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  Royal Affair

  Preston Walker

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

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  Chapter 1

  Scents assaulted his nostrils, all of them familiar and welcoming and so, so invigorating. Keiran didn’t think that he would ever get tired of breathing in the forest. Not running or exploring, just standing in one place with his four paws connected to the earth and the scents drawing an image even clearer than the one his sharp eyes could create.

  Musk beneath the spicy evergreen pine signaled the growth of mushrooms, but the air here wasn’t damp enough for a kind with medicinal properties. The berry bushes just beyond the pine thicket were bulging with berries, plump and ripe for the picking. The bushes were so laden with fruit that, if he pricked up his ears and caught the wind just right, he could pick up on soft plops as the berries occasionally dropped to the ground. They would rot there, untouched, to fertilize the earth for the next generation of growth because the berries were poisonous.

  Crushed pine needles and dropped tree branches littered the forest floor, their unique odors all mingling with earth and water. And even he could detect the trails of little creatures that had been past this path; fox and mouse and the occasional rabbit or inquisitive sparrow. Some were minutes-old, while others were nearly lost beneath the aroma of the forest. However, Keiran wasn’t trained for hunting, and the trails of animals were more difficult for him to pick up on.

  He also wasn’t supposed to be trained in herbology, but that was their little secret.

  Lifting his muzzle from the ground, Keiran glanced back over his shoulder at his mentor. She was in wolf form as well, though her pretty white coat and silver face markings made her stand out against the summer woods far more than his own shadowy pelt. Her ears were pricked, the black point of her nose twitching like crazy. However, her tail was down and her fur gently flattened, pulled this way and that by the wind. Just like him, she hadn’t detected anything useful here.

  Or maybe she did, but it’s a test.

  Letting out a low woof, Keiran called to his secret mentor. She turned her head in his direction and tilted it, deep eyes inquisitive. They were green and distinctly human, a reflection of her inner soul.

  Keiran shook his head to let her know he hadn’t found anything. The white wolf dipped her head just once in a nod and blinked slowly, giving her approval. Approval wasn’t a thing Keiran knew well and his chest swelled with pride in his abilities. He quietly thanked her, knowing she would feel it through the connection all wolves within a pack shared with one another. Abigail was young just like he was, which he suspected was also the reason she was so willing to lie to the elders and teach Keiran things he wasn’t supposed to know. Their generation was different in a way—more open.

  Abigail paced forward through the forest to come stand by him. Though female and an omega wolf just as he was, she had several inches on him in shoulder height and was therefore able to look down at him. Unlike approval, being looked down upon was something he knew well, but with Abigail, it wasn’t so bad. She was the nearest he had to a best friend. Sharing secrets would do that to people.

  Abigail blinked at him again and then trotted off deeper into the forest, veering away from the well-worn path. Her pads flashed pink and healthy as she lifted her paws, and her movements were almost completely silent. Watching her for a moment, Keiran glanced around guiltily and then tried as hard as he could to make himself feel some sort of attraction toward the female. Femininity was supposed to be attractive to a man, and Keiran was at the ripe age for finding a mate. Unfortunately, all he managed to feel was platonic. She was attractive and kind and friendly, with enough smarts and wits to become the village doctor at such a young age, but he felt those things in the same sort of way he felt them toward his accomplished siblings.

  And that was a problem, because he was an omega and would someday find—or be given to—an alpha mate. There were a few alpha females in the village, but Keiran needed a man, and there were no gay alpha males. He was doomed to a life of unhappiness, and in more ways than one, since he wasn’t highborn enough to actually become Abigail’s real student.

  A sharp, impatient bark brought him back to the forest. He barked in response and pushed away his worries, since these few hours with Abigail were supposed to be without them. He started after her disappearing tail, crashing noisily through the berry bushes. He caught a strong whiff of her scent just before clearing the bushes and slamming right into her from behind.

  Yelping, he lost his footing and crashed to the side while she stumbled over and just barely managed to avoid falling on him. Abigail staggered to the side and regained her footing, whipping back around to push her muzzle into the folds of fur on his neck. A growl rumbled in her throat, low and dangerous.

  Keiran flopped over onto his back, showing her a flash of his soft belly in submission. He wasn’t afraid of her as he would be with anyone else’s teeth at his neck, and she immediately drew away and snorted at him. He panted and batted at her face with a soft paw. All she did was draw farther away, but he rolled onto his stomach and crawled toward her with his rear up in the air and his tail lolling over his back.

  Abigail fixed him with a stern glare but then she leaped at him and came crashing down heavily on his back. All the breath huffed out of his lungs as he collapsed fully under her weight. The ground beneath them slanted down and they tumbled, yelping and wriggling against each other until they came rolling to a gentle stop in a patch of ferns.

  Lying on his side, surrounded by the grassy smell of crushed fronds, Keiran panted happily. The white parts of his pelt were stained with green, and Abigail looked like she’d jumped in a vat of dye.

  Then, suddenly, there was no longer a white wolf in the ferns but a young woman with blonde hair. Delicate fingers smoothed the skirt of a dress over her bare legs. “Well,” Abigail said. “I guess we aren’t going to harvest any mint today.”

  “Why not?” Keiran transformed back to a human as well.

  In answer, Abigail gestured back up the hill. Keiran followed her gesture and saw the distinctive purple blossoms of wild mint. Now that he was aware of it, he could smell the pungent sharpness of the plant. It was even stronger than normal and now he saw why: in their roll down the hill, they’d crushed almost all of the plants. The stalks were bent, the flowers pulverized, and the leaves already seemed to be wilting.

  “Dammit,” Keiran muttered. His skin prickled all over with embarrassed heat and he stared down at his hands. “That’s my fault.”

  “Not really,” Abigail replied. She scooted across the space between them and patted him on the shoulder. The gesture was as light as air. “I’m the one who knocked us down the side.”

  “Yeah, but I’m the one who wanted to play in the first place when you’re
supposed to be working.” Keiran kept on looking down, too ashamed to meet that gentle green gaze even though he could feel she genuinely wasn’t mad at him. “And now I’ve killed the plants. Dammit. I can’t do anything right.”

  “By all means, beat yourself up over something that you couldn’t have predicted.”

  He looked up before remembering that he didn’t want to see her eyes, too surprised by the sharp sarcasm coming from the mouth of a woman with such a sweet disposition.

  “And the plants aren’t dead,” she continued. “They’ll perk up as long as we leave them alone. And there are other patches, just not in this area. And you can do plenty of things right, Keiran. Stop being so harsh on yourself.”

  “You don’t know what it’s like.” He couldn’t stop himself from looking back the way they’d come, as if he could see through all the hills and trees between them and the village. “Everyone else is harsh on me.”

  “Or do you just think they are?”

  As comforting an idea as that was, Keiran knew it wasn’t true. He shook his head. “No, I know they are. Because of my dad.”

  Abigail’s shoulders slumped in admission, signaling that she knew exactly how right he was. Keiran’s uselessness in most areas of wolf life was well-known in their home. “Well, I’m not harsh on you. And I didn’t really need mint anyway. I just thought I’d keep an eye out for it if we came across any. Salem’s stomach is acting up again and I thought some fresh tea might help soothe him.” Before Keiran could start beating himself up again, she continued, “I have better herbs for it, but mint is his favorite. But my job as healer is to make people do things they don’t like, so it’s no big deal.”

  Keiran sighed, but let himself be cheered up by her words anyway. Of all his catastrophic mistakes, at least this one wouldn’t do any lasting damage. Salem was as famous for his sensitive stomach as Keiran was for being a disgrace. “I wish blacksmithing came to me as easily as healing. Things would be so much easier.”

  In their world, and especially in the world of predators, a person’s life was decided before they were born. Alpha and omegas alike were tied to their families, with sons and daughters expected to continue the family craft or marry into another. As some occupations naturally had more demand than others, those families were viewed as being wealthier. Those were the highborn shapeshifters like Abigail who often took on other special positions in society; Abigail was the daughter of a councilman, whose father was the village mayor, so she was a leader in training as well as a healer. Her place in life allowed for that.

  Meanwhile, Keiran came from a line of blacksmiths and, in this day and age, blacksmiths weren’t as useful as they were in the past. In their kingdom of animal shapeshifters, known as Dexus, technology had moved on past the age where the makers of weapons were honored. Their village was on the outskirts of Dexus, which meant they were still a few decades behind the rest of the world, but Keiran’s family had still become little more than welders and menders of farming tools. That meant he was lowborn, and not suited for a doctor’s life.

  Abigail regarded him in silence for a moment before speaking with carefully chosen words. “Why is smithing so hard for you?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. His hands clenched into fists, but he forced them to relax. Abigail was his friend, and they were in a place where no one could overhear him and get mad. He was as safe as he would ever be. “I mean, I understand how it works and what to do, but I don’t know how I’m supposed to know when to do this or that. I just don’t get it. And my Pa, he doesn’t know how to explain it to me because he just says I’m supposed to learn how to feel what I’m doing.”

  “They call that intuition.”

  “Well, I don’t have it.”

  Abigail clapped her hands together, startling him. “Yes, you do! You’re great at learning what herbs do and how to combine them. You even know the best places to look for them.”

  Keiran remembered the afternoons he’d spent, few and far between, in Abigail’s cabin. Well, her cabin was the traditional doctor’s cabin, where every village doctor had lived. The building was adjoined to the clinic, where she showed him how to store herbs so they retained their properties. She showed him her medicine cabinets and her rare stores of pills and medicines given to them in allotted amounts by Dexus’s healthcare system.

  And then, there had been the days when she taught him how to treat patients, how to bind wounds and clean them. She had demonstrated only on unconscious shapeshifters, since anyone who saw Keiran in Abigail’s clinic would report him to the council. A lowborn learning a highborn craft was as illegal as murder. Well, almost.

  I guess it’s true that I’ve thought of some combinations that Abigail didn’t think of before. And he did find herbs pretty easily, when he wasn’t rolling over them.

  “That’s just not the same.”

  “Why not? Metals have unique properties, too. A broken hoe could be kind of like setting and mending a broken bone, if you think about it.”

  He hadn’t considered that before, and for a moment, he could almost feel himself growing excited about the idea. Why not apply his passion to his future job? But then, the more he thought about it, the more thin that idea became. It couldn’t support its own weight. “I wish it was that easy. But Abby, even if I learned how to be a blacksmith… it’s not healing.”

  “I know,” she replied, and her voice contained all the sadness in the world for him. Somehow, though he shared her sadness, he also felt just a bit better. Having someone understand his plight was somehow even more important than solving the problem. “But don’t worry. When you get older—when we both get older, I mean—we’ll be a little more free. I’ll always be your friend.”

  “I’ll always be your friend, too.” Keiran looked at her and smiled the best that he could. She would make someone a fine mate.

  Abigail turned her head suddenly, listening. Keiran listened too, although all he could pick up was the howling of wind through the trees.

  No, not the wind.

  It was an actual wolf’s howl, rising distant but clear. The tone was as unique as a voice. “It’s my Pa,” Keiran said. His heart sank. He was being summoned back home.

  “So it is,” Abigail said. “I guess you’d better get going on home then, huh?”

  “Yeah.” He stood up. Abigail stayed sitting. “Roll around on some more herbs for me, okay?”

  She laughed. “Absolutely. Race with the wind, Keiran.”

  “Race with the wind, Abigail.”

  Closing his eyes, Keiran focused on shapeshifting. The change came over him like a rippling wave, like a hand rubbing over his body and leaving fur in its wake. He felt his insides change and his skeleton realigning itself, forcing him to drop forward down onto his paws. The moment he hit the ground, he was fully transformed and his legs were already running.

  Running through the trees back to the bare hills surrounding the village took a lot less time than it had taken to walk so deep into the forest. His legs ached as he slowed to a halt, pushing his way through the last of the trees to stand on a hill looking out over the plains. The village sat low, surrounded on three sides by hills, with a soft stream running down one side and meandering off. It was beautiful and idyllic, undisturbed by vehicles or the pollution of cities. The only smoke clouding the air was from that of clean, wood-burning fires.

  The plains around the village were mostly tamed for farming, though some plots of land were left free and wild for grazing animals. The wolves still kept dogs for herding, considering even the omegas above such a domestic task.

  From his vantage point, Keiran saw the other wolves roaming around, going about their lives. Sheep and cattle grazed peacefully, although they now lifted up their heads as a small party of large wolves pulled away from the village and headed for the forest.

  A thrill of anxiety shot through Keiran at the sight of them. If they were sent to fetch him, his father’s summons must mean he was in trouble. After observing th
em for a bit more, he took a deep breath and managed to calm down. They were moving at a fast, purposeful pace with their heads up, not following a scent at all. A hunting party, then.

  If I take much longer, Pa really will be mad at me and then I’ll be in trouble after all.

  Panting nervously to himself, Keiran set off down the hill at a trot. He stuck to the paths, which smelled of wolves. The scent grew stronger the closer he came to the village, even when he crossed the hard dirt road. Exhaust and other vehicle reeks drowned out all natural scents, but the last time he’d seen a car passing by was last week. Being so far from everything in Dexus, they didn’t get much traffic.

  Reaching the first building on the outskirts of the village, Keiran paused and tilted his head back. He opened his mouth, forming an almost perfect circle. A growl started deep in his chest, pulling up his throat and filtering out as a high, thin howl.

  Another howl rose up almost as soon as he sent up his call—his father’s response. It was a call of home, which meant his father wanted him back at the house.

  Transforming into a human, Keiran pushed up from his crouch and walked through the village. Some of the others greeted him and he dipped his head in response, but most of them ignored him; he put his head down when passing them in return, scurrying on past as was befitting a wolf of his status. The streets were mostly empty anyway, since it was the middle of the day and those who weren’t hard at work were either on their way to work, or just not working that day. Not even the children were idle. Even with his weakened human senses, he could hear them at the schoolhouse.

  The only person idle was Keiran. He lowered his head and would have tucked his tail between his legs had he been still in wolf form.

  “There you are! At last.”

  Keiran turned his head and tried not to look as guilty as he felt, watching his father walk down the side of their house toward him. For the first time, he wondered why his father wasn’t at his workshop. Had something happened?

  “I came as fast as I could, Pa.”