The Ironwake pack watched him refuse her at the altar. His grandmother watched it with him. Three weeks later the king of the Seven Banners rides into her exile with a circlet in his hand and a record that names the bloodline she didn't know she carried.

Seren Marnoch stood at the altar of Ironwake Hall with her mother's bone-white gown on her shoulders and a fated bond promised to her by the man she had loved since summer. The rite was supposed to be a formality. The wolf in her was supposed to rise. Her throat was named in the old words. And then Torrin Valehart looked past her and chose another, and Belda Valehart set the cold stone to her skin, and Seren Marnoch walked out of her own mating with a mark that was not supposed to exist on her kind.

Draevon of Varnhollow is the Alpha King of the Seven Banners, and he has not ridden personally to a lesser pack's threshold in nine winters. He rides to Ironwake because his Keeper has opened a book that was supposed to have been burned, and the book names a woman his grandfathers were told had been erased four generations ago. She is called Marnoch in this generation. Her mother was Mirenn. Her wolf has not yet come up.

He finds her in a side keep with one servant and the old silver pin from her mother's gown still in her hair, and he does not speak to her as a petitioner.

He speaks to her as a queen.

A rival house has already ridden on the valley she was cut from. The old Accord has cracked at its center seal. And Draevon, who has spent nine winters ruling alone, is about to find out whether a woman rejected at one altar can be claimed at the next without losing her spine in the crossing.