His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 128

Chapter 128

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Chapter 128

Abby

mogen had asked for the training hall at seven, and for nobody else in it.

Ryan had grumbled about that. The warriors trained at seven. He had moved them to the north field with a great deal of muttering, and posted two of his own at the doors, and told me that if anything happened he wanted to know about it before anyone else did. I had promised him he would.

The hall was cold. Somebody had opened the high windows to air it out, and the light came down through them in long gray bars across the mats. Daphne was already there when I came in with her bag open on a bench and a folded blanket over her arm. Imogen sat cross-legged on the floor at the edge of the mats with a wooden box in her lap, and I didn’t let myself look at the box.

Sloane came in last.

She walked from the side door without the crutch, slowly, with only a slight hitch on the left. She was in a plain gray sweater and trousers, and her hair was tied back off her face, and she looked at the three of us, and at the empty hall, and at the box in Imogen’s lap, and her expression didn’t change at

all.

“You asked for me,” she said.

“I did,” I said. “Come and sit down.”

She sat on the bench beside Daphne’s bag. I sat beside her.

“I promised I’d find you something to do,” I said. “After the reception.”

“You did.”

“Imogen asked for you.” I glanced at Imogen, who was turning one of her rings and watching Sloane with her sharp, tired eyes. “By name.”

Sloane looked at her.

“I gather at night,” Imogen said. “Roots, bark, moss. Some of it only shows itself under the moon, and some of it’s under the snow by now, and I can’t find it with these.” She tapped the side of her nose. “I’m an old woman with a human nose, girl. I need a wolf’s.”

“There are forty wolves in the barracks.”

“There are. And every one of them makes the sign against the evil eye when he thinks I’m not looking.” Imogen’s mouth thinned. “I won’t have one of those at my elbow while I work. You don’t

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“I don’t need you to fight. Ryan has wolves for that. I need you to carry a basket and keep your eyes, open.” Imogen tilted her head. “And to let me look at you while you do it.”

Soane’s face didn’t change. “Look at me.”

“At that.” Imogen nodded at the faded mark on her neck. “A bond cut through on a field, with a curse in it. I’ve never seen one up close that wasn’t already dead. In ten days I have to tie something to the Alpha’s heart and make it hold, and I’d like to know first how a thing behaves when it was to come apart.”

It was quiet in the hall.

“It’s night work,” I said. “In the cold. Nobody else wants it.” I made myself say the rest/”When I took it to the council, Garrick said it was fitting. Let the traitor carry the witch’s basket.”

I watched it land. Sloane only nodded, as if I had told her the weather.

“He’s not wrong,” she said. “Yes. All right. Yes.”

Something in her shoulders let go, just slightly. I don’t think she knew it did.

“Good,” Daphne said briskly. “Then before anyone goes traipsing about in the woods at midnight, I want to see that leg. Properly. With all four of them on the ground.” She looked at Sloane. “When did you last shift?”

Sloane didn’t answer right away.

“The field,” she said. “Before the field. Weeks ago.”

“Then it’s time.” Daphne held out the blanket. “I want to see how she’s carrying it. Slowly, mind. If it hurts, you stop and you tell me. If Rhea doesn’t want to put weight on it, you let her not.”

Sloane looked at the blanket. Then at me.

“I’ll turn around,” I said.

***

I heard the shift rather than saw it. The soft rustle of clothes. A long, careful breath. Then the sound I had heard a thousand times and never stopped hearing, bones moving, the low wet pull of a body becoming something else.

Then the click of claws on the mats.

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cream all over, with gold laid along her shoulders and down her spine as if someone had brushed it, on, and in the light from the windows the gold looked almost warm. Her ears were up. She stood very still with her weight forward on her front legs and looked around the empty hall as if she had forgotten what it felt like to be this big.

She took a step, and another, and the left hind leg came down carefully. She tested it the way you test ice, a little weight, then a little more. Then she put it down properly and walked, slowly, the whole length of the mats and back, and the limp was so slight I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t been looking for it.

Daphne crouched beside her and ran her hands down the leg from hip to paw, firmly, feeling for something under the fur. Rhea let her. She stood with her head low and her ears turned back toward Daphne’s voice, and she didn’t flinch once.

“Good,” Daphne said, half to herself. “Good girl. That’s knit properly. Both breaks.” She sat back on her heels. “She’s favoring it out of habit, mostly. Another month and you won’t see it at all.”

Rhea’s ears came forward.

She looked at me. Then she trotted over, slowly, and put her nose against my hand.

I didn’t move. I let her smell my fingers. She breathed in, long and careful, and then she pressed her head against my palm for one second, very lightly, the way a wolf does when she is saying something she doesn’t have words for.

Then she turned and went back to Daphne and the blanket, and a moment later, Sloane was on her knees on the mats with the blanket around her shoulders, breathing hard, with her hair come loose

and her face wet.

“Sorry,” she said. “It’s been a long time.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Daphne said. “She looks wonderful.”

Sloane laughed. It came out shaky. “She thinks so too.”

***

She got dressed again behind the equipment racks. When she came back, Imogen had opened the

wooden box on her knee.

I looked at it this time. I made myself.

The collar lay coiled on its black velvet, dull and dark, exactly the way it had looked at the foot of the dais three nights ago. In the gray light of the hall it looked smaller. Ordinary, almost. A band of old metal with thin threads woven through it. The kind of thing you might find at the bottom of a

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work all right. The same hand that made the stones on the field, and the veil on the western line.” She ran one finger along the band without quite touching it. “But I can’t read it properly sitting still. It’s made to do something. I need to see it doing it.”

The hall was very quiet.

“On a wolf,” Sloane said.

“On a wolf.” Imogen looked up at her. “Not for long. A minute. Two. Long enough to watch the threads take hold and see where they go. And then off again.” She didn’t look away. “I wouldn ask the Luna. You understand why.”

“I understand,” Sloane said.

She didn’t say anything else.

She was looking at the collar. Just looking, with her hands folded in her lap and her face very still. knew that stillness. It was what Sloane did with her face when something frightened her and she had

decided nobody was going to see it.

I hadn’t known I was going to speak until I did.

“You don’t have to,” I said. “Sloane. You don’t. We can find another way.”

She turned her head and looked at me.

Whatever she saw in my face, it changed something in hers. I watched it happen. I watched her look at me and see what the box had done to me at the reception, and what it was doing to me now, sitting on a bench in the training hall in daylight with my throat closing just from looking at it.

She looked back at the collar.

“It’s all right,” she said quietly. “I know how to wear it.”

***

She held her hair up off her neck while Imogen fastened it.

I watched the clasp go home. I heard the small click it made. And I felt it in my own throat, so clearly that for a second the hall swung around me and I had to put my hand flat on the bench to stay upright.

Diana pressed herself flat against the inside of my ribs, shaking.

Sloane’s back arched. The pain went through her the way it had gone through me the night they put

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shoulders could come down.

Imogen leaned in close with her rings glinting, watching the side of Sloane’s neck as if she could see Something there that the rest of us couldn’t. Her lips moved silently.

“Talk to me, girl,” she said. “What does it feel like?”

“Like nothing.” Sloane’s voice was low and very even. “That’s the worst of it. It isn’t that she’s quiet, or far away. Where she was, there’s nothing at all. I know she’s in there somewhere, under it.an’t reach her.” She swallowed. “The bond goes too. Whatever’s left of it.”

“And the burning?”

“It comes back if you push.” Her mouth twisted. “Pull at it, get angry, get frightened, try to run. It doesn’t care which. The more you fight, the more it hurts, and it learns fast. By the second day it was warming before I’d even decided to move.” She was quiet for a second. “The first night, I tried to tear it off. He held my hands away from it until I stopped. He told me it responds to resistance.”

I remembered that too. Not the words, because nobody had said them kindly to me. Cressida’s assistants had held my wrists and told me to stop fighting it, and the old woman had touched the collar and said I would adjust. And I remembered the silence where Diana should have been, which was worse than anything they did to me after.

I had worn it for a day. Sloane had worn hers for weeks.

“The girls in the cells all had them,” Sloane said. She was speaking to Imogen now, slowly, as if every word cost her something. “Every one I saw. So their wolves couldn’t answer them, I suppose, and they couldn’t shift and fight their way out.” Her voice didn’t change. “I don’t know what else was done to them. I never saw. I don’t even know how long most of them had been there.”

“Daphne’s girls lost their memories,” Imogen said. “Some of them can’t tell you their own names. You kept yours.”

Sloane was quiet for a moment.

“He never let her near me,” she said at last. “Cressida. Not once. He kept me in his rooms and he kept her out of them.” She touched the band at her throat with two fingers, lightly, the way you touch a bruise to see if it still hurts. “Maybe that’s why. I don’t know.”

“But he kept you in this,” Imogen said.

“For a while.” Sloane let her hand fall. “He put it on me because he didn’t trust me. He was right not