His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 113

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Chapter 113

Abby

even of them are home,” Cassandra said. “The last two went back to the river packs on Tuesday. Their mother drove up herself to fetch them.”

She turned a page in the folder on her knee. Around the council table, the elders listened hout interrupting, which was rarer than it should have been:

Two weeks. That was how long it had been since the border and the truck going up into the mountains. Two weeks of meetings twice a week in this long, low room under the packhouse, and of letters on the desk upstairs, and of learning, slowly and badly, what all of it meant.

I sat at the head of the table in a dress the color of wet slate. It had come up from the seamstress in town four days ago, the first of three, with a note from Cassandra pinned to the collar: Yours this time. Wear it like you meant to. It fit me. Nothing had fit me like that before. The sleeves were long and narrow, the neck high enough to cover the place where Kade’s mark sat, and the wool was heavy enough that I stopped fidgeting with it after the first hour. My hair was pinned back. My mother’s crescent lay against the collarbone where everyone could see it.

I had stood in front of the mirror the first morning and not recognized the woman in it, and then I had gone downstairs and Garrick Shaw had stood up when I came into the room.

He hadn’t done that before.

“And the other four?” Edmund asked.

“They’re staying,” I said. “For now. They don’t remember where they came from, or they remember pieces that don’t match anything we can find. One of them thinks her pack had a red barn and a river. That’s all she has.” Tessa. Every time I said it out loud, it sounded thinner. “Daphne’s keeping them close. They’re helping in the clinic and the kitchens. They want to be useful.”

“The packs we did find,” Edmund said. “Their Alphas have been told?”

“All seven. Cassandra wrote to every one of them.”

“And every one of them wrote back,” Cassandra said, “asking whether Moonhaven is still standing.”

Nobody spoke for a moment.

“There are rumors,” Liam said from the end of the table. He had his arms folded and his eyes on the scarred wood. “Ryan’s heard them on the eastern road. And Tiernan heard them from two packs north of Ravenwood. That the Rogue King came out of exile and burned half of Moonhaven. That the Alpha’s dying. That we’re being run by a girl and a council of old men, and it’s only a matter of time.”

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It was the first thing she had said all afternoon. I looked at her. She looked back at me, had looked at me every meeting since the verdict, as if she was still deciding what I was.

Then we show them,” I said.

Edmund raised an eyebrow.

the way she

“We invite them.” I made myself say it steadily. I had rehearsed it in the bath last night, and again on the stairs, and it still felt too big in my mouth. “The Alphas whose girls came home. And o neighbors. Ravenwood, Ashford, Stonecrest, Greyhollow. All of them. We open the hall, we feed them, we let them walk through the town and see that it isn’t burned. We let them see the borders are held.” I looked around the table. “Rumors grow when nobody can see what’s true. So we let them see”

“You want to invite every Alpha within three hundred miles,” Ansel Pike said slowly, “into a pack whose Alpha can’t walk down his own stairs.”

“Yes.”

“That’s madness.”

“It’s what Nathaniel did,” Cassandra said mildly, “the winter after the floods took the east road. You may remember. He had the whole valley to dinner in the middle of it. He said a pack that hides looks like a pack that has something to hide.”

Edmund was looking at the table. After a moment, he nodded slowly, as if he had just found something there he’d been looking for.

“He did say that,” he said. “I was at the dinner.”

I didn’t look at Cassandra. I had found the floods in the old records three nights ago, at two in the morning, because someone in Cassandra’s spare room had told me Edmund liked precedent, and that I should let him find it himself.

Garrick shifted his cane.

“If we’re going to fill this pack with strangers,” he said, “the borders will need doubling while they’re here. More than doubling. And the town.”

“I was going to ask you about that.” I turned to him. “Which routes you’d put the extra patrols on. Ryan has his plan, but you ran the northern line for twenty years. I’d like to know where you’d put them.”

Garrick stared at me.

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to run something like that. Cassandra says nobody in Moonhaven has done it better than you.’

Hester looked at me for a long moment.

The community hall,” she said.

“If you’d be willing.”

She didn’t answer. But she didn’t say to, and when Cassandra passed her the list of packs, she took it and folded it and put it in her cardigan pocket.

******

It almost worked.

We were nearly at the end when Ansel Pike cleared his throat.

“A question, Luna, before we go.” He folded his thin hands on the table. “How is the Alpha?”

“Better,” I said. “He’s out of the clinic. He’s in his own rooms. He can walk the length of them now,

with help.”

“And when will he be able to resume his duties?”

Everyone at the table was looking at me.

“When Daphne says he can,” I said.

“With respect, Luna, that isn’t an answer.”

“It’s the only one there is.”

“Then perhaps,” Ansel said, very gently, “it’s time someone said the other thing. Garrick said it weeks ago, and he was right to.” He didn’t look at Garrick. “The Alpha has no heir. We are about to invite every pack in the valley to look at us. Some of them will be counting. If the Alpha doesn’t recover, the title passes to the nearest male of the line, and the nearest male of the line was last seen driving into the mountains in a truck.”

The room went very quiet.

My face was hot. I could feel it climbing up my neck under the high collar of the dress, and I couldn’t stop it.

No son. That was what he meant. That was what they had all meant, every time they said it. As if I

were a room in the packhouse that had been left empty too long.

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heal”

Ansel opened his mouth.

The Alpha is recovering,” I said. I was surprised by how steady it came out. “That’s all there is to say about it today. Thank you, all of you.”

I stood up. After a second, so did everyone else.

***

Liam waited until the room was empty.

He didn’t come over right away. He stood by the door with his hands in his pockets and watched me gather the papers off the table and square them, and square them again, until I gave up and just held

them.

“Ansel’s an old goat,” he said.

“He’s not wrong.”

“He’s an old goat who isn’t wrong. Those are the worst kind.” He came and leaned on the table beside me. “How are you, Abs?”

Nobody had asked me that in days. Not like that, as if they actually wanted to know.

“Tired,” I said.

“And?”

“And I don’t sleep. And I read everything three times. And every time somebody says the word heir, I want to crawl under this table.” I put the papers down. “And Garrick stood up when I came in today.

Did you see?”

“I saw.”

“I don’t know what I did.”

“You asked him something.” Liam nudged my shoulder with his. “Nobody’s asked Garrick anything in eight years. You’re doing better than you think.”

“Cassandra says that too. In a voice.”

“Cassandra says everything in a voice.” He hesitated. “Has anyone been helping you? Besides Mom’s

best friend and your useless brother?”

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“A little,” I said.

Liam looked at me sideways for a long moment. Then he looked away again, and I knew he had guessed, and I knew he wasn’t going to say it.

“How’s Kaia?” I asked.

“Fine,” he said, much too quickly.

I opened my mouth.

“Go see your mate,” Liam said. “He’s been asking for you since lunch. Ryan says he threw a cup at

the wall.”

***

Kade’s rooms were next to the Luna’s, at the end of the Alpha wing. There was a door between them, in the wall behind his wardrobe, that nobody had opened in eight years. I still went round by the corridor. I had walked it so many times in the last two weeks that I could have done it in the dark.

He was in the armchair by the window when I came in.

That was new. Daphne had let him out of the bed four days ago, as far as the chair and back, and he took the chair every chance he got, as if being upright, even sitting down, was something he could win. There was a blanket over his knees he clearly hadn’t put there himself. There was a dent in the plaster beside the door at about the height of a thrown cup.

He looked up.

He didn’t say anything for a second. He just looked at me, at the slate-colored dress and the pinned hair and the crescent at my collarbone, and something in his face went very still and very soft at the

same time.

“You’re beautiful,” he said.

I felt myself flush. “It’s your mother’s idea.”

“My mother didn’t put you in it.”

“She might as well have.” I came and stood beside the chair. “She says the elders take me more seriously if I look like I’m not about to go and sit in the clinic supply closet. Apparently it works. Garrick stood up today.”

“Garrick stood up?”

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I watched him wait for it to pass. His hand had gone flat against his side, over the bandage, the way always did now. He had lost weight. Not much, but enough that his shirt hung differently, and the bones of his wrists looked sharper than they should.

When he looked up again, his face had changed.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“For what?”

“For the last two weeks.” He didn’t look away from me. “I’ve been impossible. I know I have. I snap at Daphne. I snap at Mom. I threw a cup at Ryan this afternoon because he told me the western patrol was fine, and it was, and I hated that I didn’t know it myself.” He swallowed. “And I’ve been taking all of it out on you, because you’re the one who keeps coming back.”‘

I sat down on the edge of the bed beside the chair and took his hand.

“It’s fine,” I said.

“It isn’t.”

“It’s hard. That isn’t the same thing.” I turned his hand over in mine. His fingers were warm now, at least. For days after the field they had been cold. “I’m managing. Liam helps. Your mother helps. She found me a precedent about floods for Edmund that made him look like he’d swallowed something

sweet.”

I didn’t tell him about the back stairs. I didn’t know how to say Sloane’s name to him in this room, not yet. But I thought about her, sitting at that dark window, saying let them carry some of it, and I let Kade’s hand carry my weight for a moment, and that helped too.

“I hate this,” he said quietly.