His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 144

Chapter 144

Kade

They came at ten.

All eight of them. The council had kept the same day and the same hour for as long as I had been alive, and in all that time I could count on one hand the mornings anyone had called it outside them. I sat at the head of that table now and listened to them come in, one by one, and knew from them footsteps how each of them had taken my note.

Edmund Marsh, quick and worried. Hester, slow, in no hurry at all. Ansel Pike, so quiet I didn’t hear him until he was pulling out his chair. And Garrick, last, with his cane striking the boards/hard enough to be heard in the corridor, so that everyone would know he was angry before he opened his

mouth.

Abby sat at my right hand. She had dressed carefully, in one of the dark blue dresses she wore for council, and pinned her hair back so the silver showed. She was very pale. Through the bond she was quiet, the kind of quiet that takes effort.

Liam sat on my left. Ryan stood by the door, where the Gamma always stood. He hadn’t looked at

me since he came in.

In the corner by the window, in the chair nobody else ever took, Imogen sat with her hands folded in

her lap.

“The Alpha,” Garrick said, before he had even sat down, “has something to tell us. Or so his note says. Though I gather the kitchens have already told most of the town.”

“Sit down, Garrick,” I said.

He sat. Slowly, with both hands on the cane.

I told them.

I told it the way I had told it in the corridor at six that morning. Sloane Sinclair had been moved in the night, on my order, by my Beta. After what had been shouted in that garden the night of the fire, I hadn’t been willing to leave her under a roof with people who had spent half the night calling for her blood. She was somewhere safe. I wouldn’t say where. The fewer people who knew, the fewer could be

asked, and the safer she was.

It was easier the second time. I hadn’t thought it would be. That frightened me more than anything else that morning.

When I finished, nobody said anything for a while.

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He said it as if he were holding the word up to the light.

“A woman who betrayed this pack to the Rogue King. Who paid a rogue to carry your Luna over the border. Who was pardoned by this table, against my voice and Hester’s, on the promise that she would stay where we could see her.” He leaned forward. “And on the first night anyone accuses her f anything, the Alpha and the Beta take her out the back door in the dark and hide her where none of us

can see her at all.”

“She was accused by a girl who was asleep,” Cassandra said.

She was halfway down the left side of the table, in her usual chair, with her hands folded, She hadn’t looked at me when she came in either. I hadn’t expected her to.

“She was accused by a girl in front of fifty people,” Ansel said gently. “Whatever state the girl was

in.”

“And fifty people shouted traitor,” my mother said. She looked round the table, at each of them in turn. “I was in that garden, Garrick. I heard my pack. I heard what they wanted to do to her, and so did you. If my son hadn’t moved her, I would have done it myself.”

Edmund Marsh had gone pink. Hester’s mouth had thinned. Garrick didn’t look away from my mother, but he didn’t answer her either.

“There’s no proof she set that fire,” I said. “None. Owen was with her from the moment she left her room. He saw her throw herself at that candle and miss it by a foot. He told this table so, the morning after the fire. Nobody has called him a liar.” I let that sit. “What we have is a girl who was chained in a cell on a mountain for months, who walks in her sleep, and who says things in her sleep she can’t remember saying. I want to know who put a candle in her hand. I want to know where she got it, and how she got through a locked clinic and across the garden in bare feet without a mark on them. Those are the questions this pack should be asking. And they’ll be answered.”

“By whom?” Ansel said.

“By me.”

Ansel smiled very slightly and looked down at his hands, and said nothing else. I could hear the rest of the sentence in the room as clearly as if he had.

By you. Who has hidden the only other person who was there.

***

“The inquiry sits tomorrow,” Garrick said. “You set it yourself, at this table. Three days, you said, when everyone had slept and nobody was standing in the smoke.” He put both hands flat on the head

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“From this table?”

“From this pack.” I kept my voice level. “The inquiry is postponed.”

The room changed. I felt it the way you feel weather change in a valley. Edmund drew in a breath. Hester put down her pen.

“Postponed,” Garrick said. “Until when?”.

“Until this council can promise me she’ll walk out of that room on her own feet. And until papne says the girl is fit to be heard. One of them has burned hands and won’t let anyone turn the amp down. The other has a leg that was broken in two places this autumn, and knees tom to pieces on the storehouse floor.” I looked at him. “Neither of them is going to stand in front of you this week.”

“And the pardon?”

“The pardon stands. Nothing has been proved that would take it away.”

“Nothing has been proved,” Garrick said, “because the Alpha has put the accused where nobody can prove anything.”

“That isn’t what happened.”

“That’s what it looks like, from here.” He wasn’t shouting. Garrick never shouted at that table. He let the words do it. “That’s what it will look like in town by tonight, and in every pack in the valley by the end of the week. The Alpha of Moonhaven, a week back in his chair, hiding the traitor from his own council.” He looked down the table at Abby. “With his Luna’s blessing, I’m told.”

I felt it in the bond before I saw it. Abby didn’t move. She didn’t say anything. But something in her drew in on itself, the way a hare flattens in long grass.

Knox came up.

He came up all at once, from the bottom of my chest, with his hackles stiff and his lips peeling back, and for a moment the room went red at the edges. I could have been across that table before Garrick had finished turning his head. I could feel exactly how it would go. The cane. The old man’s chair going over.

And under Knox, the other thing. Turning. Lifting its head in the dark.

Keep your temper. That was the price Imogen had named, the night she tied it down. Whatever they said, whatever they did. Every time I lost it, the binding would fray.

I put my hands flat on the table.

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him turn over, slowly, and settle again, not quite as deep as before.

“My Luna,” I said, “has my confidence. As she had this council’s for a month, while I lay upstairs. You’ll speak of her at this table the way you did then, Garrick, or you won’t speak of her.”

Garrick held my eyes. Then he inclined his head, very slightly. It wasn’t an apology. He didny mean

it to be one.

****

They went round it for another hour.

Hester asked whether the warriors guarding Sloane were Moonhaven’s, and I said they were mine, which was true in a way she would never think of. Edmund asked, nervously, whether the other packs should be told, and I said no. Ansel asked nothing at all. He sat with his hands folded and listened to everyone else, and I watched him gather it all up, every word, the way he gathered things, to be taken out later and turned over in somebody else’s kitchen.

Near the end, Garrick turned in his chair.

“Gamma,” he said.

Ryan, by the door, straightened very slightly.

“You run the watch,” Garrick said. “Whose wolves are guarding the traitor? Where have you put

them?”

The room went quiet.

I didn’t look at Ryan. I couldn’t. I knew what I had done to him in that corridor at six that morning. I had stood in front of him and his own warriors and told him he wasn’t trusted with it. He had every right to tell this table so.

“The Alpha’s arrangements,” Ryan said, “are the Alpha’s.”

That was all. He didn’t look at me when he said it either. But he said it.

Garrick studied him. Then he turned back to the table with something on his face that might almost have been respect, and I hated it, because I knew exactly what it had cost the man by the door.

***

It ended the way I had known it would. No vote. Nothing to vote on. The inquiry postponed, the pardon standing, and eight people going out of the council room into the corridor with their heads close together, and the sound of their voices following them down the stairs.

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