His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 134

Chapter 134

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Chapter 134

Kade

woke because nothing hurt.

It took me a moment to understand that was what had woken me. For six weeks I had come up out of sleep the same way every morning, slowly, through a fog of Daphne’s draughts, with the wound already waiting for me at the surface like a dog at a door. I would lie still with my eyes closed and take stock of it before I moved. Where it was worst. How far the threads had crept in the night. Whether I

could sit up on my own or would have to wait for someone to come.

This morning I lay in the gray light with my eyes closed and reached for it, out of habit, and it wasn’t there.

There was something. A weight, low down in my chest, heavy and still, the way a stone is still at the bottom of a pond. I could feel it if I went looking. But it didn’t move. It didn’t pull. It didn’t burn. It lay curled at the bottom of me, asleep, with Knox stretched out across the top of it like a guard across a doorway.

I breathed in all the way. Then I did it again, because I could.

Abby was asleep on my chest.

I didn’t remember carrying her up. I remembered the hall, and the cold, and kneeling in Imogen’s circle with her in my arms for a long time, until Daphne came and put a hand on my shoulder. I remembered the stairs. I must have walked them, with her, because I was here and she was here, and nobody else could have done it.

She lay on her side against me, half on top of me, with the blanket from the training hall still wrapped round her under the quilt. Her hand was flat on my chest, over my heart, where it had been when she fell asleep. Her hair had come loose across my shoulder.

At her temple, the two silver strands lay side by side against the brown.

I looked at them for a long time.

Then I eased her hand off my chest, and her head onto the pillow, an inch at a time. She frowned in her sleep and turned toward the warm place I had left, and pulled the quilt up under her chin, and didn’t wake. Daphne had said she would sleep for days. I hoped she would. I hoped she would sleep for

a week.

I sat up on the edge of the bed.

It was nothing. It was the simplest thing in the world. I put my feet on the floor and stood up, and

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I dressed myself.

It took a long time. My hands were steady now, but they had forgotten some of it. The buttons The cuffs. The particular way you have to bend to get a boot on without pulling at your side. Twice stopped halfway through and stood still, waiting for the wound to answer, and it didn’t.

The bandage was still there, under the shirt. Daphne had put a fresh one on last night, after. When touched it through the cloth, there was no wet heat under it. Only a dull ache, deep in the muscle,

the kind of ache you get from an old injury in cold weather.

The mirror over the washstand showed me a man I hadn’t seen in six weeks. Thin. Too thin the shirt loose across the shoulders where it used to pull. Gray under the eyes. But upright. On his/feet. At the edge of the collar, where three dark threads had reached the side of my throat by the reception, there was nothing now but three faint lines, pale gray, like the marks a pencil leaves when you rub it out.

I buttoned the collar over them anyway.

At the door I looked back at her. She hadn’t moved. One hand had found its way out from under the quilt and lay open on my pillow, palm up, fingers curled.

I went out and closed the door very quietly behind me.

***

The council met at eight.

I knew that because it had met at eight every Tuesday for as long as I had been alive. My father had set the hour. I had sat at the head of that table at eight o’clock every Tuesday for eight years, until a cursed blade had sent Abby to sit there in my place, in my mother’s borrowed dresses, while I lay upstairs and listened to the bond go tight every time Garrick Shaw opened his mouth.

I walked there.

Down the Alpha wing, down the main stairs, across the hall. Every one of them. Nobody was carrying me. Nobody had an arm under mine. It was early, and the packhouse was only half awake, but the people who were up saw me. A girl carrying linen stopped dead on the landing and stared. One of the kitchen boys, coming up from below with a crate of something, put it down very slowly on the step and stood there with his mouth open. Two warriors coming off the night watch stopped talking in the middle of a sentence.

I nodded to each of them as I passed. I didn’t stop.

By the time I reached the corridor outside the council room, I could feel it behind me, the way you feel a change in the wind. Someone would be running to tell someone. Someone would be reaching for

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never in their lives troubled to keep their voices down in that room. They had never needed to.

“-carried in. That’s what I heard. Carried in by the Beta and the Gamma, and the witch already in here waiting with the doors barred.” Garrick. “At the full moon. In my day, we’d have called that what

its.’

“And what is it, Garrick?” Hester’s voice. Dry as paper.

“Witchcraft. In the training hall. With the Luna in the middle of it.” A thump. His cane, on the floorboards. “Half the night watch saw the light in those windows. Silver as you like. And nobody’s said a word to this council. Not one word.”

“The Luna’s been in the Alpha’s rooms every night for a week.” Ansel Pike. Thin and gentle and reasonable, the way he always was when he was about to say something poisonous. “Which is natural, of course. Entirely natural. But one does wonder what she’s doing there. Whether it’s nursing, or something else. We were promised an answer, if you remember. About the Alpha’s recovery. About an heir.” A pause. “We still haven’t had one.”

“Ansel,” my mother said. Very quietly.

“I’m only asking what the pack is asking, Cassandra. You know what they’re saying in the town. That he’s worse than we’re being told. That he can’t stand. That she’s keeping him up there because the moment anyone sees him, it’s over.” Another pause. “And that whatever she did in that hall last night, she did because she’s desperate. And desperate girls with that kind of power-”

I opened the door.

***

It was the silence I would remember.

Eight people at a long scarred table, in a room I had known since I was old enough to crawl under it. Edmund Marsh at the near end with his spectacles pushed up on his forehead. Garrick with both hands on his cane. Hester in her cardigan. Ansel Pike with his mouth still a little open, the end of his sentence still in it. My mother, halfway down on the left, very straight in her chair.

Every one of them turned to the door, and every one of them stopped.

I didn’t say anything. I walked in. I walked the length of the table, past every one of them, at an ordinary pace, the pace of a man who had walked the length of that table a thousand times and expected to do it a thousand more. I didn’t look at anyone. I went round the end of the table to the chair at the head of it, the one Abby had been sitting in for six weeks, and I pulled it out, and I sat down.

My hands went flat on the table in front of me. Not because they were shaking. Because that was

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“Good morning,” I said.

dmund was the first to recover. He took his spectacles off his forehead, folded them, put them in his breast pocket, and inclined his head to me. Deeply. The exact depth he had used for my father.

“Alpha,” he said. “Good morning.”

One by one, the others did the same. Hester. The others along the table. Garrick, slowly, with his jaw working, as if the bow had been dragged out of him by the scruff. Ansel last of all, with a smile on his thin face that didn’t reach anywhere near his eyes.

“Alpha,” he said. “What a joy to see you on your feet.”

“Isn’t it,” I said.

I looked down the table at him for a moment. Long enough for him to wonder how much I had heard through the door. Then I looked away, because I had promised Imogen, and because I could feel Knox lift his head at the bottom of my chest, and the thing under him stir, very faintly, in its sleep.

I breathed out. Knox lay down again.

“I won’t keep you long,” I said. “I know there’s business. Edmund will take you through it. But there are a few things you should hear from me first, before you hear them in the town.”

I let my eyes go round the table.

“I’m well enough to take my seat,” I said. “As of this morning, the regency is ended. I’m grateful to this council for its patience over these last weeks. I know it wasn’t easy.” I didn’t look at Garrick. “And I’m grateful to my mother, and to my Beta, and to my Gamma, who between them kept this pack standing while I couldn’t.”

Murmurs. Nods.

“Most of all,” I said, “I’m grateful to my Luna.”

Nobody moved.

“She sat in this chair for six weeks,” I said. “She was eighteen years old, and she sat here, every Tuesday, and answered every one of you, and some of you didn’t make that easy for her. She brought home every girl we could find a home for. She welcomed every Alpha in the valley into our hall with her own Alpha upstairs in a bed, and sent them away believing Moonhaven was standing. She kept it standing.” I looked at Ansel. “And whatever she was doing in my rooms every night, Ansel, she was doing it for me. You can tell the town that, if they ask.”

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“Good,” I said. “Then nobody will object to what comes next.”

leaned back in my father’s chair.

“From today,” I said, “Luna Abigail returns to her duties as Luna of this pack. Not as regent. As my Luna. With her own seat at this table, at my right hand, where my mother sat beside my father. She’ll come to council when she chooses, and she’ll speak in it when she chooses, and when she speaks, this council will give her the same courtesy it gives to me.” I paused. “She won’t be here today. She

resting. She’s earned it.”

Nobody said anything.

“And on the matter of an heir,” I said, “which I understand has been troubling this council a great deal-” I let it sit a moment. “When there is anything to tell you, you’ll be told. Until then, I’d take it as a kindness if it wasn’t discussed at this table again. Or anywhere else.”

Ansel opened his mouth.

“Ansel,” Edmund said mildly, without looking at him. “The Alpha has spoken.”

Ansel shut his mouth.

My mother had taken her hand away from her face. She was looking at me down the length of the table, and her eyes were wet, and she was smiling, and she didn’t look away.

***

I sat through the rest of it.

All of it. Edmund’s report on the eastern roads. Hester’s accounts. A long, slow argument between Garrick and Hester about the deer herd. I listened to every word. I answered when I was asked. I didn’t

look at the clock.

And at the end, when Edmund asked if there was anything else, I told them about the letter.

Not all of it. Not where it came from, or who it was addressed to, or who had read it out in my office

at three in the morning with her hands shaking. Only that we had received a warning, from a source beyond our borders, that Cressida was not finished with us. That the watch was doubled and would stay doubled. That nobody went out alone after dark until I said otherwise.

Garrick wanted to know the source.

“When I’m sure of it,” I said, “you’ll know.”

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death and should eat something.

My mother stopped last. She didn’t say anything either. She bent down and kissed the top of my head, the way she had when I was small, and went out.

****

Liam was waiting in the corridor.

He had been there the whole time. I had felt him on the other side of the door, through the nk, like

a hand on my shoulder. When the last of them had gone, he came in and shut the door and stood with his back against it, looking at me sitting at the head of the empty table.

“You walked,” he said.

“I walked.”

“All the way down the main stairs. In front of the linen girls.”

“That was the idea.”

He laughed. It came out of him all at once, the way it used to when we were boys, and he pushed his hand through his hair and came over and dropped into the chair at my right, Abby’s chair, and sat there grinning at me like an idiot.

“Ansel’s face,” he said.

“I know.”

“I’m going to remember Ansel’s face on my deathbed.”