His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 146

Chapter 146

The cans went off a little after dark.

I was at the table with Teague’s hand in front of me, unwrapping the linen to look at it, the way I did every night. He had come back up the mountain more than a week ago on three legs, grato the bone with cold, and walked in through the door and shifted on the floor in front of the stove and lain there for an hour without speaking. Then he had got up and put the kettle on. He hadn’t said anything about the line, or the letter, or what he had seen there. He had looked at me once and

nodded. That was all.

The hand hadn’t changed. It wasn’t going to. Gray-black from the wrist down, cold as a stone, the fingers half curled. He could hold a cup with it, now, if he thought about it. He couldn’t close it into a

fist.

I had the linen half off when the wire rang.

All of it at once. Every can along the north edge of the clearing, banging and clattering on the wind, so loud over the roar of the storm that Teague’s head came up and his good hand went to the knife on

the table before the sound had even finished.

I was already on my feet.

The axe was by the door. I had it in my hands before I knew I had crossed the room. Teague was behind me with the knife. Neither of us said anything. We didn’t need to. We had both been waiting for this sound since the night she came up the road. Every night. Every time the wind got up, and a branch came down, and the cans stirred on the wire, and we both went still at the table and listened,

and then let out our breath when it stopped.

It didn’t stop.

“Stay here,” I said.

He didn’t argue. He stood with his back against the wall beside the window, the knife low in his good hand, and the lamp behind him.

I opened the door.

***

The storm hit me like a wall.

I couldn’t see the woodpile. I couldn’t see the trees at the edge of the clearing, twenty yards away.

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My wolf came up with me. All the way, the way he always did when there was danger, every hair on end, every muscle ready. I let him. I could smell nothing in that wind but snow and pine. I couldn’t hear anything but the storm. If it was her, if it was Cressida come back up the mountain with her rifles and her burned hand, she could be standing ten feet in front of me, and I wouldn’t know until she spoke.

Halfway across the clearing, my wolf stopped.

Not slowed. Stopped. Dead, in the middle of a stride, so suddenly that I stumbled. And then e wasn’t ready to fight anymore. He was something else entirely. He was pulling. Straining toward the north edge of the clearing so hard that it hurt, that it dragged at me under my breastbone, in the

place where the bond had been before she cut it on the field.

The place that had ached every night since the field.

It wasn’t aching now. It was pulling. Hard. The way it had pulled the first night, in a stone chamber, when they brought a girl in with silver on her wrists and I had looked up and known.

I dropped the axe.

I ran.

***

She was lying face down in the snow just past the wire, half buried already, with a pack on her back and one arm flung out in front of her toward the light.

I didn’t think. I was on my knees beside her, digging her out with my hands, pulling the snow off her back and her legs and her hair. Her hair was full of ice. Her coat was frozen stiff. When I turned her over, her face was white as the snow, and her lips were blue, and her eyes were closed.

I put my hand on her throat.

For a moment I couldn’t find anything. My own hands were shaking too hard. Then I found it. Slow, and faint, and far away, but there.

“Sloane,” I said.

Nothing.

I got my arms under her. Under her knees and her shoulders, pack and all, and stood up with her, and she was so light, lighter than she had been on the field, lighter than anyone had any right to be. Her head fell back against my arm. Snow slid off her face.

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put her down on the rug in front of the stově.

“Fire,” I said. “All of it. Water. Hot, not boiling. Every blanket in the house.”

Teague was already moving. He shoved logs into the stove one-handed until the iron ticked and roared. He put the kettle on the hob. He went into the back room and came out with his arms of blankets, and dropped them beside me, and went back for more.

I got the pack off her. The straps were frozen. I cut them. I got her coat off, a good wool coat that wasn’t hers, stiff as a board with ice, and threw it in the corner. Under it, her sweater was soaked through. Her trousers were wet to the hips. Her boots were full of snow.

I stopped.

She was cold. She was so cold. Her skin under my hands was like the stones in the stream. And every scrap of cloth on her was wet, and pulling the heat out of her, and if I didn’t get it off her, the fire wouldn’t matter.

I knew that. I had known it since I was a boy, sleeping rough in the mountains in winter. It didn’t make my hands any steadier.

“Teague,” I said. “Turn round.”

He turned round. He stood facing the wall by the door with his arms folded, the ruined hand tucked under the good one, and didn’t move.

I did it as fast as I could. As carefully as I could. The boots first, and the socks, frozen to her feet. Then the rest. I kept my eyes on what my hands were doing and nothing else. Every piece I took off, I wrapped another blanket round her, until she was a bundle of wool in front of the stove with only her face showing, white and blue-lipped against the gray.

Then I sat down on the rug and pulled her into my lap, blankets and all, with her back against my chest, and wrapped my arms round her, and held her there in front of the fire.

I had done this before. Once. The night of the fever, the first week, when she had shivered so hard I thought her bones would break. She had hated me then. She had been too sick to fight it.

She didn’t fight it now either.

***

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cans on the wire had finally stopped.

At some point, she began to shake.

started in her shoulders. Small at first, and then bigger, until her whole body was shuddering in my arms, so hard her teeth knocked together. I held on. I knew what it was. It was good. It meant her body had remembered how to fight.

Then she made a sound. Low, in her throat.-

And her eyes opened.

She didn’t know where she was. I saw that. She looked at the fire, and the blankets, and the room, all blurred and gold and strange, and her breath caught, and she tried to pull away from whatever was holding her.

“It’s me,” I said. “Sloane. It’s me. You’re inside. You’re safe.”

She went still.

Then, very slowly, she turned her head. And looked up at me.

She lay against my chest in the blankets with her face turned up to mine, shaking, and looked at me as if she were trying to make sure. I looked back. Her eyes were the same. Everything else about her was wrecked. Her face was raw with windburn, and there were cuts on her hands, and a pink, fading mark on the back of one wrist, the last of a burn that hadn’t come from my mountain. But her eyes

were the same.

“Your cans,” she said. Her voice was a thread. “I tripped on your cans.”

Something happened in my chest. I couldn’t have said what. It hurt.

“Teague’s cans,” I said.

“Tell him thank you.”

From the wall by the door, without turning round, Teague grunted.

***

She couldn’t hold the cup.

I held it for her. Broth, from the pot on the back of the stove, Teague’s venison, hot and salty, with a crust of bread broken into it. She drank it in small sips, with my hand round hers on the cup and her head against my shoulder. Halfway through, she had to stop and close her eyes. Then she drank the

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I turned round and faced the wall beside Teague while she got dressed under the blankets, slowly, with her hands shaking, and when she said “All right,” I turned back, and she was sitting on the rug in front of the stove in my shirt with the sleeves rolled up four times, and a blanket round her shoulders. Her hair was coming dry in the heat, in tangles.

She looked about fifteen.

She looked like the only thing in the world.

I sat down on the floor across from her, with the stove between us, and made myself not reach for her again.

“What are you doing here?” I said.

It came out rougher than I meant it to. She heard it. She looked at me across the firelight, very

steadily.

“You sent a letter,” she said.

“I didn’t sign it.”

“You didn’t need to.” Her mouth moved. “Your window here.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You could have died,” I said. “Out there. Another hour. Less. If you’d gone left at the wire instead of right-” I stopped. I couldn’t finish it. “You could have died, Sloane.”

“I know.” She pulled the blanket closer. “I nearly did. I lay down in the snow and thought, so this is how. It wasn’t so bad.” She looked at the fire. “And then I felt you.”

The room went very quiet.

“The bond,” she said, still looking at the fire. “What’s left of it. It’s been pulling me west every night since the field. I’ve been telling Rhea to stop. And up there, in the snow, it pulled me left. Toward you.” She swallowed. “I didn’t know it could still do that. After I cut it.”

“Neither did I,” I said. “It pulled me too. Out there. Before I saw you.”

She looked at me then.

Neither of us said anything for a while.

“Why are you here?” I said again, more quietly. “Tell me properly. All of it.”

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Fifty people in the firelight shouting traitor. A council in three days, and a pardon that wouldn’t

survive it. And Kade, sitting on a chair in the dark in his mother’s spare room, saying I’m not going to

let them.

He let me go,” she said. “He didn’t exile me. He let me go, and told no one.” She looked down at her hands. “They’ll say I ran. They’ll say it forever.”

I sat very still.

She doesn’t need a Blackwell anymore.

The girl. The candle. The Moonsilver wolf made me. A pack turned against its own Luna, in her own house, by a girl Abby Blackwell had nearly died to save. And not a single rogue over the border Not a single blade.

I had known her for thirteen years. I should have seen it. I had seen her do it before, to me, in a hunting shack on this same mountain. Find the thing that hurts most. Put her hand on it. Wait.