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Chapter Twenty-SevenMAIRWEN
‘Our Alpha Falk, a goode reign of one hundred years or more, following the death of her mate—'
I blinked at the page, my finger beneath the word mate, my other hand lifting a cup of tea to my lips. Slowly, I lowered the tea and set it aside, safely away from the ancient text.
'Following the death of her mate…'
Alpha Falk was a woman?
I'd found the word mate a number of times in regards to these historic alphas, and as near as I could tell, it referred to the omega an alpha had chosen to remain by his side for a lifetime. They usually produced male heirs at an irregular rate—more frequently than the ten-year cycle of a rut, to be sure—and were included in histories of flights, battles, and politics. But never had I heard of an omega mate rising to the rule of alpha. Had it been an honorary title offered during a time of peace?
No, I remembered this area in the records of battles, and there'd been at least three in the century she would've ruled. I'd only assumed that she was the same Alpha Falk as her alp—mate.
I marked the page with a ribbon and then pushed back from my seat. Niall and Ronson were at the ports today, meeting with local merchants, which left me and Beatrice with the run of the castle. Her office was only two corridors away, and I hurried there, my hands fiddling in the deep pockets of one of my new dresses.
I'd told Ronson I would be researching the family lines of significant dragonkin today, and in a way, I was, but I'd long since worked through any information that might be relevant for the upcoming flight. No, for the past two days, I'd been searching for more mentions of mates. It seemed as though the further back I searched, the more I found, and I knew there must be some piece still missing, something that explained what made an omega mate different than an omega rut partner. It was possible that the word had simply fallen out of fashion, but every time I tried to push my curiosity aside, it continued to itch in my thoughts.
There had to be more.
I burst into Beatrice's study, and received her usual arched eyebrows in reply. But she smiled slightly too and set down her pen.
"What seems to be the matter, Mairwen?"
"Where…where do we keep the portraits of old alphas? The ones we no longer display?" I asked.
Beatrice hummed for a moment, head tilting. "There are a few attics that might serve as storage for that sort of thing," she said, rising and drawing a heavy ring of keys from her desk drawer, older and simpler-looking than the ones she carried at her hip day-to-day. "Some underground storerooms too, though I can't say what state anything would be in, if that were the case."
"I don't mind searching on my own, if you'd rather not," I said, almost wishing Beatrice might hand me the ring and leave me to it.
Not that I didn't like the older woman—she was wonderful and we'd grown to be friends. And I suspected if anyone else in the castle would be thrilled to learn of a woman alpha in our history, it would be Beatrice. But it was my mystery for the moment.
Beatrice pursed her lips, and I sighed, relenting. "But I think…if I find what I'm looking for, you'd like to see it too," I admitted.
"Lead the way, Omega Cadogan," she said with a smile.
I blinked, turning toward the door, then paused and winced. "Well…actually, I don't know the way."
Beatrice laughed, and we set off together.
Two attics, one lower keep, and a very large closet later, I was giving up hope.
"Perhaps they didn't keep them after all," I murmured.
"Unlikely," Beatrice said, huffing and throwing a large sheet back over a collection of boxes that housed old di
I chewed on the inside of my lip briefly. "There is much of our history that it seems was…nearly erased."
"Nearly, yes," Beatrice said, leading us back out of the closet. "But you found it in the library, didn't you? Because whatever our alpha predecessors did not want the public to know, they couldn't bring themselves to destroy outright. If it exists, Mairwen, it will be here. Somewhere. Come, there's a long flight directly up to the attic just this way."
Truth be told, I was quite tired of ru
My thighs burned, and I was making a galling amount of noise, huffing and puffing my way up the narrow spiraling stairs, always watching Beatrice's skirt disappear out of sight. When I thought I was near to fainting, near to falling backwards and toppling my way back to the hall, near to sitting down on this exact step to wait for Ronson to come and find me and fly me about—up or down, I didn't care—I finally heard a door creak above me.
"Aha!" Beatrice's voice curled its way to my ear. "This looks more like it."
And with that, I regained my last reserves of energy and hurried up after her.
The air was hazy with dust, light falling through two opposing stained glass windows with simple diamond patterns in a mismatch of colors, painting the large rectangular drapes of sheets. Beatrice hadn't touched a single one, and she stood at the center of the room, smiling and waiting for me.
"I assumed you'd like to do the honors," she said.
I really liked this woman.
"Thank you," I said, nodding. I was breathless and my legs were trembling, and my pretty new dress now clung damply to me in uncomfortable places, but I smoothed my skirts with clammy hands and stepped forward.
The first few portraits I uncovered were fairly typical—an alpha standing alone along a cliffside, or perhaps with an omega at his side, sometimes even a child. I grunted as I pushed aside a family portrait that Beatrice examined in the shifting light of the windows.
One after another, I uncovered a painting, frowning to find another man, another pair of wings, another dragon on the skyline. She had reigned for one hundred years. Surely. Surely there'd been a portrait. Or had that been a line too far for the preservation of history? Had her portrait been destroyed? Was she only one of the women in the many I'd already uncovered?
"Mairwen, there is…something curious in these," Beatrice murmured behind me.
But I was busy lifting another sheet of linen, pausing halfway to see a solitary figure in an enormous brocade skirt filling the frame, gilded with beads and pearls and a belt made of lattice gold and huge rubies.
"Beatrice," I hissed, jumping up to throw back the curtain of linen, marveling at what I found.
The portrait was very old, the style of figure stiff and simplified, but the subject was undeniable. Beatrice gasped behind me, stumbling closer, and together we stared at the woman in the frame.
The woman…with wings.
"Alpha Falk," I murmured, finding the broach over her chest with the Falk family crest. She'd kept her own alpha mate's name and crest, instead of whatever family line she'd been born into.
"She is…she was… Mairwen, are those wings…symbolic?" Beatrice asked, her eyes wide and lips remaining parted.
I shook my head. "I don't know. But…how?"
An answer was impossible, so for a long stretch, Beatrice and I remained standing together in silence, staring up into the hard and mischievous eyes of the woman in the portrait. What had her first name been? Had she kept the name Falk because she was mated, whatever that meant, or because she loved the alpha who chose her, or simply for the sake of her rule as alpha?
Had she been able to fly?
I smiled as I studied her. She'd not been very pretty, I noticed. Not by today's standards. Her face was quite round and her shoulders very broad. There was no hint of a bosom in the image, and her waist was almost squared to her chest. But she looked clever. She looked like the kind of woman who could rule as alpha—a concept I hadn't ever considered before today.
Her wings were a warm shade of brown, and they took up most of the background of the portrait. It was obvious the intention was to show them, to show that she'd had them. They had the most detail of any piece of her, even of all the jewelry, the leathery texture so carefully transcribed in paint, the glow of a sunset bleeding through the wing on the right.
"Mairwen, look," Beatrice said gently, tiptoeing closer, raising a hand up to Alpha Falk's throat.
I frowned, inching up to join Beatrice, squinting at the slight discoloration of her skin, little pink and silver highlights at the curve where neck met shoulder.
"Is that…is that a bite?" I asked, almost whispering.
"I'm not sure," Beatrice admitted, taking my hand and drawing me back, turning me to face the other portraits. "But she isn't the only one with the mark."
It took me a moment—my head was still spi
My hand rose up to press over my chest as I rushed to the next portrait, no mark on the woman's throat this time. Alpha Brand, who'd chosen a handful of omegas to rut with, without any mention of a mate.
And the next, marked, bitten. Alpha Unger. His mate was recorded as having established the first schools for young women on the island, both human and dragonkin.
The bite marks. They were mating marks.
I couldn't recall every family crest—my head was spi
My cheeks were warm as I turned and found Beatrice watching me, her gaze on my throat, at the curve of my shoulder, where curved dark bruises marked my skin. I resisted the urge to lift my hand and cover the marks, it wouldn't do any good now.
"We should…we should cover these back up," I rasped out.
Beatrice glanced at the portraits that surrounded us, lingering on Alpha Falk, glowing in the last rays of the day. "For now," she murmured.
Yes, I thought. For now.