His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 140

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Chapter 140

Abby

Rade’s voice went over all of them like a wave.

“Enough.”

He didn’t shout it. He didn’t need to. It was the Alpha’s voice, the one I had heard him use on a handful of times in my life, and it came up out of the bottom of him and went through the crowd and out across the frozen garden, and every single person in that ring of firelight stopped where they

stood.

The big cook in the apron took a step back. Then another.

Behind us, the storehouse roof came down.

It went all at once, with a long splintering groan and a rush of sparks that went up into the dark like a flock of birds, and the heat came out across the frost and hit my face. Somebody screamed. The hose crews staggered back and then set their feet and went in again. And in the middle of it, very calmly, Kade began to give orders.

Ryan, to the fire. Every warrior on the bucket line who wasn’t already there. The kitchens emptied and checked, the packhouse woken room by room and counted. Daphne, for the girl. Somebody to find Daphne. Somebody to find a blanket.

“Mother,” Kade said.

I hadn’t seen Cassandra arrive. She was at the edge of the crowd in her dressing gown and boots, with her hair down her back and her face white, and she came forward at once.

“Take Sloane upstairs,” Kade said. “Now. Owen goes with you. Nobody else goes near that room

tonight. Nobody.”

Cassandra didn’t answer him. She went straight past him, through the gap in the crowd, and knelt down in the frost beside Sloane, and put her arms round her.

Sloane let go of Tessa’s shoulders.

I watched her do it. I watched her hands open, slowly, one finger at a time, as if they had frozen there. Somebody from the clinic was already coming with a blanket, and they wrapped Tessa in it and lifted her, and she went limp in their arms with her face turned toward the fire, still whispering. Sloane didn’t look at her go. She let Cassandra pull her up. Her leg wouldn’t hold her. Owen got her

other arm.

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Not hard. He didn’t look at me. He was watching the crowd, the faces all round us, red and gold and wet-eyed in the firelight, and his hand on my wrist was very steady.

Not now, he said, through the bond. Not in front of them. Abby. Please.

I stopped.

Cassandra and Owen took Sloane away through the crowd. Slowly, because of her leg. The people stepped back to let them pass, and nobody said anything, but I saw their faces as she went by I saw what was in them. And I saw, too, what happened after she had gone, when the space she had left closed up again.

They looked at me.

Not all of them. Not for long. A glance, here and there, from the edge of a crowd that had just heard a frightened girl in a white nightdress say Moonsilver over and over in the firelight. A glance, and then away. At the fire. At their feet. At anything but the silver in my hair.

I felt every single one of them.

****

The fire was out by dawn.

There wasn’t much left to put out by then. The storehouse was a black shell, the roof gone, the walls standing up out of the snow like broken teeth, and the smoke still coming off the ashes in thin gray ribbons. Half the winter flour was gone. Most of the grain. All of the lamp oil, which had gone up in the first quarter hour and taken the back wall with it. One of the warriors on the hose had burned both hands. Two of the kitchen boys had cut themselves on the broken glass from the windows.

Nobody was dead.

I said that to myself over and over, standing in the council room at seven in the morning in the clothes I had pulled on in the cabin, with soot on my sleeves and frost still in my hair. Nobody was dead.

Kade sat at the head of the table. He had his hands flat on the wood in front of him, and his face was gray, and through the bond I could feel what that night had cost him. The run back from the cabin. Two miles through the eastern woods, in the dark, with his hand pressed to his side the whole way. Standing in the cold for four hours giving orders. At the bottom of his chest, under Knox, the thing that Imogen had tied down lay heavy and still, but it wasn’t quite as still as it had been. I could feel it shifting. Very slightly. The way a sleeper shifts toward waking.

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Owen told it first.

stood at the foot of the table with his hands behind his back and his face scrubbed red and raw and his eyes on the wall above everyone’s heads, and he told it the way a warrior is trained to tell things. Plainly. In order. Leaving nothing out.

Sloane, at his door, a little after one. Saying Tessa was outside, with a candle. Saying they had to go now. Him saying he would call the watch. Her saying no.

“She said if I called it,” Owen said, “there’d be twenty wolves out there, and the girl would wake up screaming, and we’d never know where she was going.”

Garrick Shaw shifted his cane.

Owen went on. The back stairs. The garden. The storehouse door, open. The girl inside, with the candle. Sloane saying her name, and nothing happening. The candle falling.

“She went for it,” Owen said. “Sloane. She threw herself at it. Her leg went and she fell, and she missed it by about a foot.” He swallowed. “I got the girl out. Sloane got herself out. Then I called the

watch.”

“After the fire had started,” Garrick said.

Owen’s jaw tightened. “Yes, sir.”

“Not before. When she first came to your door. When she told you the girl was out there with a

candle. You didn’t call it then.”

“No, sir.”

“Because she told you not to.”

Owen didn’t answer.

Garrick leaned back in his chair. He didn’t look pleased about it. That was the worst of it. He looked like a man who had been proved right about something he had hoped very much to be wrong about.

“So,” he said. “Let me understand. A traitor, pardoned by this council against my advice, kept under guard by the Alpha’s own order, sits at her window at one in the morning and sees one of the girls from the mountain walking in her sleep. Out of all the windows in this house, hers. She knows exactly where the girl is going. She knows she’ll have a candle. She stops the guard from calling the watch. She follows the girl to the storehouse and is there, in person, when it goes up. And when it’s burning, and the girl wakes, the first thing out of the girl’s mouth is a story about the Luna.” He looked round

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her hair pinned up any way and her face like stone.

“She threw herself at a lit candle on a leg that was broken in two places eight weeks ago,” Cassandra said. “Owen saw her do it. Go and look at her knees, Garrick, if you don’t believe him. I have. They’re tok to pieces.”

“Or she knocked it over herself, and fell doing it.”

“And then dragged the girl out of a burning-building, and held on to her, and asked her who had given her the candle.” Cassandra’s voice didn’t rise. “That’s a very strange way to commit arson”

“That’s a very clever way to commit arson,” Ansel Pike said gently, “if you want to be found holding

the victim.”

Cassandra turned her head and looked at him. Ansel didn’t look away. But something in his thin face shifted, very slightly, and he put his hands in his lap.

“The girl said what she said,” he went on, more quietly. “In front of fifty people. I don’t think anyone at this table believes the Luna crept into a child’s head in the middle of the night and walked her to the storehouse with a candle.” He let that sit, just for a moment, long enough for everyone to hear that he had said it. “So the question is who put it there. A frightened girl, half out of her mind, who doesn’t know what she’s saying, will say whatever the last person who spoke to her told her to say. And the last person who spoke to her was Sloane Sinclair.”

I sat very still.

“She asked her a question,” Cassandra said. “Who gave it to you. Owen heard it. Half the kitchen

heard it.”

“And the girl answered.” Ansel spread his hands. “With the one name in this pack that would do the most damage. The one name that would set this whole house whispering. A girl who was rescued by the Luna. Who has every reason in the world to love her.” He looked round the table. “Why would she say that, unless someone had already put it in her head?”

Nobody answered.

Under the table, my hands had closed on my knees.

I asked her to watch, I thought. I asked Sloane to watch Tessa. In the corridor by the window, not two weeks ago. I told her, if Tessa walks again, I want to know. Not Ryan. Not the council. Me.

I opened my mouth.

And I saw, in the half second before I spoke, exactly how it would sound.

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What would they hear?

Not that Sloane was innocent. They would hear that Sloane and the Luna had been meeting in corridors. They would hear that the Luna had been afraid of that girl, for no reason anyone could see. They would hear Tessa’s words again, and this time they would have a reason to believe them could already see it. Garrick’s face. Ansel’s gentle voice. One does wonder what the Luna knew, and when. And the glances across the firelight, at the silver in my hair, would stop being glances.

And it wouldn’t save her. It would only put me in the room beside her.

Across the table, at the very end, Imogen sat in the corner chair she always took, with a cup of something in her hands that she wasn’t drinking. She had been there all along. I hadn’t noticed her

come in.

She was looking at me.

She didn’t shake her head. She didn’t do anything. She only looked at me, steadily, over the rim of her the way she had looked at me in the training hall when she said when I say stop, you stop.

cup,

I closed my mouth.

***

Kade let them talk for a long time.

He didn’t say much. He listened, with his hands flat on the table, the way his father had, and every so often he asked a question, short and plain, and listened to the answer. I could feel him holding himself. I could feel Knox right under the surface, pacing, every time Garrick said traitor and every time Ansel said the Luna. And under Knox, the other thing. Turning over in its sleep. Each time a little more.

When he finally spoke, his voice was very even.

“Sloane Sinclair stays in her room,” he said. “Under guard. Day and night. Nobody goes in but my mother and Daphne.” He looked down the table. “The girl stays in the clinic, with Daphne. Nobody questions her. Nobody goes near her but the healers. She’s eighteen years old and she was chained to a floor for months, and last night she woke up in front of a burning building with no idea how she got there. Whatever else is true, that’s true.”

Garrick opened his mouth.

“There’ll be an inquiry,” Kade said, before he could speak. “A proper one. This council. Three days from now, when everyone has slept, and nobody is standing in the smoke. We’ll hear Owen again, and the cook, and anyone else who was there. And Sloane.” He paused. “And the girl, if Daphne says she’s

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three days.”

“Alpha-”

three days, Garrick.”

It came out of him low and rough, from the bottom of his chest, and every person at that table heard what was under it. Knox. Very close to the surface. Garrick heard it. He shut his mont

At the corner of the room, Imogen set her cup down very quietly on the floor beside her chai

*****

I went to the clinic afterward.

I don’t know why. Kade had gone back up to his rooms, slowly, with Liam’s shoulder under his arm, and his face set so hard I knew how much every step was costing him, and Imogen walking behind them both. I should have gone with them. I meant to. And instead I found myself standing outside the clinic door, in my sooty clothes, with my hand on the latch.