small words that landed like a broadaxe.
00:01:35Claudia felt the bond.
00:01:37That luminous, terrifying thread that had ignited in her chest the moment she'd crossed the threshold,
00:01:44and her wolf had gone absolutely still with recognition.
00:01:48Snap.
00:01:49It did not snap cleanly.
00:01:51Nothing ever does.
00:01:53It was more like watching a bridge collapse from the inside.
00:01:57The structure held for one impossible moment, and then it came apart, piece by piece, from the center outward,
00:02:04and the sound it made inside her was not a sound at all, but an absence of one.
00:02:09She stood there for three full seconds, staring at Darren Ashford, this tall, dark-haired,
00:02:16gray-eyed man who was apparently her mate and was apparently appalled by this, and she waited to see if
00:02:22she was going to cry.
00:02:23She did not cry.
00:02:25What she felt instead was something colder and more durable than tears.
00:02:29The quiet click of a door closing inside her, the precise and deliberate moment when a person decides that this,
00:02:37whatever this is, is not going to be the thing that destroys them.
00:02:40Very well, she said, and she turned around, and she walked out.
00:02:46She did not look back.
00:02:48Neither of them knew, in that moment, that the woman walking out of that hall was the last surviving heir
00:02:55to the throne of Verith.
00:02:57That the blood running quiet in her veins was the oldest royal blood on the continent.
00:03:02That the kingdom she did not yet know was hers was already waiting for her, and had been for 20
00:03:08years, concealed behind a lie her mother had died to protect.
00:03:13Darren Ashford would spend the next eight months sleeping poorly and making his entire pack miserable.
00:03:19He would spend them pushing away the phantom ache behind his ribs that no healer could explain and no amount
00:03:26of work could dull.
00:03:27He would spend them telling himself, with diminishing conviction, that he had made the right choice.
00:03:34He had not, of course, made the right choice.
00:03:38But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
00:03:40This is the story of a rejection.
00:03:43And a crown.
00:03:44And two people who were catastrophically wrong about who they were and what they deserved, and had to lose nearly
00:03:51everything before they were willing to admit it.
00:03:54It is, despite its unpromising beginning, a love story.
00:03:58Just not a simple one.
00:04:01Chapter 1
00:04:01Iron Spire keeps sat in the northern reaches of the Ashford Pack Territory, like a declaration of intent.
00:04:09It was not a beautiful fortress.
00:04:12It had not been built to be beautiful.
00:04:14It had been built to be difficult to attack.
00:04:17And in this ambition, it had succeeded admirably for 400 years.
00:04:21Its walls were thick enough to lose a man inside, its towers were perpetually cold, and its great hall had
00:04:29an echo problem that meant private conversations were, in practice, not very private at all.
00:04:36Claudia had traveled three days to reach it.
00:04:39Her home pack, the Halvern Pack, a modest but respected group settled in the river valleys to the south, had
00:04:47arranged the meeting through the proper channels.
00:04:49A letter had come the previous month, sealed with the Ashford Wolf Crest, confirming that Alpha Darren would receive the
00:04:57Halvern Omega Claudia at Iron Spire on the 14th of the new moon.
00:05:02Her pack master had been pleased.
00:05:05Her mother, had she still been alive, would have been pleased.
00:05:09Claudia herself had been cautiously optimistic in the way that a person is cautiously optimistic about a thing they have
00:05:16spent their entire life being told to expect and have therefore worked up a complicated relationship with.
00:05:23The mate bond was supposed to be sacred, a gift from the moon goddess herself, a recognition between two wolves
00:05:30that was meant to transcend class and rank and circumstance.
00:05:34In practice, of course, it was somewhat more complicated than the old songs suggested.
00:05:40Claudia was an Omega.
00:05:42Darren Ashford was an Alpha.
00:05:45Not just any Alpha, but the ruling Alpha of one of the three most powerful packs in the Northern Territories,
00:05:52a man who commanded 300 wolves and answered to no one except the distant and largely ceremonial authority of the
00:06:00High Council.
00:06:01The gap between their stations was not a gap, so much as an abyss, and Claudia was not so naive
00:06:08as to have missed this.
00:06:09She had, however, allowed herself to hope.
00:06:13This was, in retrospect, the mistake.
00:06:16She had felt the bond the moment she walked through the Great Hall's doors.
00:06:20It had been unmistakable, like stepping from a dim corridor into direct sunlight, like the first breath after a long
00:06:28submersion,
00:06:29like every metaphor she had ever read in the old stories and dismissed as romantic exaggeration.
00:06:36Her wolf had simply gone.
00:06:39Oh, as though recognizing something it had been searching for without knowing it was searching.
00:06:45Darren Ashford had been standing with his back to her, speaking to his beta.
00:06:50He had gone very still.
00:06:52And then he had turned, and she had seen his face.
00:06:56He was not what she had expected.
00:06:58She was not sure what she had expected.
00:07:01Precisely.
00:07:02The romantic stories tended toward descriptors like magnificent and commanding that rendered the actual man somewhat abstract.
00:07:11What she saw was a person.
00:07:13A tired one.
00:07:15A person who had, apparently, just experienced the same seismic recognition she had,
00:07:21and whose immediate response to it was something that looked disturbingly like dismay.
00:07:26She had given him the time to compose himself.
00:07:29This had perhaps been her second mistake.
00:07:32His beta.
00:07:33A broad-shouldered man named Torben,
00:07:35who had the expression of someone watching a fire he had been quietly dreading materialize,
00:07:41withdrew from a hall with the practiced smoothness of a man who recognized a conversation he did not want to
00:07:48witness.
00:07:49And then it had been just the two of them, and the echo, and the hounds by the fire,
00:07:54and the moment that Claudia would spend the next eight months trying and failing to stop replaying.
00:07:59I know what you are, Darren had said, finally.
00:08:03His voice was low.
00:08:05Not unkind.
00:08:06Worse than unkind.
00:08:08Somehow, careful.
00:08:10The voice of a man who had thought about this and arrived at a conclusion he had decided to stand
00:08:16by.
00:08:16I know what this is.
00:08:18So do I, Claudia said.
00:08:21Then you understand why.
00:08:23I don't, she said.
00:08:25Not yet.
00:08:27He looked at her then.
00:08:28Really looked.
00:08:29And she saw something move through his gray eyes that she could not name.
00:08:34Something that was not cold.
00:08:36Not calculated.
00:08:38Not the simple disdain she had braced herself for.
00:08:41Something almost like pain.
00:08:43Which made no sense.
00:08:45Which she filed away in the part of her mind that handled things she did not yet have the context
00:08:50to interpret.
00:08:51I am an alpha, he said, as though she might have somehow missed this.
00:08:56My pack requires.
00:08:58I am aware of what your pack requires, Claudia said.
00:09:02She was surprised by the steadiness of her own voice.
00:09:06I am asking why it requires it of me.
00:09:09You're an omega.
00:09:10He said it plainly.
00:09:12Not cruelly, but plainly, as though the word contained within it all the explanation that was needed.
00:09:19And perhaps in the world as it was constituted at that particular moment, in the Northern Territories, in the Ashford
00:09:26Pack, in the political reality that Darren Ashford had inherited and never questioned.
00:09:31It did.
00:09:33It did.
00:09:33Claudia considered this.
00:09:34She considered his gray eyes and his careful face, and the pain she thought she had seen move through him.
00:09:42She considered the bond still humming in her chest like a plucked string, diminished now but not gone.
00:09:49It would not be gone until he said the words, until the formal rejection was spoken, and some part of
00:09:55her wolf was still, absurdly, waiting for him to decide otherwise.
00:10:00She gave him one more moment, he said the words, and she walked out.
00:10:06What Claudia did not do, in the days and weeks that followed, was fall apart.
00:10:11This was perhaps surprising, given the circumstances.
00:10:15The rejection of a mate bond was not a small injury.
00:10:19It was, by every account she had ever encountered, one of the most significant wounds a wolf could sustain.
00:10:26The old healers had written about it.
00:10:29The storytellers had composed entire tragedies about it.
00:10:33There were ceremonies to ease the separation, rituals to help the severed wolf grieve and recover.
00:10:40Claudia had none of those resources.
00:10:42What she had was a three-day journey home, a packmaster who watched her with carefully neutral eyes,
00:10:49and a small stone cottage on the edge of the Halvern village, where she lived alone.
00:10:55She arrived home on a Sunday.
00:10:57She unpacked her traveling bag.
00:10:59She put the kettle on.
00:11:01She sat down at her kitchen table, and she stayed there for a very long time,
00:11:06not moving, just breathing, just being in the space of what had happened.
00:11:10She did not cry.
00:11:12She had decided, somewhere on that second day of riding with her jaw set and her eyes on the road,
00:11:18that she was not going to give the rejection a single tear.
00:11:22This was not stoicism, exactly.
00:11:25It was closer to a decision about who she intended to be.
00:11:29After an hour at the kitchen table, she picked up the kettle and made tea.
00:11:34After three days, she went back to work.
00:11:37After a month, she was almost used to the hollow space where the bond had been.
00:11:42Almost.
00:11:42The thing about wounds, the kind that go deep enough to reach bone,
00:11:47is that they do not heal at the rate you want them to.
00:11:50They heal at the rate they want to.
00:11:52And the severed mate bond did not heal so much as calcify,
00:11:56became part of her, became scar tissue,
00:11:59became the particular kind of ache that one stops noticing in good hours and notices acutely in bad ones.
00:12:05She was, on balance, managing.
00:12:08This was the state of things when the first soldiers arrived.
00:12:11Chapter 2
00:12:12They came on horseback, twelve of them,
00:12:16wearing armor that did not belong to any pack Claudia had ever encountered.
00:12:20It was old armor, not old and worn, but old and deliberate,
00:12:25the kind of craftsmanship that had been preserved across generations because it was too significant to replace.
00:12:31The crest on their breastplates was a crowned wolf mid-howl, rendered in silver on deep blue.
00:12:38Claudia was in her herb garden when they arrived.
00:12:41She straightened from her work, soil on her hands, a cutting knife in her grip,
00:12:47and looked at twelve armored soldiers in the road outside her cottage,
00:12:51and experienced the specific and bracing feeling of a person whose quiet life has just been interrupted by something large.
00:12:59Claudia of the Halvern Pack, said the woman at the head of the column.
00:13:04She was silver-haired and severe, her back straight as a blade,
00:13:09her dark eyes scanning Claudia with the efficiency of someone conducting a rapid and professional assessment.
00:13:16Born on the night of the winter solstice, twenty years passed,
00:13:20daughter of Adeline and, until now, unnamed father.
00:13:24That's a fairly intimate way to introduce yourself to someone you haven't met, Claudia said.
00:13:30She did not put the knife down.
00:13:32Not out of aggression, precisely.
00:13:35More because it seemed sensible to hold onto something solid.
00:13:39The silver-haired woman almost smiled.
00:13:42My name is Commander Saya of the Verith Royal Guard.
00:13:45I've been looking for you for eight years.
00:13:48I've been in this garden for most of them, Claudia said.
00:13:51You weren't looking very hard.
00:13:54This time the woman did smile.
00:13:56It was a brief smile.
00:13:58Careful, but genuine.
00:14:00Your mother hid you well.
00:14:02She was an exceptional woman.
00:14:05The mention of her mother landed differently than Claudia expected.
00:14:10Not with pain, exactly.
00:14:12That pain was old and worn smooth by now.
00:14:15But with a sudden sharp attention,
00:14:16the feeling of a puzzle piece being offered that she did not yet know was part of a puzzle.
00:14:22What do you want?
00:14:23Claudia asked.
00:14:25The truth is somewhat involved, Commander Saya said.
00:14:29May I come inside?
00:14:30The story that Saya told,
00:14:32sitting across from Claudia at the kitchen table with a cup of tea going cold in her hands,
00:14:38was this.
00:14:39Twenty-one years ago,
00:14:40the kingdom of Verith,
00:14:42the oldest sovereign wolf kingdom on the continent,
00:14:45ruling the lands east of the mountain range that the northern packs called the Grey Walls,
00:14:50had been torn apart by a succession crisis.
00:14:53The king,
00:14:55Aldred Verith III,
00:14:57had died without a declared heir.
00:14:59His queen had died in the same sickness.
00:15:02What he had left behind was a brother,
00:15:05Merrick,
00:15:05with ambitions and a following,
00:15:07and a daughter,
00:15:08a daughter whose existence only a handful of people knew about,
00:15:12because she had been born to a woman who was not the queen,
00:15:16and because the king,
00:15:17aware of his brother's ruthlessness and aware of his own failing health,
00:15:22had made certain choices.
00:15:24He had sent the child away.
00:15:26He had sent her west,
00:15:28with her mother,
00:15:29with a new name and a sealed letter,
00:15:31and the knowledge that if she were ever found by the wrong people,
00:15:35she would not survive the finding.
00:15:38Adeline,
00:15:38Claudia's mother,
00:15:40had settled among the Halvern Pack.
00:15:42She had built a quiet life.
00:15:44She had raised her daughter as an Omega,
00:15:47as a member of the pack,
00:15:48as a person who belonged to the valley and the river and the herb garden,
00:15:53and not to thrones or succession crises,
00:15:56or the complicated machinery of kingdoms.
00:15:59And then,
00:16:00eight years ago,
00:16:01Adeline had died.
00:16:03A fever,
00:16:04swift and pitiless,
00:16:06the kind that takes people before anyone has properly said goodbye.
00:16:10She had left,
00:16:11on the kitchen table,
00:16:13a sealed letter.
00:16:14Claudia had read that letter.
00:16:16She had read it twice,
00:16:17and then she had folded it up and put it in the bottom of the cedar chest,
00:16:22where she kept her mother's things,
00:16:23and she had told herself,
00:16:25with the same quiet deliberateness she brought to most decisions,
00:16:29that she needed time to understand what it meant before she decided what to do with it.
00:16:35Eight years had passed.
00:16:36She had been,
00:16:37She now admitted,
00:16:39somewhat avoidant about this.
00:16:42You read the letter,
00:16:43Saya said.
00:16:44It was not quite a question.
00:16:46Yes,
00:16:46Claudia said.
00:16:47And you said nothing.
00:16:49I said nothing.
00:16:51For eight years.
00:16:53I was,
00:16:54Claudia said,
00:16:55processing.
00:16:56Saya looked at her for a long moment.
00:16:59There was something in the look that was not quite exasperation,
00:17:02and not quite admiration,
00:17:04and was perhaps a mixture of the two that had not previously had a name.
00:17:09Your uncle has been on the Verith throne for twenty years,
00:17:12she said finally.
00:17:14He has not been a good king.
00:17:16I gathered as much,
00:17:17Claudia said.
00:17:18People who kill their brother's heirs in order to take thrones generally aren't.
00:17:23He does not know you're alive.
00:17:25Or rather,
00:17:27he is suspected,
00:17:28but he has not been able to find you.
00:17:32Saya paused.
00:17:33He found your mother's old contact.
00:17:35Three months ago.
00:17:36We learned of it.
00:17:38We came first.
00:17:40Claudia looked at her hands.
00:17:41At the soil still caught under her fingernails from the herb garden.
00:17:46At the cutting knife on the table beside her teacup.
00:17:49She thought about Darren Ashford saying she was an omega,
00:17:53as though it explained everything.
00:17:55She thought about the severed bond in her chest,
00:17:58its familiar ache,
00:18:00its quiet scar.
00:18:01She thought about her mother,
00:18:03who had chosen a quiet valley and a small cottage and a false name and a lifetime of silence to
00:18:10keep her daughter safe,
00:18:11and who had never told her daughter any of this while she was alive,
00:18:15because some truths are too heavy to give to a child.
00:18:19If I come with you,
00:18:20Claudia said slowly,
00:18:22what happens?
00:18:24You take your throne,
00:18:25Saya said.
00:18:26You return to Vereth.
00:18:28Your uncle's claim becomes illegal the moment you are recognized.
00:18:32You are the true heir.
00:18:35And if I don't,
00:18:37Saya's expression did not change.
00:18:40Your uncle's people will find you,
00:18:42and they will not be here to offer you tea.
00:18:44Claudia nodded once.
00:18:47She stood up from the table.
00:18:49She went to the cedar chest.
00:18:51She retrieved the letter.
00:18:53She read it one more time.
00:18:55Her father's handwriting,
00:18:57which she had never seen before in anything else,
00:19:00careful and precise,
00:19:02and carrying in every stroke the weight of a man trying to say enough in a very limited amount of
00:19:08words.
00:19:08She had been eight years old when she first read it.
00:19:12She was 20 now.
00:19:14The words were the same.
00:19:16She was not.
00:19:17Give me an hour to pack,
00:19:19she said.
00:19:20Before we continue,
00:19:21I'd like you to let me know in the comment section where you are currently watching this story from.
00:19:25Also,
00:19:25do not forget to like and hit the subscribe button for more interesting werewolf romance stories.
00:19:30Chapter 3
00:19:31Backslash We Should Check In Briefly on Darren Ashford
00:19:35This is perhaps uncomfortable given what we know about him.
00:19:39He is not,
00:19:40at this point in the story,
00:19:42a sympathetic figure.
00:19:43He made a choice,
00:19:45a cold,
00:19:46calculated,
00:19:47status-driven choice,
00:19:48and a woman walked out of his great hall carrying his decision in her chest like a wound,
00:19:53and he watched her go,
00:19:55and he told himself it was the right thing.
00:19:57We want to be very clear,
00:19:59it was not the right thing.
00:20:00Darren,
00:20:01to his credit,
00:20:02was also starting to suspect this.
00:20:04The month after the rejection,
00:20:06he had been fine,
00:20:07functional.
00:20:08He had told himself the hollow ache behind his ribs was simply the adjustment period,
00:20:13the natural consequence of a mate bond initiated and severed,
00:20:17an inconvenience that would pass.
00:20:19He had thrown himself into pack business,
00:20:22there was always pack business,
00:20:23and he had eaten regular meals and held council
00:20:26and done all the things a functioning alpha was supposed to do.
00:20:29The second month,
00:20:31he had been slightly less fine.
00:20:32The hollow ache had not passed.
00:20:35It had,
00:20:36if anything,
00:20:36deepened,
00:20:37not dramatically.
00:20:38He was not the sort of man given to dramatic displays,
00:20:41but quietly and persistently,
00:20:44the way water works on stone.
00:20:46He had started to notice small things.
00:20:48He noticed the absence of a presence he had never actually experienced,
00:20:52which made no logical sense.
00:20:54He noticed that he was irritable in a directionless way,
00:20:58irritable at weather and food and the perfectly reasonable administrative requests of his council members.
00:21:04He noticed,
00:21:05most inconveniently,
00:21:06that he had developed a habit of stopping in the middle of tasks
00:21:09and staring at nothing for intervals that his Beta Torben tracked with increasing concern.
00:21:14Torben,
00:21:15who had been Darren's Beta for six years and his closest friend for 12,
00:21:19had not said anything immediately.
00:21:21He was a patient man and a careful one,
00:21:23and he understood that Darren needed to arrive at certain conclusions under his own power,
00:21:28because Darren arriving at conclusions under pressure from other people was,
00:21:32historically,
00:21:33counterproductive.
00:21:34He had waited.
00:21:35For months in,
00:21:37Torben finally said something.
00:21:38They were in the training yard,
00:21:41running drills with the younger wolves in the pack's warrior cohort,
00:21:44and Darren had stopped mid-correction and stood with his hands loose at his sides,
00:21:48and the expression of a man attempting to locate a thought that keeps moving just out of reach.
00:21:54Is it getting worse?
00:21:55Torben asked.
00:21:57Darren turned to look at him.
00:21:58I don't know what you mean.
00:22:00Yes,
00:22:00you do.
00:22:01Darren considered this.
00:22:03The training yard was cold.
00:22:05It was always cold at Iron Spire.
00:22:07The wind off the mountains did not permit otherwise,
00:22:10and the young wolves had gone still,
00:22:12watching their alpha with the alert wariness of people who sensed something significant was
00:22:17happening.
00:22:17Fall out,
00:22:19Darren said to them.
00:22:20Then,
00:22:21to Torben,
00:22:21walk with me.
00:22:22They walked to the parapet that faced south.
00:22:25It was a clear day,
00:22:27the mountains stark against a white sky,
00:22:30the valley below spread out in its winter emptiness.
00:22:33Darren stood with his hands on the cold stone,
00:22:35and looked at the southern road.
00:22:38Tell me,
00:22:39Torben said.
00:22:40Darren was silent for a moment.
00:22:41I made the right decision,
00:22:43he said.
00:22:44It came out with slightly less conviction than he had intended.
00:22:47Did you?
00:22:48She was an omega.
00:22:50My pack requires.
00:22:52I know what you told her,
00:22:54Torben said.
00:22:54I know what you told yourself.
00:22:56I'm asking what you think now,
00:22:58for months later,
00:22:59after sleeping badly and being unpleasant to our council,
00:23:02and staring at the south road like it owes you something.
00:23:06Darren's jaw tightened.
00:23:08I think,
00:23:09he said,
00:23:09after a long pause,
00:23:11that I may have been operating on assumptions I did not examine.
00:23:14Torben breathed out through his nose.
00:23:16This was,
00:23:18from Torben,
00:23:19the equivalent of a dramatic exclamation.
00:23:22For months,
00:23:22he said.
00:23:23Four months to get there.
00:23:25I am thorough.
00:23:26You are stubborn.
00:23:28Same thing.
00:23:29Torben leaned his forearms on the parapet.
00:23:32What are you going to do about it?
00:23:34I don't know yet,
00:23:35Darren said.
00:23:36He looked down at the south road.
00:23:38She's a long way away.
00:23:40She is,
00:23:41Torben agreed.
00:23:42And every day she gets further.
00:23:44He didn't know then how profoundly accurate that was.
00:23:47While Darren was standing on his parapet reconsidering his choices,
00:23:51Claudia was three days east of the gray walls and getting further by the hour.
00:23:56The road to Vereth was nothing like the valley she had grown up in.
00:24:00It was wilder.
00:24:01The landscape shifting from the gentle river country of the Halvern lands through dense pine
00:24:06forest and then into the long, elevated plains that the Vereth people called the Windfields.
00:24:12The sky was enormous here.
00:24:14The grass bent in permanent waves from a westerly wind that never seemed to entirely stop.
00:24:20The mountains were behind her now, and the world felt wider than she was accustomed to,
00:24:25which was both exhilarating and faintly terrifying.
00:24:29Commander Saya rode beside her and answered questions with the patience of someone who had
00:24:33been waiting a long time to have this conversation.
00:24:36How many people know I'm alive?
00:24:38Claudia asked on the second day, out of the Halvern territory.
00:24:43Within the guard, twelve.
00:24:45Within the kingdom, fewer than five.
00:24:48Saya paused.
00:24:50Your uncle does not know, or he would have moved more aggressively before now.
00:24:55What does he know?
00:24:57That your mother fled.
00:24:59That she went west.
00:25:00That she was never found.
00:25:03A brief pause.
00:25:04He knows that the king had a child.
00:25:07He has never been entirely certain whether that child survived.
00:25:11Twenty years is a long time to sit on an uncertain throne.
00:25:16It is, Saya agreed.
00:25:17It has not made him a more pleasant man.
00:25:20Claudia thought about this.
00:25:22She thought about the strangeness of having a family she had never known.
00:25:27A father's handwriting on a letter.
00:25:29An uncle's throne built on a lie.
00:25:32A kingdom that had been waiting, in some abstract sense, for her whole life.
00:25:37She thought about how different the shapes of things looked when you finally understood
00:25:42what you were looking at.
00:25:43Tell me about Verith, she said.
00:25:45Saya told her.
00:25:47The kingdom was old.
00:25:48Older than the Pax system in the Western territories.
00:25:52Older than most of the political structures that currently carved up the continent.
00:25:56It had been built on the principle that wolves could govern as wolves.
00:26:00That the instinct for hierarchy and loyalty that ran through their nature could be channeled
00:26:06into something more durable than conquest.
00:26:08The early Verith kings had been unusual rulers.
00:26:12Not only powerful in the physical sense, but scholars, diplomats, people who had understood
00:26:18that authority was most stable when it was also legitimate.
00:26:22Merrick, her uncle, had none of those qualities.
00:26:25He had the authority.
00:26:27He had spent twenty years assembling the legitimacy through a combination of force and propaganda,
00:26:33and the simple arithmetic of being the only person standing.
00:26:37He was not, Saya said, entirely without political skill.
00:26:42He had kept the kingdom from fracturing.
00:26:45He had maintained the borders and the trade routes and the basic machinery of governance.
00:26:50He had also taxed his people into exhaustion, suppressed three attempted uprisings, and quietly
00:26:57eliminated anyone whose bloodline made them inconvenient.
00:27:00He's been trying to have me killed, Claudia said.
00:27:03It was not quite a question.
00:27:06Twice, Saya said.
00:27:07We intercepted the second attempt six weeks ago.
00:27:10That was what precipitated our decision to find you.
00:27:14A fission of him, Claudia said.
00:27:16He's a thorough man.
00:27:18Apparently it runs in families, Claudia said, and was surprised to hear something almost like
00:27:24dark humor in her own voice.
00:27:26Grief, she had learned, had a way of arriving in unexpected forms.
00:27:32Sometimes it arrived as laughter, sharp and brief, because the alternative was worse.
00:27:39They arrived in Bereth on the eighth day.
00:27:42The capital city was called Halvard.
00:27:44Not to be confused with her former pack, the names were coincidental, and she had always
00:27:50found it faintly strange, and it sat at the junction of three rivers, protected on the
00:27:55north by the gray walls and on the east by a natural bluff that had been fortified into
00:28:00the city's outer wall centuries ago.
00:28:02It was, by any reasonable measure, an impressive city.
00:28:07It was large and old and layered with history in the way that very old cities are.
00:28:12Each era of building pressed against the next, the ancient stone of the original walls supporting
00:28:19the newer towers, the original market square surrounded by a century of accumulated growth.
00:28:25It smelled of river water and baking bread, and the particular combination of wood smoke
00:28:30and cold air that Claudia, for reasons she could not entirely explain, found herself responding
00:28:37to as though to something familiar, as though something in her blood recognized it.
00:28:43She had thought she was prepared for this.
00:28:45She found, riding through the outer gates, that she was not.
00:28:50Chapter 4
00:28:51The plan, as Saya laid it out in the safe house three streets from the palace, was this.
00:28:59Claudia would not announce herself publicly.
00:29:01Not yet.
00:29:03Not until they had secured allies within the court, people who remembered the
00:29:07old king, people who had spent 20 years in quiet opposition to Marek's reign, people who
00:29:13would recognize the royal bloodline and act on it.
00:29:16There were more of these people than Marek suspected, because Marek was the kind of man
00:29:21who believed that power crushed all opposition, and had therefore missed the category of people
00:29:26who had learned, very carefully, how to be opposed to him without being visible about it.
00:29:31These allies would need to see her first.
00:29:34They would need to be certain.
00:29:36Certain of what?
00:29:38Claudia asked.
00:29:39That you are who you are, Saya said.
00:29:42And that you are someone who can actually lead.
00:29:45That's two separate criteria.
00:29:48Yes.
00:29:49The bloodline is the first.
00:29:51You are your father's daughter.
00:29:53Anyone who knew him will see it.
00:29:54The second is more complicated.
00:29:57Saya looked at her with those steady dark eyes.
00:30:00You've spent your life as an omega in a pack society.
00:30:04You've had no formal training, no experience with court politics, no practice with a specific
00:30:10kind of authority required of a ruling monarch.
00:30:13You are also, from what I have observed in ten days, someone who walked out of a mate rejection without
00:30:21falling apart, and spent eight years holding onto a secret that most people would have been broken by, and who
00:30:27made a life's decision in under an hour, and has not wavered from it since.
00:30:32Claudia considered this summary.
00:30:34You're saying there's potential, she said.
00:30:37I'm saying, Saya replied, that the qualities that make a good ruler are not always the ones
00:30:43that formal training produces.
00:30:45Sometimes they're the ones that survive in the absence of it.
00:30:49The first meeting was three days later.
00:30:52It was held in a private library on the palace's eastern wing, a room that technically belonged
00:30:58to the head archivist, an elderly man named Prosper who had served three kings and survived
00:31:04all of them through the simple expedient of making himself so quietly indispensable that
00:31:10even Merrick could not justify removing him.
00:31:14Prosper had been one of the king's most trusted advisors.
00:31:17Twenty-one years ago, he had been the one who sealed the letter.
00:31:21He had been one of the five people who knew.
00:31:24He was 83 years old, and he moved with the careful economy of a man who has learned to spend
00:31:31his energy deliberately.
00:31:32When Saya brought Claudia into the library and closed the door, he looked at her for a very
00:31:38long time without speaking.
00:31:40Well, he said, finally.
00:31:43His voice was dry and precise.
00:31:45The voice of someone who had spent a lifetime choosing words carefully.
00:31:50You have his eyes.
00:31:52I've been told, Claudia said, though I never had anything to compare them to.
00:31:58Gray, Prosper said.
00:32:00Gray with that particular quality.
00:32:02As though they are lit from behind.
00:32:04Aldred had that.
00:32:06A pause.
00:32:07Your mother's nose, though.
00:32:09Which is perhaps fortunate for you.
00:32:11Was my father's nose problematic?
00:32:13It was, Prosper said gravely, somewhat assertive.
00:32:18Claudia laughed.
00:32:20It was not a polite, controlled laugh, but a genuine one.
00:32:24Slightly startled out of her, and she saw something shift in Prosper's careful expression at the
00:32:30sound of it.
00:32:31He used to laugh like that, the old man said.
00:32:34His voice was quieter now.
00:32:36Your father.
00:32:38Exactly like that.
00:32:39And that, Claudia found, was the moment Verith became real to her.
00:32:45Not the journey.
00:32:47Not the gates.
00:32:48Not the sight of the palace.
00:32:50This.
00:32:51This old man recognizing something in her laugh that she could not even see herself.
00:32:56This connection to a father she had never known.
00:32:59This proof that she was not invented but descended.
00:33:03Not constructed but continuous.
00:33:05She pressed her lips together.
00:33:08She breathed through her nose.
00:33:10She did not cry because she had decided about crying, but it was a closer thing than most
00:33:15moments had been.
00:33:17Over the following two weeks, Sayah brought her to seven more of these meetings.
00:33:21Each one was careful, private, conducted with a particular delicacy of people who understood
00:33:28that what they were doing was quietly treasonous to the currently installed king, and who had
00:33:33decided to do it anyway.
00:33:35There was a woman named Sarah, a former lady of the court who had been exiled to her family
00:33:40estate after her late husband had been too openly critical of Merrick, and who received
00:33:46Claudia in a drawing room crowded with dogs and warm fires, and spoke with the direct,
00:33:52undecorated frankness of a woman who had lost enough to have no patience for pretense.
00:33:57You'll have to be harder than you look, Sarah told her, after about 20 minutes of conversation.
00:34:03How hard do I look?
00:34:04Claudia asked.
00:34:06Sarah's mouth curved.
00:34:08Not very.
00:34:09Which is the point?
00:34:10Your uncle will underestimate you.
00:34:13Most of them will, at first.
00:34:15The question is whether you can use that before they stop doing it.
00:34:19How long do I have?
00:34:21Until you do something that frightens them, Sarah said.
00:34:24Which, if you're the right person for this, won't take long.
00:34:28There was Lord Fenn, young, anxious, the son of one of the old king's most loyal generals,
00:34:36who spent their entire meeting alternating between barely concealed excitement and barely concealed
00:34:42terror, and managed to be, despite this, genuinely useful because he was the one who had maintained
00:34:49contact with the northern border garrison, a significant military asset that Merrick believed
00:34:54was securely his own.
00:34:56And there was, on the 14th day, the complication.
00:35:00The complication arrived in the form of a messenger from the Western territories,
00:35:05breathless from hard writing, carrying a letter sealed with the Ashford wolf crest.
00:35:11Claudia stared at the crest for a long moment.
00:35:14That is, she said carefully to Saya, not something I was expecting.
00:35:20No, Saya agreed.
00:35:22She had the expression of someone who is rapidly revising a plan.
00:35:26Neither was I.
00:35:28The letter was from Torben, not from Darren himself, which told Claudia something,
00:35:33and it was short and direct and made her feel several things simultaneously, none of which
00:35:40she particularly wanted to examine at that moment.
00:35:43Torben wrote that he had heard rumors, the kind of rumors that spread fast in the political
00:35:48circles connecting the Western Pact territories to the Eastern Kingdoms, about a woman of unknown
00:35:55lineage arriving in Verrath under the protection of the Royal Guard.
00:35:59He wrote that Darren had been in no fit state to write this letter himself, which Torben clearly
00:36:05felt needed to be stated.
00:36:07He wrote, with a frankness that she recognized as Torben's particular gift, that the Ashford
00:36:13Pack was willing to offer its support and alliance to the Verrath claim if, and he had
00:36:19underlined this with some force, if the claimant was willing to receive it.
00:36:23He had signed it.
00:36:24With respect, and on behalf of an alpha who is extremely sorry and does not yet know how
00:36:31to say so.
00:36:32Claudia folded the letter.
00:36:34She set it on the table.
00:36:36She looked at it.
00:36:38Well, she said.
00:36:39Your call, Sia said.
00:36:41Generous of you.
00:36:43I try.
00:36:44Claudia picked up the letter again.
00:36:46She read it twice more.
00:36:48She thought about Darren Ashford's gray eyes and his careful face, and the pain she had thought
00:36:54she saw in them, and the bond that was a scar now but had once been a song, and the
00:36:59choice
00:36:59he had made, and the choice she had made afterward.
00:37:02She thought about kingdoms and thrones, and the things that were already set in motion.
00:37:07Right back.
00:37:08She said, finally.
00:37:10Tell them that the Verrath claimant does not currently have the time or the inclination
00:37:15to manage someone else's emotional reckoning in the middle of a succession crisis.
00:37:20If the Ashford pack wishes to offer political alliance, they may submit their terms formally
00:37:26through Commander Sia.
00:37:28She paused.
00:37:30Tell Torben thank you for the candor.
00:37:32Sia almost smiled.
00:37:34And Darren?
00:37:36He knows where I am, Claudia said.
00:37:39He can make his own way here.
00:37:41Chapter 5
00:37:42What Darren actually did was arrive in Halvard 14 days later, having ridden at a pace that
00:37:48deeply concerned his horse and alarmed his entire escort, with no formal advance notice
00:37:55and no prepared speech, and exactly one clear objective—to see her.
00:38:00This was not, his beta had pointed out before he left, the most politically sophisticated approach.
00:38:07Noted, Darren had said, and left anyway.
00:38:10He had spent the four months since the rejection constructing an increasingly complicated and
00:38:16increasingly unconvincing set of reasons why he had been correct.
00:38:20He had built this structure carefully.
00:38:23He had reinforced it regularly.
00:38:25He had stood inside it, and looked out at the south road, and told himself it was solid.
00:38:31The letter from Verrath had taken the structure apart in about eleven minutes.
00:38:35It was not the content, precisely.
00:38:39It was not the discovery that Claudia was the heir to a kingdom, though that had certainly
00:38:44landed with some force.
00:38:46It was the way Torben had described finding out.
00:38:49The image of sitting in the map room at Ironspire going over trade route reports and hearing
00:38:54through three degrees of rumor that the Omega Darren had rejected eight months ago was apparently
00:38:59a royal heir in exile, and the particular sensation Torben described of watching his alpha absorb
00:39:05this information, which he likened, memorably, to watching a man realize he had been sitting
00:39:11on the edge of a cliff and had only just looked down.
00:39:14I made an error in judgment, Darren said, on the evening before he rode out.
00:39:20He and Torben were in the great hall, which was empty except for the two of them and the
00:39:26hounds by the fire.
00:39:27Yes, Torben said.
00:39:29I want to correct it.
00:39:30I know.
00:39:32I'm not going because she's a queen, Darren said, and his voice had an edge to it.
00:39:37Not anger, but something more uncomfortable.
00:39:41Conviction, perhaps.
00:39:43The kind that costs something.
00:39:45I want to be very clear about that.
00:39:47The bond, the rejection, that was wrong of me regardless of who she is.
00:39:52Her being a queen makes it worse, but it doesn't change the fundamental thing.
00:39:59Torben looked at him.
00:40:00I know, he said again more quietly.
00:40:03I didn't examine my assumptions, Darren said.
00:40:06I had ideas about what my pack required, about what an alpha's mate should be, about what strength
00:40:12looked like, and I didn't examine any of them.
00:40:15I just acted on them.
00:40:17He stopped.
00:40:18She stood in front of me, and she was, she was extraordinary, Torben.
00:40:24She was extraordinary, and I rejected her in about 45 seconds because she didn't fit
00:40:30a framework I'd never even questioned.
00:40:33Yes, Torben said.
00:40:35That's it?
00:40:36Just yes.
00:40:37What else do you want me to say?
00:40:39You've spent eight months getting here.
00:40:41I'm not going to argue with you now that you've arrived.
00:40:45Darren looked into the fire.
00:40:46The hounds, sensing something, shifted and resettled.
00:40:51The echo moved through the great hall.
00:40:54She's not going to make this easy, he said.
00:40:58Absolutely not, Torben agreed, with what seemed to Darren like slightly too much relish.
00:41:04She's going to make it very difficult, and frankly she should, and you're going to have
00:41:09to earn it.
00:41:10I know, Darren said.
00:41:12He rode out the next morning before the sun was up.
00:41:15The road to Vereth took most people eight to ten days at a comfortable pace.
00:41:20Darren covered it in six, which his escort would later refer to, in subdued voices, as
00:41:26the ride.
00:41:27He was not reckless with his horses.
00:41:30He was too experienced a horseman for that, but he was relentless in the way that a person
00:41:35is relentless when they are outrunning something, which in this case was the fear that if he arrived
00:41:40late something would already be decided, and he would find himself standing outside a door
00:41:45that had been closed.
00:41:47He arrived in Halvard on a gray afternoon, unannounced.
00:41:51Commander Saya met him at the safe house.
00:41:54She was not, he noted, surprised to see him, which suggested that she had expected this,
00:42:00or had been warned, or both.
00:42:02She looked at him with the expression of a soldier conducting an assessment.
00:42:08You came, she said.
00:42:09I came, he agreed.
00:42:11She said you could find your own way here.
00:42:14I found my own way here.
00:42:16A brief pause.
00:42:18Saya appeared to be making a decision.
00:42:20She is in a council meeting, she said.
00:42:23You'll wait.
00:42:24Darren waited.
00:42:25He was not generally good at waiting.
00:42:27He was, by nature and by the habits of authority, accustomed to things happening when he decided
00:42:33they should happen.
00:42:35Waiting in a safe house in an unfamiliar city while the woman he had wronged conducted kingdom
00:42:40business three streets away was not a comfortable experience.
00:42:44He sat with it.
00:42:46He thought it was probably appropriate that it wasn't comfortable.
00:42:50The meeting lasted two hours.
00:42:52Claudia arrived in the safe house with the kind of energy that filled a room without effort.
00:42:57Not loudness.
00:42:58Not performance.
00:43:00But presence.
00:43:00The particular quality of a person who has spent a great deal of time recently having
00:43:05to be entirely present and has gotten very good at it.
00:43:08She stopped in the doorway when she saw him.
00:43:11Her expression did not change.
00:43:13Her dark eyes moved over him with the same measured quality he remembered.
00:43:18The same assessment that he had found eight months ago.
00:43:23Disconcerting and now recognized as one of the most honest things
00:43:26anyone had ever directed at him.
00:43:29She looked well.
00:43:30She looked, in fact, remarkable.
00:43:34There is something in her bearing that had not been there in his great hall,
00:43:37or perhaps had been there and he had not paid enough attention to see it.
00:43:42A quality of arrival, he thought.
00:43:45The look of a person who had found their footing.
00:43:48Darren Ashford, she said.
00:43:50Claudia, he said.
00:43:51That's an interesting response.
00:43:53I expected you to use a title.
00:43:56I don't know what title to use, he said.
00:43:58I'm not sure what to call you yet.
00:44:00She looked at him for a moment.
00:44:02You can call me Claudia, she said.
00:44:05For now.
00:44:06A pause that contained a great deal.
00:44:09Sit down.
00:44:10He sat down.
00:44:11She sat across from him, with a distance between them that was not accidental,
00:44:17and she folded her hands on the table and looked at him with those gray eyes,
00:44:21her father's eyes, though she did not know yet that he knew this.
00:44:25And she said, simply,
00:44:28Why are you here?
00:44:29And Darren, who had been composing some version of this answer for six hard days of writing
00:44:34and eight longer months of arriving at it, said,
00:44:38Because I was wrong.
00:44:40Not wrong, because of who you turned out to be.
00:44:43Wrong about who you were when you were standing in front of me,
00:44:46and I wasn't paying enough attention to see it.
00:44:49Silence.
00:44:50That's a better answer than I expected, Claudia said.
00:44:54I had time to work on it.
00:44:56Eight months is a long time.
00:44:58It is, he agreed.
00:45:00I use some of it badly, and some of it reasonably productively.
00:45:04Her mouth moved.
00:45:06Not quite a smile, but the shape of one.
00:45:09The shape of one that was deciding whether or not to arrive.
00:45:13I'm in the middle of a succession crisis, she said.
00:45:17I have a throne to reclaim, an uncle who's tried to have me killed twice,
00:45:21and a political coalition that is currently held together by goodwill
00:45:25and the particular tension of people who have been waiting a long time for something to be different.
00:45:31She looked at him steadily.
00:45:33I don't have time to also manage the fallout of a rejected mate bond.
00:45:38I know, he said.
00:45:40I'm telling you this, she continued, because I want to be honest with you about the situation,
00:45:46not because I'm asking you to leave.
00:45:49A beat.
00:45:50You're not asking me to leave, he said.
00:45:53Not yet.
00:45:54She sat back.
00:45:56The Ashford Pact's political weight in the Northern Territories is significant.
00:46:01An alliance with you would strengthen my coalition considerably.
00:46:05A pause.
00:46:06That is a pragmatic reason to let you stay.
00:46:09I'm telling you it's pragmatic, so you understand I haven't made a decision about the other thing.
00:46:15The other thing, he said.
00:46:17Yes.
00:46:19That's very diplomatic language.
00:46:21I'm learning to be diplomatic, she said, with the precision of someone who finds the project interesting
00:46:27but is not going to pretend it's natural.
00:46:30It is, frankly, exhausting.
00:46:32This time the thing he had been suppressing for six days of writing and eight months before that did reach
00:46:38his face.
00:46:39He did not try to stop it.
00:46:41It was a small thing, genuine and involuntary, and he thought, watching her, that she noticed it.
00:46:48I would like, he said carefully, to be useful to you, to the extent that I can be, without the
00:46:55expectation of anything in return.
00:46:58She looked at him for a long time.
00:47:00Can you fight, she said.
00:47:02Yes.
00:47:03Can you be honest when the situation requires something you don't want to give?
00:47:08A pause.
00:47:09I am learning to be.
00:47:11That's an honest answer about honesty, she said.
00:47:14I'll give you points for that.
00:47:16She stood up.
00:47:18She extended her hand across the table.
00:47:20Not the gesture of a mate.
00:47:22Not the gesture of a woman willing to return to a bond.
00:47:26But the gesture of someone offering something more provisional and more real.
00:47:31You can stay, she said.
00:47:33You can serve the claim.
00:47:34We will see what else follows.
00:47:37He took her hand.
00:47:38It was the first time he had touched her.
00:47:41He realized, in the great hall, there had been no touch, only words.
00:47:46Her hand was warm and the scar of the broken bond ached in his chest with an intensity he had
00:47:53not felt since the day after the rejection, because that was the thing about proximity.
00:47:58It reminded the wound of what it was reaching for.
00:48:01He did not let the ache show on his face.
00:48:04He thought that was probably the least he owed her.
00:48:07Thank you, he said.
00:48:09Don't thank me yet, Claudia said.
00:48:11Wait until you've met my uncle.
00:48:13Chapter 6.
00:48:15Merrick Verrath was 54 years old and looked.
00:48:19Darren thought upon eventually seeing him at distance, like a man who had spent 20 years being afraid and had
00:48:26spent all that time converting the fear into aggression.
00:48:29He was not physically impressive, shorter than his reputation, thinner than his portraits, with quick eyes that moved constantly over
00:48:38a room in the restless way of someone who has learned to be perpetually watchful.
00:48:43He wore his authority like a garment he was not entirely certain fit, and the overcompensation made him dangerous in
00:48:51a particular way, the kind of danger that comes not from strength, but from the willingness to do extreme things
00:48:58to avoid appearing weak.
00:49:00Claudia had assessed him.
00:49:02Darren knew.
00:49:03With the same efficiency, she brought to everything.
00:49:07He's frightened, she told the council.
00:49:09On the fourth day after Darren's arrival, in the library where Prosper served as chair and the maps of the
00:49:16palace and city had been spread across the long table.
00:49:20He has been frightened for 20 years.
00:49:23Frightened men make predictable choices.
00:49:26She paused.
00:49:28The question is not whether he'll try to move against us once he knows I'm here.
00:49:32He will.
00:49:33The question is when and on what grounds, and whether we've built enough of a coalition to weather it.
00:49:40We have eight of the twelve noble houses, said Lord Fenn, who had graduated, in the two weeks since his
00:49:47first meeting with Claudia, from barely concealed terror to a slightly more composed version of the same.
00:49:53The northern garrison has confirmed through back channels that their commander will stand with the true heir when the claim
00:50:00is made public.
00:50:01A pause.
00:50:03The city's merchant guilds are cautiously sympathetic.
00:50:07They've spent a decade absorbing Marek's trade levies.
00:50:11Cautiously sympathetic, Sarah said, with the tone of a woman who had seen a great deal of cautious sympathy fail
00:50:19to translate into useful action.
00:50:21In other words, they'll celebrate after we've won.
00:50:25That's all we need them to do, Claudia said.
00:50:28Sarah looked at her, and the look had something in it that had not been there in their first meeting.
00:50:34Not approval exactly, but a kind of recognition.
00:50:37You have been paying attention, she said.
00:50:40I am paying attention, Claudia said.
00:50:43Continuously.
00:50:44It's somewhat all-consuming.
00:50:47Welcome to being a queen, Sarah said Drilly.
00:50:50The issue was timing.
00:50:52They had the pieces, or most of them.
00:50:54What they did not have was a moment, the right moment, the moment that would make the public declaration not
00:51:01a gamble but an inevitability that would give the uncertain allies the confidence to step forward and leave Marek with
00:51:09nothing to stand on.
00:51:10This was the part of the plan that Darren, who was primarily useful in a military capacity and was aware
00:51:16of the limits of his role, found himself listening to with something between professional admiration and a more personal kind
00:51:24of attention.
00:51:25Claudia in a council room was not Claudia in the safe house, not Claudia in the quiet conversation, and not
00:51:32Claudia in his great hall.
00:51:34She was faster here, more precise, the kind of quick that had been honed by something rather than simply present.
00:51:41She moved through the map of the situation with an instinctive grasp of the political geometry that Prosper watched with
00:51:48an expression Darren had begun to recognize as the old man's version of satisfaction.
00:51:53She thinks like Aldred did, Prosper said, on the evening of the fourth day, quietly, to Darren alone as they
00:52:02stood in the corridor outside the library.
00:52:05Your father thought in structures, he had told Claudia once.
00:52:09You think in movements.
00:52:11It was, Prosper said, the difference between a good administrator and a good ruler.
00:52:16She doesn't need me for this, Darren said.
00:52:19No, Prosper agreed.
00:52:21Not for this.
00:52:23He looked at Darren with the measured gaze of a man who had eight decades of context for human foolishness
00:52:29and was therefore neither surprised nor unsympathetic.
00:52:34That is not, I think, why you're here.
00:52:37No, Darren said.
00:52:39Then be here for the right reason, Prosper said, and be patient.
00:52:45She is not yet done deciding what to do with you.
00:52:48The moment came eleven days after Darren's arrival.
00:52:51It came because Merrick, who was not a stupid man, even if he was a frightened one, had his own
00:52:57network of informants, and one of those informants had, eventually, gotten close enough to the right conversation to deliver a
00:53:04fragment of something that was, while not conclusive, alarming.
00:53:08Merrick could not have known everything, but he knew enough to know he had a problem, and Marek's response to
00:53:15problems was to act before they became larger.
00:53:17He called for the northern garrison commander.
00:53:20This was the move that Prosper had predicted, if not precisely on this timeline.
00:53:26The northern garrison was the military piece.
00:53:29Merrick was trying to secure it before the situation resolved against him.
00:53:34Sayah brought the news to the safe house at midnight.
00:53:37She did not knock particularly gently.
00:53:39We need to move tomorrow, she said.
00:53:43Claudia, who had been awake.
00:53:45Darren suspected she slept less than she should and was not going to say so because it would be both
00:53:50patronizing and incorrect that it was entirely his business.
00:53:54Looked at Sayah across the table.
00:53:57The garrison?
00:53:58His messenger is already riding.
00:54:01Can we intercept?
00:54:03Possibly.
00:54:04It's a risk.
00:54:06Claudia looked at the maps.
00:54:07She was very still for a moment, the kind of stillness that was not absence but concentration, the kind that
00:54:14Darren had watched now for almost two weeks and had come to understand as the way she processed things that
00:54:20mattered.
00:54:21Her hands were flat on the table.
00:54:23Her gray eyes moved across the map with the characteristic quality of someone following a logic.
00:54:30Then, no, she said.
00:54:32We don't intercept.
00:54:34We make the interception irrelevant.
00:54:36She looked up at Sayah.
00:54:38We don't need to stop his message from reaching the garrison.
00:54:42We need the garrison to have already heard from me before it arrives.
00:54:46Sayah looked at her.
00:54:48That requires being in two places.
00:54:50It requires two fast riders and a letter with my seal.
00:54:55Prosper Seal 2.
00:54:57The garrison commander knows Prosper.
00:54:59That matters.
00:55:01She was moving now, pulling a sheet of parchment from the stack at the corner of the table.
00:55:07We move the announcement forward.
00:55:09Not tomorrow.
00:55:11Tonight.
00:55:11I make the claim before dawn.
00:55:13By the time Merrick understands what has happened, the allies who have been waiting will have been given the signal
00:55:20they needed.
00:55:21It's fast, Sayah said.
00:55:23It's meant to be, Claudia said.
00:55:25She looked at Sayah steadily.
00:55:28This is what he was afraid of.
00:55:30He knew something was moving and he couldn't stop it, so he's trying to control the last piece he can
00:55:36reach.
00:55:37We don't let him reach it.
00:55:39Sayah was quiet for a moment.
00:55:41Then she said,
00:55:43I'll prepare the riders.
00:55:45Darren had been standing by the door, taking no space in the conversation, which was as it should be.
00:55:51As Sayah left, Claudia looked at him.
00:55:54I need you tonight, she said.
00:55:57Not in the council.
00:55:58Outside the palace.
00:56:00If Merrick moves before dawn.
00:56:02If he has other resources we haven't accounted for.
00:56:06I'll be there, he said.
00:56:08She looked at him.
00:56:09In the lamplight, her eyes had that quality Prosper had described.
00:56:14Lit from behind.
00:56:16Gray and deep.
00:56:18You rode six days to get here, she said.
00:56:21Yes.
00:56:22You didn't have to.
00:56:24I know.
00:56:25A pause.
00:56:27I'm glad you came, she said.
00:56:29It was quiet and unadorned and more, because of its simplicity, than anything decorated could have been.
00:56:36He did not say you have no idea how glad I am.
00:56:39He did not say anything about the eight months or the hollow ache or the things he had built and
00:56:45torn down inside himself.
00:56:47There would be time for that, or there would not, and either outcome was something he had done to himself
00:56:52with his own choices.
00:56:54He said,
00:56:55Tell me where you need me.
00:56:57Chapter 7
00:56:58The announcement was made in the palace's great court at the fourth bell before dawn.
00:57:03It was not the grand, torch-lit ceremony of old stories.
00:57:08There were no banners unfurled or a trumpet sounded, no choreographed moment of theatrical revelation.
00:57:15What there was, instead, was Claudia walking into the court at the fourth bell with Prosper at her right hand
00:57:22and Sia at her left,
00:57:23and eight of the twelve noble houses ranged behind her, and standing in the center of that old stone space
00:57:29and speaking,
00:57:30without theater and without decoration, simply the truth.
00:57:34Who she was, whose daughter, what she carried, why she had come.
00:57:40She had thought about this speech for fourteen days, and had in the end discarded most of what she had
00:57:46prepared, and said what was most true.
00:57:48She had told them about her mother, who had hidden her and died without telling her,
00:57:54and who had left a letter on a kitchen table in a river valley cottage that Claudia had read at
00:57:59eight years old,
00:58:00and had spent twelve years gathering enough life to understand.
00:58:04She had told them about the valley and the pack and the life she had lived, not apologetically, but as
00:58:11evidence of something,
00:58:12that the blood that ran in her veins had not been able to be educated or trained out of her,
00:58:18that it had found its way through a quiet life in a way that could not have been manufactured.
00:58:23She was, she said, her father's daughter.
00:58:26She was asking for nothing on the strength of that alone.
00:58:30She was asking for something on the strength of what they would see in the days ahead.
00:58:35Merrick was not there.
00:58:37Merrick was, according to Sia's latest information,
00:58:41in his private chambers on the north side of the palace,
00:58:44where the news had reached him approximately twenty minutes before the announcement,
00:58:48and where he was currently engaged in what Sia described as
00:58:53an intense conversation with his advisors.
00:58:55The reaction in the court was not the unified roar of old stories either.
00:59:00It was complex and layered and human,
00:59:03and it was what Claudia had expected.
00:59:06Relief from some quarters,
00:59:08visible shock from others,
00:59:10calculation from several faces she had already identified as
00:59:14Marek's people who were now revising their calculations at speed.
00:59:18There were tears from an older woman in the third rank who had served her father,
00:59:23and had been old enough to remember.
00:59:25There was the particular quality of silence from the crowd that was not emptiness,
00:59:29but held breath,
00:59:30the silence of people trying to decide whether to believe,
00:59:34and wanting to.
00:59:35It was not, in other words,
00:59:37a smooth victory.
00:59:38It was a beginning.
00:59:40Prosper stood beside her when it was done and said,
00:59:43quietly,
00:59:44That was well done.
00:59:46It was honest, she said.
00:59:48Those are not always the same thing,
00:59:50Prosper said.
00:59:51Tonight they were.
00:59:53The three days that followed were complicated,
00:59:56which is perhaps the mildest possible way to describe a succession crisis
01:00:00being actively contested in real time.
01:00:03Marek did not concede.
01:00:05This had been expected.
01:00:07What he did was move his remaining allies into positions that made the already fragile situation
01:00:12considerably more precarious,
01:00:14and issue a counter-declaration of his own which,
01:00:18while legally groundless given that Claudia's bloodline was not in serious doubt,
01:00:23created enough noise to require response.
01:00:26There were two tense nights during which Darren was,
01:00:29frankly, more useful to Claudia than either of them had fully anticipated,
01:00:34not because anything came to open violence,
01:00:37but because there were three separate moments in which the presence of an alpha of his rank and reputation,
01:00:44standing visibly in support of the Vereth claim,
01:00:47caused people who had been carefully equivocating to finish their calculations and choose a side.
01:00:53Authority, it turned out, had a contagion.
01:00:55The right person committed in the right moment could tip several quieter commitments after them.
01:01:01He did not call attention to this.
01:01:03He noted it privately and considered it.
01:01:06On the fourth day, Marek's coalition fractured.
01:01:10It did not fracture spectacularly.
01:01:13It fractured the way these things tend to in practice.
01:01:16Quietly, person by person,
01:01:19each person privately concluding that the side they were on was the losing side
01:01:23and that it was better to be wrong early than wrong late.
01:01:27By the afternoon of the fourth day,
01:01:30Marek had three noble houses and the palace household guard
01:01:33and a diminishing supply of confidence that any of these were going to be sufficient.
01:01:39He sent for Prosper.
01:01:40Claudia let Prosper go.
01:01:42She and Saya and Darren waited in the library where so much of this had been planned
01:01:48and Claudia sat with her hands folded on the table
01:01:51and was very still in that concentrated way
01:01:54and Darren sat across from her and did not ask questions
01:01:58because she did not need questions
01:02:00and Saya stood by the window and watched the palace courtyard.
01:02:04Prosper came back two hours later.
01:02:07He wants terms, the old man said.
01:02:09The room breathed.
01:02:11He's not going to fight it, Claudia said.
01:02:14It was not quite a question.
01:02:16He's a frightened man who has survived 20 years by knowing when to stop, Prosper said.
01:02:22He looked at the numbers this morning.
01:02:24He knows what they mean.
01:02:26Claudia was quiet for a moment.
01:02:28Then she said,
01:02:30Exile.
01:02:31Comfortable exile.
01:02:33I'm not interested in revenge.
01:02:35I'm interested in it being finished.
01:02:37His properties in the eastern provinces will revert to the crown,
01:02:41but his personal household can follow him.
01:02:45A pause.
01:02:46He cannot stay on the continent.
01:02:48There are island territories to the south that receive political exiles.
01:02:53Prosper nodded.
01:02:55And his associates?
01:02:57Amnesty for those who were acting under duress.
01:03:00Accountability for those who were not.
01:03:02She looked at Prosper steadily.
01:03:05You know which is which.
01:03:07I do, he said.
01:03:09Then, I trust your judgment, she said.
01:03:12The formal transfer of authority took place on the seventh day.
01:03:16It was a ceremony of the old rites.
01:03:19Prosper had insisted on this, and Claudia had agreed because the old rites were the ones her
01:03:23father had used, and there was a kind of continuity in that which mattered both symbolically
01:03:28and, she was beginning to understand, politically, symbols were not decorations.
01:03:34They were structures.
01:03:36They told people what to see and how to see it, and the story of continuity, of an interrupted
01:03:42rain restored, of a daughter coming home, was a story that people needed, that the kingdom
01:03:48needed, in a way that no purely pragmatic account of bloodlines and legal claims could
01:03:53fully supply.
01:03:54She was crowned in the morning, in the throne room, with Prosper holding the crown and Saya
01:04:00at attention to her left, and the eight noble houses arranged behind her in their proper
01:04:05order, and the late winter sunlight coming through the high windows and falling, in that
01:04:11particular quality that only winter light has, like something deliberate.
01:04:16She sat in her father's throne for the first time and felt the weight of it.
01:04:21It was heavy.
01:04:22That was the first, honest, wordless impression, not of power or destiny or triumph, but simply
01:04:31of weight.
01:04:31The weight of the thing she had stepped into.
01:04:34She sat with the weight of it.
01:04:36She thought it was something she was going to have to learn to carry, and that she was
01:04:41going to learn by carrying it.
01:04:42She looked out at the court.
01:04:44In the back of the room, near the doors, she found Darren's gray eyes.
01:04:50He was standing with his hands clasped behind him, straight-backed, and he was watching her
01:04:56with an expression that was harder to read than most of his expressions, which were not,
01:05:01in general, easy to read.
01:05:03But she had been watching him for nearly three weeks, and she had gotten, she thought, better
01:05:09at the translation.
01:05:10There was pride in it, not the possessive kind, the kind that a person feels when they have
01:05:16witnessed something real.
01:05:18There was something else, too, quieter and less certain, the look of a man who was trying
01:05:24to hold something carefully because he knew it was not yet his to hold.
01:05:28She held his gaze for a moment.
01:05:30Then she turned back to the court and the weight and the work.
01:05:35Chapter 8.
01:05:36The weeks after the coronation were not triumphant in any simple sense.
01:05:42They were busy, primarily.
01:05:44Relentlessly busy, with the accumulated business of a kingdom that had been managed for 20 years
01:05:50by a frightened man and was showing the specific damage that frightened management produces.
01:05:55Claudia worked at hours that concerned Saya and Alarm Prosper and caused Sarah to arrive periodically
01:06:02with food and direct instructions that she should eat it, because apparently Sarah had decided
01:06:08that the advisory function she had spent the last two weeks performing could be extended
01:06:13to include nutritional enforcement, and Claudia did not have the energy to argue.
01:06:18Darren stayed.
01:06:19He had not announced that he was staying.
01:06:22He had not asked permission.
01:06:24He had simply continued to be there, useful in the quiet, specific ways that became apparent
01:06:30to a new queen trying to hold a newly stabilized kingdom together.
01:06:35Present for the council discussions where his northern territory's perspective was genuinely
01:06:40relevant, available for the security assessments that Saya conducted with the combination of thoroughness
01:06:46and bleak humor that Claudia had come to rely on, and completely absent from anything that
01:06:52was not asked of him, which she found after the weeks of everyone having opinions about what
01:06:58she should be doing, almost disorientingly considerate.
01:07:02They talked in the evenings, not every evening, not as a ritual or a deliberate cultivation of
01:07:10something.
01:07:10But the nature of the work brought them into the same spaces at the same times, and the conversations
01:07:16that grew from that were not conversations about the thing they were not yet discussing,
01:07:20the bond, the rejection, the eight months, the things that would eventually need to be
01:07:25addressed, but about everything adjacent to it.
01:07:28She told him about her mother.
01:07:30He listened without interrupting, which she noted, and mentioned it once.
01:07:35You don't interrupt, she said.
01:07:37I'm trying, he said, with a rueful quality that she found, despite herself endearing.
01:07:44I have been informed on several occasions that I talk over people.
01:07:48I'm attempting to become aware of the habit.
01:07:51Who informed you?
01:07:53Torben.
01:07:54Several times.
01:07:55The first few times, I didn't believe him.
01:07:58She laughed, and he watched the laugh with the same expression she had caught before, that
01:08:04involuntary thing, genuine and unguarded.
01:08:07And they sat with the conversation for a while in the particular way of two people who are
01:08:12both aware of a significant thing they are not yet saying and are, by not saying it, somehow
01:08:18communicating it anyway.
01:08:19He told her about Ironspire, about the pack and the responsibilities and the framework he
01:08:26had built his decisions inside of, the framework he had never questioned until the questioning
01:08:31came too late.
01:08:32He did not excuse himself.
01:08:35He explained which is different, and he was precise about the distinction.
01:08:40I wanted to know why, Claudia said once, quietly.
01:08:43They were in the library, late, the fire burning low.
01:08:47Not what the reasons were.
01:08:49The reasons I could construct myself.
01:08:52I wanted to know why those reasons felt sufficient to you.
01:08:55Why you didn't, she stopped.
01:08:57Didn't look closer, he said.
01:08:59Yes.
01:09:00He was quiet for a moment.
01:09:02Because I was afraid, he said.
01:09:05Not of you.
01:09:06Of the disruption.
01:09:07Of what it would mean to take a mate who didn't fit the shape of what I'd told my pack
01:09:12and
01:09:12myself I needed.
01:09:14A pause.
01:09:16Fear is very efficient at dressing itself up as reason.
01:09:19I have been, I think, quite good at that.
01:09:22She looked at him.
01:09:24And now?
01:09:25Now, he said.
01:09:27I would like to try being less efficient about it.
01:09:30The bond was still there.
01:09:32This was the thing they did not say directly for a while.
01:09:36The rejection had not severed it entirely.
01:09:39Claudia had known this, distantly.
01:09:41Had felt the damaged thread that had not gone fully dark.
01:09:45The scar that was too warm to be entirely dead.
01:09:48Being in the same space as him for three weeks, and then six, and then eight, had made it impossible
01:09:55to pretend otherwise.
01:09:57It ached in the particular way of something that was trying to heal rather than something
01:10:02that had given up.
01:10:03She was the one who said it first.
01:10:06On a night when the work had been long and the library was quiet, and she was tired enough
01:10:11to have less patience with circumnavigation than usual.
01:10:14The bond, she said.
01:10:16He looked at her.
01:10:17It didn't break completely, she said.
01:10:20No, he said.
01:10:22Careful.
01:10:23I don't know what to do with that yet, she said.
01:10:26I want to be honest about that.
01:10:28I know what I feel, and I know what happened, and I know those two things are going to take
01:10:32time to be in the same place.
01:10:35I know, he said.
01:10:36You've been patient, she said.
01:10:39I've noticed.
01:10:40I had a great deal of time to understand that patience was what was appropriate, he said.
01:10:45Eight months is a long time to understand something about yourself.
01:10:49What did you understand?
01:10:51He looked at her steadily.
01:10:53That I had been very stupid, he said.
01:10:55And that stupid was not a sufficient reason to stop trying.
01:11:00She thought about this.
01:11:02She thought about the kitchen table and the letter and the 45 seconds in the great hall
01:11:07that had cost them both more than they should have been required to pay.
01:11:11She thought about Iron Spire and the South Road and the weeks of his watchful, careful,
01:11:17useful presence and the conversations and the way he listened.
01:11:20The bond asks for something, she said slowly.
01:11:24It asks for me to trust a thing that was already broken once by that person's choice.
01:11:30Yes, he said.
01:11:31That's not a small ask.
01:11:34No, he agreed.
01:11:35It isn't.
01:11:36Silence.
01:11:37The fire.
01:11:39I'm not saying no, she said.
01:11:41I want to be clear about that.
01:11:43I'm not saying no to this.
01:11:45I'm saying.
01:11:46She paused, looking for the exact right words, because the exact right words were the only
01:11:53ones that would be fair.
01:11:54I'm saying that this goes at the pace I set, and that the pace will not be fast, and that
01:12:00I need you to hold the patience you've found and not lose it when it's inconvenient.
01:12:05Yes, he said.
01:12:06And I need you to tell me when something is difficult, she said.
01:12:10Not to manage me.
01:12:12But because I'm not interested in a version of this where one person carries the weight
01:12:17of what was done to them quietly forever while the other person feels they've been
01:12:21forgiven.
01:12:22He was very still.
01:12:24I need it to be honest, she said.
01:12:27Yes, he said.
01:12:28And then quieter.
01:12:30So do I.
01:12:32She looked at him for a long time in the low firelight, in the library where Prosper had
01:12:37been waiting for twenty years for a daughter to come home, in the kingdom that had been
01:12:42held in some kind of suspended grief since the night a young king sent his infant heir
01:12:48west to keep her alive.
01:12:49Then we'll start there, she said.
01:12:51He breathed.
01:12:52It was small but real.
01:12:54The exhale of someone who has been holding something carefully for a very long time and
01:13:00has just been told they can set it down.
01:13:02Yes, he said.
01:13:03We will.
01:13:04There is an old custom in Verith, older than the grey walls and older than the pack system
01:13:11to the west and possibly older than writing.
01:13:14On the night of the winter solstice, the ruling monarch of the kingdom is required, by tradition,
01:13:20to light the first fire of the season in the great court.
01:13:24Not a servant.
01:13:25Not a steward.
01:13:26The monarch themselves flint in hand.
01:13:29It is, by design, not a grand gesture.
01:13:32It is a small one.
01:13:34It is the point.
01:13:36Claudia was in her second year on the throne when she stood in the great court on the winter
01:13:40solstice, with the cold of the season pressing in from every direction and her breath visible
01:13:47in the lamplight and struck the flint above the pyre.
01:13:50She thought, briefly, about the first fire she had ever lit for herself, a small fire in a river
01:13:57valley cottage, after her mother's death, the first night alone.
01:14:02She thought about all the fires between that one and this one, and what they had cost, and
01:14:07what they had given her.
01:14:09The fire caught.
01:14:10The court made the sound it was supposed to make.
01:14:13Prosper, who had seen this ceremony done by her grandfather and her father and her uncle
01:14:19and now her, watched with the expression of a man completing something.
01:14:24Darren was standing to her right.
01:14:26Not as a consort.
01:14:28That title had come six months earlier, in a ceremony that was, at Claudia's insistence,
01:14:34not especially grand and not especially rushed and was exactly what it was, honest.
01:14:40Not as a supplicant or a figure of apology or a man still earning something.
01:14:45He had been earning things for long enough.
01:14:47She had told him so.
01:14:49He was standing there as himself.
01:14:52As the person who had ridden six days because he needed to tell her he had been wrong.
01:14:57As the alpha who had learned, belatedly and expensively, that the assumptions of his life
01:15:03were not the same thing as the truth of it.
01:15:06As, in the plainest possible terms, her mate.
01:15:09The scar in her chest had softened.
01:15:11Not vanished.
01:15:12It would never entirely vanish.
01:15:15And she had decided, some months ago, that she did not want it to.
01:15:20Because the scar was true and truth was something she had decided to hold on to.
01:15:25Even the parts of it that were not comfortable to carry.
01:15:28But softened.
01:15:29Settled into something that was no longer the primary story.
01:15:33That had been joined by other things, newer and growing.
01:15:37She looked at him in the firelight.
01:15:40He looked back.
01:15:41Well, he said, under the sound of the cord around them, quietly enough that only she could hear.
01:15:48Well, she agreed.
01:15:50You've had the throne for two years, he said.
01:15:53Is it what you expected?
01:15:55I expected it to be heavier, she said.
01:15:58It is, in fact, exactly as heavy as I expected.
01:16:02I don't know why I thought I was wrong.
01:16:04Because you are occasionally optimistic about the limits of difficulty.
01:16:10I am not optimistic.
01:16:12You walked out of a rejection without crying and started a revolution, he said.
01:16:17That is, at minimum, structurally optimistic.
01:16:21She looked at him for a moment.
01:16:23Then, she said, with a particular tone that he had come to recognize as the one where she was choosing
01:16:29between several possible responses and had selected the one that was truest.
01:16:34I didn't start a revolution.
01:16:36I lit a letter on fire and got on a horse.
01:16:40History, he said, tends to simplify.
01:16:44History, she replied, can manage its own interpretation.
01:16:48He was smiling.
01:16:50He did this more than he had in the first months, and she had noticed the increase, and she noted
01:16:55it now, this particular quality of it, the one that was entirely unselfconscious, the one that was, she thought, possibly
01:17:03the truest thing she had yet seen in him.
01:17:05She thought about the great hall at Ironspire, about the 45 seconds, about the way she had decided, in the
01:17:14three days riding home, who she was going to be.
01:17:17She thought, with a fairness that had taken time to arrive at, that he had spent a comparable amount of
01:17:23time deciding who he was going to be.
01:17:25That the man standing next to her had been made partly by the choice he had gotten wrong, and everything
01:17:31he had done since.
01:17:33She had not forgiven the choice.
01:17:35Forgiveness was not really the right word for what had happened, because what had happened was something more complex and
01:17:41more human than simple forgiveness.
01:17:43She had held the truth of what he had done, and she had held the truth of who he had
01:17:48become, and she had decided that both were real, and that she did not have to choose between them.
01:17:54That she could hold the damage and the repair in the same hands, and still choose what to do next.
01:18:00She had chosen this.
01:18:02The fire burned in the great court.
01:18:04The winter solstice night was very cold and very clear, the kind of night where the stars looked like they
01:18:11had been hammered into the sky with particular attention to detail.
01:18:14Claudia looked up at the stars.
01:18:16She thought about her father, who had sent her west into a quiet valley to keep her alive.
01:18:22She thought about her mother, who had lived the quiet valley and given her daughter a letter,
01:18:28and enough of a life to know what to do with the truth when it finally arrived.
01:18:32She thought about all of it, and she thought,
01:18:35Yes.
01:18:36This.
01:18:37Complicated and real and entirely mine.
01:18:41Come inside, she said to Darren.
01:18:43It's cold.
01:18:45You are the one who had to light the fire outdoors.
01:18:48It's tradition.
01:18:50Tradition is simply habit with better clothes, he said.
01:18:53She laughed, short and genuine, and the night held the sound of it, and the fire burned, and the stars
01:19:01were many.
01:19:02They went inside.
01:19:04And that is where we will leave them.
01:19:06Not at a perfect ending.
01:19:08There is no such thing, and they would both be the first to tell you so.
01:19:13There are the ordinary difficulties of ruling a kingdom and managing an alliance,
01:19:18and being two people with histories trying to build something honest from the materials of what they are.
01:19:23There is Prosper, who is getting older and will not be there forever,
01:19:27and Saya, who is quietly invaluable and knows it,
01:19:31and Torben, who visits occasionally from the north and makes jokes that are funnier than Darren lets on.
01:19:37There is the work, which is endless, and the fire, which needs to be lit every year.
01:19:43There is the bond, which is a scar, and something else, which is real.
01:19:48There is, at the beginning of all of this, before the throne and the coalition and the seven-day ride
01:19:54and the careful evenings in the library, a woman walking out of a great hall, straight-backed,
01:20:00choosing to be something that could not be broken.
01:20:02And a man standing in the echo of his own choice, beginning the long and necessary work of understanding it.
01:20:10There is all of that, and there is this.
01:20:12They found their way to each other, and it cost them both, and it was worth it.
01:20:17It usually is the things that cost you.
01:20:22If this story found you at the right time, leave us a comment below.
01:20:27We would love to hear from you.
01:20:29And if you are new here, welcome.
01:20:32There are more stories where this one came from.
01:20:34We will see you in the next one.
01:20:36We will see you in the next one.
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