Chapter 4 The Bond That Would Not Sleep

• Illness came for King Edmund the way it comes for most wolves who have spent a lifetime believing themselves too strong to be sick: suddenly, and all at once, with no patience for the fact that he had a pack to run and no time set aside in his calendar for dying slowly. Even an Alpha's healing slowed with age, and the pack healer's verdict, delivered in the careful, measured tone healers use when they are about to ruin someone's week, was a wasting sickness in the blood, one that would need close watching every hour of every day for the rest of the King's life, with no promise attached about how long that life would run.
• "He needs someone steady at his side," the healer told Julian, out of the King's hearing, in the corridor where difficult things got said. "Someone who will not forget his medicine, who will notice if his hands begin to shake or his wolf begins to slip before it becomes an emergency instead of a warning. It is not easy work, my prince. It is exhausting work, and most wolves cannot sit still that long. Most wolves would rather be running a border patrol than sitting in a sickroom counting hours."
• Julian did not hesitate. "Aria," he said, and something in the certainty of it made the healer glance at him twice before nodding and moving on, filing the moment away the way pack healers file away every small, telling thing they see and rarely mention out loud.
• She took to the King's bedside the way she seemed to take to everything, quietly, thoroughly, without complaint, learning the small rituals of a sickroom faster than anyone expected from someone who had never nursed a wolf before. She learned the exact hour his medicine was due before the healer had to remind her twice. She learned which of his moods meant pain and which meant only boredom dressed up as temper, and she answered each one differently, patient with the first, gently teasing with the second, until the King found himself, more than once, laughing before he remembered he had meant to be difficult. She brought his meals herself and sat with him after, and because the silence of a sickroom pressed on her the way it pressed on everyone, thick and waiting, she began to sing, softly, half to herself, while she worked, not performing, just filling the quiet the way you'd fill a draft with a blanket.
• The King had never much cared for music, not the way his wolves did, howling was closer to his heart than any human tune, something in the blood rather than the throat. But he found himself asking for it anyway, surprising himself every time.
• "Sing the one about the river again," he would say, and Aria, embarrassed and pleased in equal measure, would oblige, and something in the old King's shoulders would ease that no medicine had managed to touch. Even his wolf, restless under his failing skin, snapping at shadows some nights out of frustration at its own weakness, seemed to settle when her voice was in the room, curling down quiet the way a wolf settles by a fire it trusts.
• Word of the maid with the healing voice spread the way good news always spreads faster than bad, past the pack house walls into the village streets, until wolves timed their errands to pass beneath the King's window at the hour Aria was known to sing, farmers slowing their carts, children going quiet mid-argument to listen. Everleigh, which had learned to love its prince without effort, found itself falling, just as easily, in love with a servant girl who was not even one of their own kind, who carried no wolf at all beneath her skin and yet somehow, without trying, had become one of the few things the whole pack agreed on.
• Julian found excuses to be near the sickroom more often than duty required, standing in doorways longer than a report to his father needed, finding reasons to walk past twice when once would have done. He told himself it was concern for his father. His wolf, closer to the truth than he was willing to be, simply wanted to be wherever Aria's voice carried, and pressed harder against his skin every time she looked up and found him watching from the doorway, a faint flush climbing her neck that she could not quite explain to herself and that he noticed every single time, the mate bond humming low and insistent under his ribs like a second heartbeat that answered only to her.
• Only Princess Ivy, listening from the corridor with her arms crossed tight over her chest and her own weak wolf curled small and cold inside her, felt something in her go colder and meaner at the sound of it, standing just out of sight the way she had started to more and more, cataloguing every laugh that drifted out of that room, every note of a song she had never once been invited in to hear properly. She had spent her whole life watching wolves choose her brother without effort. She had never once imagined a human girl with no wolf at all would be the one to finally take the last thing she'd told herself she could still have, his attention, undivided, in a room she was not welcome to enter, and the unfairness of that sat in her chest like a stone she could not put down.