His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 129

Chapter 129

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Sloane

Chapter 129

ogen came for me at eleven, the way she had said she would, and she didn’t knock.

I was already dressed. I had been dressed since nine, sitting on the edge of the bed in my boots with my coat across my knees, listening to the packhouse settle. The pipes ticking as they cooled the clock at the end of the corridor, the third step of the back stairs below Cassandra’s rooms that complamed f you put your weight on the left side of it. I had known those stairs since I was sixteen. had gone up them at three in the morning in heels, more than once, on my way back from somewhere I shouldn’t have been, and sat on that third step to take the heels off so nobody would hear.

Nobody had ever caught me. I had been very proud of that.

The door opened, and Imogen looked in at me in my coat and boots, and at the basket I had put ready by the door, and made a small noise through her nose that might have been approval.

“You’ll want gloves,” she said.

“I have gloves.”

“You’ll want better gloves.” She held out a pair. Thick, ugly, oiled leather, the kind the groundskeepers wore. “There’s juniper where we’re going. And holly. And I don’t want your blood on anything I pick.”

I took the gloves.

***

Ryan had given us the inner line and not one step past it.

He had said so to Imogen, and then to me, and then to Imogen again in a lower voice when he thought I couldn’t hear. Inside the patrol line, inside mind-link range of the night watch, back before the moon went behind the ridge. If either of us saw anything we didn’t like, we were to call the watch first and think about it afterward. And there would be a wolf at the hedge the whole time, every night, whether Imogen liked it or not. He hadn’t looked at me while he said it. He had looked at a point about a foot to the left of my head, the way most of the warriors looked at me now.

I didn’t mind. It was better than the way they had looked at me before, when I was Sloane Sinclair of the council and the best fighter of my year, and they had looked at me as if they were trying to decide whether to be afraid of me or in love with me.

Now they just looked past me.

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went past.

We went out through the kitchen garden and the gap in the hedge behind the cold frames, where he cooks’ boy had stood in the mud with his trousers soaked the night I came back from the stars The frost had taken the garden since then. The cabbages stood in their rows under a white crust and the bean poles were bare, and our breath went up in front of us in two pale clouds.

My leg didn’t like the cold. It never would, Daphne said. I would feel every winter in that bene for the rest of my life, the way old soldiers felt the weather in their scars. I had laughed when she told me. She hadn’t understood why.

Beyond the hedge, the ground fell away toward the trees, and the moon came out from behind a long bank of cloud, three-quarters full and very bright, and laid the whole slope out in silver and black.

Imogen stopped and looked up at it.

“Nine days,” she said.

I didn’t ask what she meant. I knew. Everybody who lived anywhere near the Alpha wing knew, though nobody was supposed to. Nine days to the full moon, and whatever Imogen was going to do for Kade, and whatever it would cost Abby to let her.

“What are we picking?” I asked.

“Things that won’t keep.” She started down the slope. Her walk was quick and short and sure, an old woman who had been walking over rough ground in the dark for longer than I had been alive. “Mistletoe, off the oaks by the lake. It has to be cut by moonlight or it’s only a weed. Juniper berries, the blue ones, not the green. Moss from the north side of stone, never wood. And there’s a rowan at the bottom of the ravine that still has its berries on, if the birds have left any, which they won’t have.” She glanced back at me. “Keep up, girl.”

I kept up.

***

It was easier than I had expected.

I don’t mean the walking. The walking was hard. By the time we reached the oaks by the lake my leg was aching from the hip down, a deep, dull, patient ache, and I had stopped pretending to Imogen that it wasn’t. I mean the rest of it. The quiet. The cold. The moon on the water, and the black shapes of the oaks against it, and nothing at all required of me except to hold a basket and not fall over.

Imogen climbed the first oak herself. I hadn’t believed she would until she was doing it, her skirts hitched up into her belt and a short curved knife between her teeth, going up into the branches as if

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“Because it’s never touched the ground,” she said, coming down. “Not once since it seeded. That’s the point of it. It lives between the earth and the sky and belongs to neither.” She took the knife oft of her teeth. “It’s good for holding things that want to come apart.”

She looked at me when she said that, and then looked away, and went on to the next tree

Rhea watched all of it from somewhere just under my breastbone.

She had been watchful since the training hall. As if the collar coming off had shaken something loose in her, and she was still turning over what it was. Every so often, on the walk down, she had lifted her head toward the west. Toward the mountains. Toward a road I was not going to think about.

Don’t, I told her.

She put her head down again. She didn’t argue. She hadn’t argued with me since the field. I almost wished she would.

When I looked up, Imogen was watching me from under the oak.

“West,” she said.

I hadn’t moved. I was sure I hadn’t moved. “What?”

“You turned your head. Three times since the garden.” She tucked her knife into her belt. “Always the same way. Does it pull, or does it ache?”

I thought about not answering. Then I remembered that this was what I was here for.

“Both,” I said. “It aches all the time. It pulls when I’m tired.”

She nodded, slowly, as if I had told her something useful about the weather, and filed it away somewhere behind her eyes.

We found the juniper on the rocky ground above the ravine, and I picked while Imogen held the lantern, and the gloves were exactly as necessary as she had said. The berries came off into my palm cold and hard, and the smell of them got into everything, sharp and green and clean. The moss was harder. The snow had drifted against the old boundary stones along the top of the ravine, and Imogen walked up and down in front of them with the lantern for a while and then looked at me. I crouched, slowly, with my leg out stiff to one side, and breathed in. Under the snow and the cold stone there was something green and wet and alive, on the third stone from the end, low down. I dug it out with my gloved hands, and Imogen peeled the moss off the north face in one long piece and held it up to the

lantern.

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“Well,” she said. “It was worth looking.”

We started back.

I saw her first.

We were coming up through the birches on the slope below the packhouse, the last stretch before the garden hedge, and Imogen was ahead of me with the lantern shuttered down to a slit, and I had stopped to ease my leg, and that was the only reason I saw anything at all.

There was someone in the trees.

Off to the left, forty yards away, where the birches thinned out and the slope opened toward the

lawn. Someone small. Pale. Walking.

Owen was somewhere behind us at the cold frames, on the far side of the hedge, where the slope hid the lawn from him. I didn’t call out. I don’t know why. Every instinct I had, every year of training, said call the watch, and Ryan’s voice said it too, call first and think about it afterward. I didn’t. I stood very quietly in the shadow of a birch with my hand on its bark and watched.

It was a girl. In a nightdress.

White cotton, the plain kind Daphne gave out to the girls from the mountain, long-sleeved and down to the ankles. The hem was soaked dark to the knee. Her hair was loose down her back, brown, tangled from the pillow. And her feet were bare. Bare, on frozen ground, in the frost that had turned every blade of grass on that slope to a little white blade of its own.

She wasn’t hurrying. She wasn’t shivering. She was walking up the slope toward the packhouse at an easy, even pace, with her arms loose at her sides, the way you walk somewhere you have walked a hundred times before.

Imogen had stopped. I hadn’t heard her come back. She was at my shoulder with the lantern held low, and she was looking too.

“Who is that?” I said. Barely a breath.

Imogen didn’t answer.

The girl came out of the trees onto the lawn, and the moonlight caught her full in the face, and I knew her.

Tessa.

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I had never seen her face like this.

was empty, and it wasn’t the emptiness of sleep. Her eyes were open, and she was looking straight ahead of her at the packhouse, and there was nothing in them. Nothing at all.

She walked across the lawn. She didn’t look down. She didn’t look at the frost, or the lake or the long black line of the trees. She went straight up the slope, past the end of the terrace and arend the corner of the Alpha wing, and I followed her without deciding to, keeping to the edge of the trees,

with Imogen behind me.

She stopped under a window.

It was on the second floor, at the end of the wing, a tall window with the curtains drawn and a thin line of lamplight showing at the edge of them. I knew that window. Everybody in Moonhaven knew that window. When I was a little girl, Cassandra had lived behind it.

The Luna’s rooms.

Tessa stood on the frozen grass under Abby’s window, with her bare feet in the frost and her face turned up toward the light, and didn’t move.

The cold went down the back of my neck like water.

Rhea had come up out of nowhere. She was on her feet inside me with every hair on end, silent, staring up at that window as hard as Tessa was.

“Sloane,” Imogen said, very low.

I was already walking.

***

I didn’t touch her. I came round in front of her, slowly, where she could have seen me if there had been anything in her eyes to see with, and said her name.

“Tessa.”

Nothing.

“Tessa.” A little louder. “Tessa, it’s Sloane. You’re outside. You’re all right.”

She blinked.

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She made a small sound. Then she looked up at the packhouse, and at the window, and at me, and at Nogen behind me with the lantern, and the fear came into her face so fast it was like watching a bruise come up.

“I was in bed,” she said. Her voice shook. “I was in bed. I left the lamp on. I always leave the lamp on.” She took a step back, and her heel came down on the frost, and she flinched as if she has only just felt it. “Why am I- How did I- I was in bed.”

“I know,” I said. “It’s all right. You walked in your sleep, that’s all.”

“I don’t do that.” Her teeth had started to chatter. All at once, as if her body had only now remembered how cold it was. “I’ve never done that. I don’t- I don’t remember anything

I took off my coat.

She flinched when I put it round her shoulders. I didn’t take it personally. I pulled it closed in front of her and buttoned the top button, the way you would for a child, and she stood there and let me, shaking so hard I could hear it.

Her hands were like ice. I took one of them to pull it through the sleeve, and that was when I

smelled it.

On her fingers. Faint, under the cold and the frost and the soap Daphne used in the clinic. Smoke. Not woodsmoke. The thin, oily, particular smell of a candle that has been burning for a long time and

has just been put out.

I held her hand a second longer than I needed to.

Then I let it go.