Chapter 47: Adjustment Period
The Royal Wing had finally gone quiet. Cassian and Evander had retired to Evander's study to argue over the winter court seating chart, and Violet had seized her window of escape like a thief. She slipped into the parlor, bolted the door, and pulled the portal crystal from her pocket. It warmed in her palm, amber light curling around her fingers, smelling faintly of ozone and beeswax.
The air over the tea table split open in a shimmering circle. On the other side, a fire crackled, and Dawn Bjorn's grinning face filled half the frame, fur collar up around her ears.
"There she is," Dawn said. "The runaway Queen. I heard the forge rang this morning. Half the mountain heard about it, honestly, and we're four kingdoms away."
"Dawn." Violet sat down on the couch and tucked her legs under her, haircomb catching the lamplight. "It was one hammer blow. I'm surprised you heard it over the sound of your husband crying about his greenhouse."
"He's not crying, he's negotiating with the misting system. Which is losing." Dawn leaned closer to her side of the portal, green eyes narrowing with delight. "Hold on, is that the comb? You made that? Vi, that's gorgeous. That's Academy-top-of-the-class gorgeous. I told Mira you'd come back to it eventually."
"I was supposed to call Mira."
"She's here. Aneara's manor, dinner, wine. We hijacked your call." Dawn pulled the crystal angle wider and Mira's workroom swam into view behind her, shelves of jars and a silver-cropped head bent over a slate. Mira straightened, wine glass in hand, and waved.
"Vi. Two weeks married and already hiding from your husbands to talk to us. It begins."
"It hasn't begun. It's one evening." Violet pulled a throw pillow into her lap. "They're arguing about a seating chart. I have hours."
"You have minutes," Mira said. "Evander found you in eleven seconds last time."
"He did not."
"He did. I watched the memory charm in your own retelling, love. Eleven seconds." Mira sipped her wine. "Anyway. Dawn has been dying to interrogate you for three days. I'm just here for the entertainment and the wine."
Dawn dragged a chair closer to her side of the connection, the wood scraping, and settled into it with her forearms on her knees like a coach at halftime. "Right. Real talk. How are you keeping up with your husband?"
"Which one?"
"Either. Both. Are they being gentlemen?"
Violet frowned. "They're... very attentive. Cassian brought me tea at dawn. Evander had the whole forge built in a week."
Dawn and Mira exchanged a look across the two sides of the portal. It was the look of two women silently agreeing the answer had missed the question entirely.
"Vi." Dawn's voice gentled into something dangerously kind. "How are you dealing with two, bordering on three, sexual appetites?"
The blush hit Violet's ears first. She felt the heat crawl up her neck and knew there was no stopping it, and both her friends watched it happen with the twin satisfaction of hawks.
"I," Violet said, with as much dignity as a scarlet woman could summon, "have been with them for two months. Married for two weeks. They know I'm adjusting. They're being patient."
Silence. Mira set her glass down. Dawn pressed her lips together, then lost the fight entirely and laughed, a loud bark of a laugh that made her fire spit.
"Patient," Dawn repeated. "Oh, sweetheart. Oh, you sweet summer child. They're not being patient. They're being careful. There's a difference and your body is about to explain it to you."
"Explain what to me?"
Mira took over, settling onto a stool in her workroom, wine in hand, in the tone she used for trade negotiations. "Fae are the same, for the record, before you think this is a wolf thing. When you bond with a shifter, your body raises itself to meet your mate. Their magic writes itself into yours. Their hunger becomes partly yours. Their moods, their cycles, and yes, their libido, especially. You bonded two of them under an eclipse. Your body is currently learning to want what they want, when they want it, and it will not ask your opinion first."
Violet's mouth opened. Closed. She thought of the last fortnight. The way her skin had started humming when Cassian came into a room. The way she'd woken at moonrise wanting Evander with an urgency that felt borrowed, like wearing someone else's coat. She'd assumed it was newlywed enthusiasm.
"Oh," she said quietly.
"Yeah, oh," said Dawn.
"And it doesn't settle down," Mira added, mercilessly cheerful. "Aneara is eight hundred years of calm in a silk gown and the moment I walk past her desk in certain skirts she loses three centuries of composure. You adapt. You don't outgrow it."
Violet pulled the pillow tighter. "I've been sleeping eight hours a night and wondering why I keep waking up with my hands under the pillow like I'm holding a weapon."
Dawn howled. "That's your body spoiling for it. That's the wolf in the bond. Eight hours. Gods. What do your kings do, sit outside the door with a whetstone?"
"They've been extraordinarily well behaved, actually."
"Because they're waiting for you," Dawn said, and for a moment her voice was entirely without teasing. "Vi, listen to me. I've been married the longest of the three of us. A hundred and sixty-eight years to that enormous bear. I know what I'm talking about, which is rare and you should write it down. Adjusting to a shifter is nothing like adjusting to a warlock or a fae. It's a whole body education. And it took me a year to figure out with one of them."
"A year?"
"I spent three months thinking I was ill. Woke up furious every full moon, wanted him every time he walked through a door, ate like a siege army. Magnus finally sat me down, all gentle scholar, and said, 'Dawn, love, your body is keeping pace with mine. It would help if you let it.'" She shrugged inside her furs. "Once I stopped fighting it, everything changed. Including how good the sex got, which I did not think had a higher setting."
Violet stared at her. "You've never mentioned this."
"You were busy shrinking yourself under a hedge warlock, there wasn't a natural opening." Dawn said it kindly and completely without apology, and moved on. "Also, fair warning, bears are clingy. Magnus sleeps on me. Like an actual possessive weighted blanket. Four hundred pounds of scholarly bear draped across my back every single night, snoring in my ear, one huge hand doing ownership mathematics on my hip. It is the most irritating and most sexually exciting thing in the world and I would gut anyone who suggested he move to his side of the bed."
"You don't have a side of the bed," Mira said.
"I don't have a side of the bed," Dawn confirmed. "The point is, I have one husband. One shifter's tide to swim in, one appetite to answer. And Vi, I have never in three hundred and forty years seen anyone satisfy two mates. Not once. Not in the Clave, not at court, not in the old stories where the women die of exhaustion in the footnotes. You're not adjusting to one mate's bond. You're adjusting to two, that have been fed through an eclipse wedding and a century of these idiots pining at each other across a throne room."
"A century of pining," Mira said into her wine. "That's stored somewhere. That has to go somewhere."
Violet sat very still. The pillow had become a prop in a play about a woman who was fine. She thought about the cave nest, the second night of Lupercalia, when both of them had needed her and each other and something in the middle of the bed had seemed to catch fire. She thought about this morning, against the anvil, how loud she'd been and how neither king had shushed her, had encouraged her, had stood at the door afterward wearing the expressions of men watching a miracle.
"So what do I do," she said. "Ask them to keep waiting?"
"You could," Dawn said. "And they would. For years. They'd die politely of it, both of them, and be very noble about it, and you'd all three be miserable in matching noble ways. Or you could stop treating them like gentlemen and start treating them like what they are. Wolves. Your wolves. You don't have to be ready every hour of every day, Vi. You have to stop pretending the hour isn't coming."
Mira leaned forward. "The month? The month you think you're giving them to be patient? It's not a month. Your body's already there. It's been there since the cave. You're the only one who hasn't been told."
Violet pressed her face into the pillow and made a sound into it that neither of her friends had the mercy to pretend they didn't hear.
"I'm going to die," she said into the stuffing.
"You're going to be extremely happy and sleep four hours a night," Dawn corrected. "Different thing. Similar funeral arrangements."
Aneara's voice drifted through Mira's end of the portal then, smooth and dry as poured cream. "Tell her the carrying part wears in. Eventually you learn to ride the wave instead of drowning in it. And tell her Aneara says congratulations on the forge. The ring of good iron carries, apparently, even across realms."
"Did you hear that all the way from the dinner table?" Violet asked, muffled.
"My wife hears everything. It's her worst quality after the foal-walk winnings." Mira raised her glass toward the portal. "Dinner at the manor within the month, love. I haven't forgotten. Bring your husbands. Feed them first, Aneara's cook holds grudges."
"Bring the dress that makes the gate guards blush," Dawn added. "Green. Think green, I told you. Clave green, not palace sage. Something that says 'my husbands have ruined me and I've never been better.'"
"I'm not wearing that to your mountain."
"You're absolutely wearing that to my mountain."
The portal light began to soften at its edges, the crystal cooling in Violet's palm. Dawn's face lingered a moment longer, grin gone crooked and soft.
"Vi. One last thing. When you go back in there tonight, and you will go back in there tonight, don't ask permission. They've spent two months being careful with you because they think that's what you need. Show them what you need. They'll weep. I promise you, they will weep."
"Dawn."
"Wolves weep. It's beautiful. Ask Cassian, he'll deny it, that's how you'll know."
The connection folded closed. The parlor went still, lamplight and the smell of cold tea and the amber afterimage of the portal hanging in her eyes.
Violet sat on the couch for a long minute, pillow in her lap, blush still burning her ears, and listened to the palace. Somewhere down the corridor, two voices were still arguing about a seating chart, one warm and one cool, rising and falling like weather.
Her body had already decided. That was the thing she kept circling. It had decided weeks ago, at moonrise, at the forge, in the cave, and it had been waiting with a wolf's patience for the woman in charge to catch up.
She set the pillow aside. She stood, smoothed her skirt, and checked the haircomb in the mirror over the mantel. Gold sun, silver moon, steel made by her own hands.
Then she unbolted the parlor door and went to find her husbands, walking not like a Queen and not like an advisor, but like a woman with two months of appetite and no further intention of pretending otherwise.