The Wolf King's Maid

My father sells me at the wolf gate for eleven thousand dollars and asks if that covers the interest.

"It covers the debt," the Steward says. "Interest is a courtesy. We've extended it."

Settling night. First of the month. Half of Fenmoor in the queue behind us on the gate road, headlights off, because the wolves don't like headlights.

The ledger table sits under the arch. Behind it, Aldous Crewe, Steward of Blackmere, grey three-piece suit, black leather gloves, a book the size of a gravestone.

"Name," he says.

"Hana Seo." I say it before my father can. "Twenty-six. I kept his books."

"Then you know the number."

"Eleven thousand, two hundred and forty. He rounded down."

Behind my father, my sister Brooke has her hands in the pockets of my coat. Navy wool, mine since I was nineteen. She took it off the hook this morning and said I'd be inside anyway.

Someone in the queue says, "Jesus, Danny."

"She's the quiet one," my father tells the table, warm, the voice he used on the bank. "Keeps to herself. Good with floors. The other one's got an interview Tuesday."

"The other one's got my coat," I say.

Crewe looks past him at Brooke, then at me, the way you'd compare two apples. "You were offered a choice of daughters, Mr. Seo."

"I was."

"And?"

"And she's got her mother's face," my father says. "Nobody wanted that either."

The queue goes quiet. The kind of quiet where people decide to remember something.

A woman steps out from under the arch. Ash-blonde hair loose over one shoulder, bronze velvet to the throat, a thin gold circlet, a black fur stole. Lady Vesper Thane. The Queen-elect. In three weeks they name her at the full moon. She looks me over the way Crewe looked at his ledger.

"Hands," she says.

I show her. Ink on one finger. Three months of nothing to do with them.

"Floors," she tells Crewe. "Give her the floors. Nobody will look at her down there."

That's the whole inspection.

"Read the terms," I say.

Crewe's eyebrows go up a sixteenth of an inch. "Girl."

"Out loud. So they hear what he sold." I turn so the queue can see my face. "All of it."

The Steward likes an audience.

"Hana Seo, in service to Blackmere until the debt of Daniel Seo is worked off, at the Steward's reckoning. The floors, the fires and the cups." He looks up. "Nothing else. Nobody in this keep puts a hand on her. That is the law here, and the town has heard it."

"Wrist."

Here's the thing about wolves. They can't touch silver. It burns them, and it has no smell, so at the gate they turn out your pockets and never check your socks.

My mother's chain is silver. Thin as thread. It's been around my left ankle since I was eleven, since the funeral, under a sock, where it has never once been anybody's business.

Crewe takes a plain iron band from the drawer, gloved, and closes it on my right wrist. It clicks.

"You'll feel it take," he says. "Like a hand on the back of your neck. Then you'll want to do as you're told. Most find it restful."

I wait.

Nothing. No hand. Nothing restful.

"Took?" he asks.

I'm a bookkeeper. I know what to do with a number that doesn't add up. You write it down and you say nothing.

"Yes, Steward."

"Good girl. In."

I don't look at my father. I look at Brooke, who'll remember this. "Keep the coat," I tell her. "It never fit you either."

The great hall is bigger than the church in Fenmoor and colder. Wolf banners in gold thread. An empty throne on three black steps. Fifty wolves at the long tables, thirty humans along the walls in grey, holding things.

A short woman with cropped grey hair and an iron band on her wrist puts a tin basin in my arms. Warm water. A cloth over the rim.

"Lo," she says. "Kitchens. You're floors, I heard."

"I heard."

"Tonight you're hands. Don't spill."

The east doors open and the room changes temperature.

He comes in alone. Black coat, black fur at the collar, close beard, and eyes the colour of a lit candle seen through whisky. Gold. Not the fire doing it. The Wolf King of Blackmere, Idris Harrow, and there's blood on his hands to the wrist. Whoever questioned him in the ring tonight has stopped.

Vesper rises from the high table. He walks past her.

Crewe steps up beside him, gold ring over the glove, and says it, not loud. "In the King's name. Kneel."

Thirty humans go down like a dropped tray. One sound. The wolves don't move; they don't have to.

I go down a half-beat behind them, because my knees are mine and I've decided they kneel.

"Wash the King's hands," Crewe says.

He holds them out over the basin without looking at me. Big hands. Blood dry at the knuckles and wet in the lines of the palm. I work the cloth between his fingers and the water goes pink, then red, and I don't stop.

"The floor girl's hands aren't shaking," Vesper says, from the high table. Bright. For the room. "She doesn't understand where she is."

"She understands," he says.

The first thing I hear him say is about me.

Then he says one word to the hall. Low. "Out."

Fifty chairs at once. Boots on stone. The wolves go because their blood says go, the humans because their wrists say it. Vesper goes with her jaw set. Crewe goes last, with one look back at me that I file.

And me, on my knees with a basin of his blood, because nothing moved me.

It's very quiet, one person breathing in a hall built for three hundred.

He looks down. Gold eyes, on my face for the first time tonight.

"I said out."

"You did."

A brazier pops.

He looks at my wrist. The iron. "That's new."

"Tonight."

"It sets by morning," he says, like a man closing a ledger, and looks away, and I pick up his blood and go.

The humans' corridor behind the hall is narrow and warm. I put my back against the stone and the basin on the floor, and I don't shake, because he was right about one thing and wrong about the other.

Every soul in Blackmere kneels when he says kneel. By morning, every soul but one.

I say it to the wall, quiet, so it's been said once.

"My father sold them the only maid in Blackmere who can say no. He just bought the one maid he can't order."