Chapter 16 — Taming the Wolf King

"You should marry me properly," Thuong Diem said, in exactly the tone he used to announce that the smoked meat needed turning, three days after the creek-bed fight, as though the thought had simply occurred to him mid-chore and he saw no reason to dress it up further.

I nearly dropped the bark tally I'd been updating. "Excuse me?"

"Not the human way. I don't know your customs, and you've never described a ceremony that made sense for a world without your kind of priests in it anyway." He was mending a torn strap of leather as he spoke, not even looking up, which somehow made the whole thing worse and more sincere at once. "The old way. A bonding, before the whole tribe, before the elders, before the priest. It's meant to be done before a mate goes into danger a King couldn't protect her from himself. I should have asked before the creek. I'm asking now, before whatever comes next."

I set the tally down very carefully, because my hands had started doing something unhelpful and shaky. "You've been treating me like your mate in every way that matters for months, Thuong Diem. I didn't realize there was a formal version we were missing."

"There is." He finally looked up, and whatever was in his face made my chest go tight and warm at once. "It matters. Not because anything changes between us — I don't think anything could change between us at this point, short of the sky falling. It matters because it's a promise made in front of witnesses who'll hold us to it, and because whatever the Blood Moon brings, I want it known, clearly, by everyone in this tribe and every ally we've made, that you are not a curiosity who wandered into my life. You are my wife, or you will be, the moment you say yes."

"That's a very long way of asking a simple question."

"I'm nervous," he admitted, with the particular baffled honesty of a Wolf King who had faced saber-toothed tigers and giant serpents without flinching but found this considerably harder. "You make me nervous. You've made me nervous since the first night you knocked me flat with a bone and I discovered I liked it more than I understood how to say out loud."

I crossed the space between us and kissed him before he could keep talking, which felt like the only sensible answer to give a man who'd just confessed something that earnest.

"Yes," I said, when I finally pulled back. "Obviously yes. Ask me a real question next time, though, instead of burying it inside a speech about promises and witnesses."

"Noted," he said, and the grin that spread across his face was the exact one from the first weeks I'd known him, wolfish and delighted and entirely too pleased with himself, except now it belonged, wholly and without reservation, to me.

---

The eight days between his question and the ceremony turned out to be their own kind of chaos. Word spread through the tribe within an hour, and by the next morning I had no fewer than six women — several of whom had barely spoken to me directly in the early weeks after the coup — arriving at my door with opinions about my hair, my clothes, and the "proper" way a Wolf King's mate should be presented before the gathered elders.

"You wear white clay along the part of your hair," one of them informed me with total confidence, already reaching for a small clay pot before I could object, "same as every bonded mate in this tribe for six generations. It shows you've been claimed and chosen both, not just one or the other."

"What if I don't want clay in my hair?"

"Then you'll be the first bride in six generations to show up looking like she wandered in off a hunt," she said, entirely unbothered by my resistance, and continued applying it anyway with the brisk efficiency of someone who had clearly done this many times before and had no patience for brides who didn't yet understand they'd already lost this particular argument.

I gave in. It turned out, grudgingly, to look rather striking against my dark hair, and I decided somewhere around the third woman insisting I also needed a specific arrangement of dried flowers that this was simply the price of admission into a culture I'd fully committed to belonging to. Dai Bao and Nhi Bao, meanwhile, treated the entire preparation process as an elaborate game specifically designed for their amusement, alternately "helping" by fetching things nobody had asked for and getting thoroughly underfoot until Thuong Diem, banished from seeing me before the ceremony by a tradition even he didn't dare violate, took them both hunting for the day purely to give the women working on me some peace.

"He's going to cry," one of the women told me, with total certainty, braiding a thin strand of silver thread through the flowers at my temple. "Wolf Kings always do, at the actual bonding, no matter how much dignity they walk in with."

"He absolutely will not," I said. "He's spent his whole life being the most feared thing in a hundred miles."

She only smiled, in the particular way of someone who has seen this exact overconfidence proven wrong many times before, and said nothing further.

She was right. He did.

---

The bonding was held eight days later, on the first clear night after a stretch of rain, in the wide clearing before the main den where the whole tribe could gather. Tuyet Phong came, with a small honor guard and a gift of woven silver-gray cloth that she informed me, with the particular dryness I'd come to expect from her, was "not friendship, human, just professional courtesy toward an ally who might actually survive long enough to be useful again." Vu Vinh officiated the practical parts. The priest handled the old words, the ones that mattered to the tribe's oldest traditions, standing before us with his cane set aside for once, both hands steady.

"The bond that's made tonight," he said, his voice carrying clear across the clearing, "is not only between two people. It is a promise the whole tribe witnesses and holds, that this Wolf King and this woman stand as one thing now, in danger as in peace, and that whatever threatens one threatens both, and whatever protects one protects both." His cloudy eyes found mine, and something in them, briefly, looked almost young. "I did not expect, when I warned a frightened stranger at a cave entrance not to strike two children, that I would one day stand here watching her become the anchor this whole tribe's future depends on. But here we are. And I find, strange as it is to admit at my age, that I could not have hoped for a better one."

Dai Bao and Nhi Bao, dressed for the occasion in small woven vests that Trong Cot's mate had insisted on making despite both boys' vocal objections to wearing clothes at all, sat directly in front of the gathered crowd, uncharacteristically still and solemn for exactly as long as the ceremony required before dissolving, the moment it ended, into an enthusiastic wrestling match over who got to sit closest to me at the celebration feast afterward.

Thuong Diem and I exchanged the old vows — his hand pressed flat against mine, palm to palm, a gesture Vu Vinh told me represented two paths becoming one road — and I felt, standing there in torchlight with the whole tribe watching and two small chaotic demons currently rolling in the dirt a few feet away, more certain of anything than I had been of a single decision in either of my two lives.

The feast that followed was enormous, chaotic, and joyful in exactly the specific way this tribe did everything — too much food, too much noise, at least one minor fistfight over a disputed portion of roast boar that ended in laughter instead of blood, Trong Cot getting visibly emotional after his third cup of fermented berry wine and insisting, loudly, that he'd known I was destined to be Queen since the day I made him dig a ditch. Tuyet Phong watched the whole spectacle with an expression somewhere between amusement and genuine bewilderment, clearly still adjusting to how differently our tribe celebrated compared to her own mountain's more measured traditions.

"You people are loud," she observed, accepting a cup of the same fermented wine with the air of someone deciding to commit fully to an experience rather than half-participate in it.

"We're happy," I said. "Loud and happy aren't the same thing everywhere, but around here they mostly overlap."

Even Cot Nhan made an appearance, trading his usual workshop solitude for one night, presenting me with a small carved bone pendant "for luck, not sentiment," he insisted gruffly, though he lingered long enough afterward to watch me put it on before disappearing back toward his cave with something suspiciously like satisfaction in his step. The reforged club, he reminded me before he left, was close now — a few more weeks, no more delay than that, and this time I believed him without needing to ask twice.

Late in the night, once the fires had burned low and most of the tribe had drifted toward sleep, Thuong Diem found me sitting a little apart from the noise, watching Dai Bao and Nhi Bao finally succumb to exhaustion in a tangled pile near the embers.

"Regrets?" he asked, settling beside me, his shoulder warm against mine.

"Not one." I leaned into him, watching the last of the fire's light flicker across two small sleeping faces that had somehow, in the space of less than a year, become the entire center of my world. "I keep thinking about what the priest said. That I didn't come here to survive a beast world. I came here to become an anchor for it." I looked up at him. "That's a strange thing to build a marriage on top of. A prophecy. A deadline neither of us chose."

"Every marriage is built on top of something neither person entirely chose," Thuong Diem said. "Mine was supposed to be built on top of ruling by fear, the way my father did, the way I assumed I always would. You changed that without asking my permission, and I've never once regretted it." He pressed a kiss to my temple, unhurried, certain. "Whatever the Blood Moon asks of us, Lam Thien, I'd rather face it as your husband than as anything else I could have been instead."

Overhead, the moon hung full and silver and, for one more night at least, ordinary — no hint yet of the blood-red it would eventually turn, no sign of the reckoning the priest had promised was still weeks away. I held onto that ordinariness as long as I could, that night, wrapped in firelight and my new husband's arms, with two small snoring apocalypses curled nearby and an entire tribe sleeping peacefully around us, and let myself believe, just for those few hours, that we had all the time in the world to get ready for whatever came next.

We didn't. But I'm glad, looking back, that I didn't know it yet.