His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 145

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Chapter 145

Sloane

The first night, I walked until the stars began to go.

The road climbed the whole way. Not steeply, at first. A long, patient grade, up between the pines, with the snow packed hard in the old wheel ruts and soft and deep at the edges. I walked in the ruts. My boots crunched. My breath went up in front of me and froze on the scarf Cassandra had wound round my neck, until the wool was stiff with it.

I didn’t look back after the curve. I had looked back once, at Liam standing at the bottom of the road with his hand raised, and that was enough. That was all I was going to let myself have.

The pack was heavy. Nathaniel’s pack. I could feel the shape of everything Cassandra had put in it through the canvas against my spine. Bread, and cheese, and a twist of paper with salt in it, and dried meat, and a flask. Matches in a tin. A knife in a leather sheath. Spare clothes, rolled tight.

I had stood in the middle of that room with her arms round me and not cried. I was proud of that. I had held on to her for a long time, and smelled her lavender soap, and felt her hand on the back of my head the way she used to hold me when I was sixteen and newly come to the packhouse and nobody else knew I cried at night. She hadn’t said anything. She hadn’t needed to.

At the fork, I stopped and took out Liam’s map.

The light was going gray by then. Not dawn yet. The hour before it, when the snow starts to glow from underneath and the trees come out of the dark one by one. I unfolded the map against the trunk of a pine and found the fork, and the red pencil lines spreading away from it to the left and the right, and the long blank space above them.

I took the right-hand road. It went north. That was all I knew.

When the sun came up, I found a hollow under an overhang of rock above the road, out of the wind, and scraped the snow out of it with my hands, and put down the blanket Cassandra had rolled under the flap of the pack, and lay down in it in all my clothes. I ate some of the bread. I drank from the flask. I took my boots off and put on dry socks, and put my feet inside the pack to keep them warm.

My leg ached all the way from the hip. Not the sharp pain of the break. The deep, dull, patient ache Daphne had promised me for every winter of my life.

I lay in the hollow with my eyes closed and listened to the wind in the pines.

Somewhere down in the valley behind me, Owen would be waking up. He would go to my door to take the morning watch from Liam, and find Liam gone, and the door unlocked, and the room empty. The bed made. The window shut.

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I turned my face into the blanket. I had known it would hurt. I hadn’t known how much.

Rhea pressed herself against the inside of my ribs. She didn’t say anything. She lifted her head and turned it toward the west, the way she always did, and I didn’t tell her not to. Not this time.

**

The second day, I let her out.

I hadn’t meant to. The plan had been to walk. A wolf can’t carry a pack, and I didn’t want to leave anything behind. But by the middle of the afternoon the road had narrowed to a track, and the track had climbed into deeper snow, and my leg had begun to drag. Every step was slower than the last. At that pace, I would still be on the mountain when Cassandra’s bread ran out.

So I took the pack off and lashed the straps together, short, the way we used to tie a training pack for wolf drills, so that it sat in a tight bundle. I put my clothes on top of it. I knelt in the snow and let

Rhea come.

It hurt. It always does, a little. It hurt more on the leg. But then I was standing on four feet in the snow with the cold gone from my skin and the whole mountain open in front of me in scent, and Rhea shook herself all over and sneezed, and I almost laughed.

She picked the bundle up in her jaws by the knot of the straps and set off up the track at a long,

easy lope.

She favored the leg. I felt her do it. Every time the left hind came down, she took the weight a little early off it, the way Daphne had said she would, out of habit, and I didn’t stop her. But she was faster than I was. Much faster. The track went by under her, and the trees, and the snow, and the miles.

At the end of the second day, a little before sunset, we came out on a ridge above the treeline and

saw the temple.

I knew it at once. I would have known it anywhere.

Not the building. There was no building. There was only the mountain, on the far side of a long white valley, with a great raw scar across its face where half of it had come down. Gray rock and broken stone and dirty snow, poured out down the slope in a fan a mile wide. Somewhere under all that, the chamber where they had kept Abby in chains. The cells. The long carved hall.

Somewhere in the middle of it, the place where the floor had gone out from under me, and my leg had snapped, and a man had picked me up out of the dark and carried me down the mountain.

Rhea sat down in the snow on the ridge with the bundle between her front paws and looked at it.

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the third morning, I found the crossroads.”

I came down to it from the south, through the trees, a little after dawn, and stopped at the edge of the woods and watched it for a long time before I went any closer. It wasn’t much. Two road meeting in a muddy fork in a cleft between hills. A long low building with a tin roof and a porch, and a sign over the door so old the letters had worn off it. A gas pump. A rusted truck with no wheels, sitting on

blocks in the snow.

There was smoke coming from the chimney. Someone was up.

I didn’t go down. Nobody could know I had been here. Not in this place, where rogues bought flour and lamp oil and didn’t ask each other’s names. If someone saw a she-wolf in a good coat coming down out of the trees on her own, they would remember. And there were people in these mountains

who would pay to know where I was.

I looked at the roads instead.

One ran away south and east, down toward the lowlands. One ran back the way I had come. And one, the narrowest, went north. Straight up into the hills, between the trees, climbing.

There were tire tracks on it. Old ones, half filled with new snow. But there.

I took out Liam’s map and found the crossroads and put my finger on it, and traced the narrow road north. It went a mile and a half on the map, and then the line stopped. Just stopped, in the middle of all that blank white space, as if the man who drew it had got bored. Above it, there was nothing at all.

The road comes up to it from the east and stops there.

I folded the map and put it away. I walked round the crossroads through the trees, keeping well back, until I came out on the narrow road above the last bend, where nobody at the trading post could

see me.

Then I started to climb.

***

The snow began at noon.

Lightly, at first. A few big soft flakes drifting down between the pines, settling on my sleeves and in my hair. I didn’t mind them. I was climbing, and I was warm with it, and the tire tracks were still there under the new snow, faint but there, going up.

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I kept walking. The road was still there, more or less. A long pale gap between the trees, going up. kept to the middle of it and kept climbing. My leg had started to drag again, worse than yesterday, And I couldn’t let Rhea out. Not in this. A wolf can run in snow, but she can’t find a road under it any better than I could, and if I lost the pack, I lost everything.

The wind came up.

It came down off the mountain all at once, as if someone had opened a door at the top, and brought the snow with it. Not falling now. Flying. Straight into my face, so thick and so fast that

couldn’t see the trees on either side of the road. I couldn’t see the road. I couldn’t see my own hand in front of my face when I held it up.

I stopped.

I stood there in the white, with the wind screaming in my ears, and turned round slowly, and there was nothing. Nothing in any direction. White, and white, and white, and the cold coming through my coat like knives.

Don’t panic. My own voice, in my head. The voice I used to use on the younger ones in winter training. You panic, you die. Find shelter. Get low. Wait it out.

I couldn’t find shelter. I couldn’t find anything.

I walked anyway. Uphill. That was all I could tell. My feet knew which way was up even when my eyes didn’t. I walked with my head down and my arm up over my face, one step and then the next, and the snow came up to my knees, and then above them, and I fell, and got up, and walked, and fell.

I don’t know how long. A long time. The light was going. Not the sun. The sun had been gone for hours behind the storm. The gray was going, the last of it, into a darkness that was white at the edges and roaring.

My leg went.

It folded under me, the way it had in the storehouse, and I went down on my face in the snow, and this time I didn’t get up. I lay there with the pack on my back and the wind howling over me and the snow already starting to cover my legs, and I thought, quite calmly, so this is how.

It wasn’t so bad. I was very tired. The cold had stopped hurting.

Rhea was screaming.

She was screaming inside me. Clawing. Throwing herself against the inside of my ribs over and over, the way she had thrown herself at the collar. Get up. Get up. Get UP.

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