His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 147

Chapter 147

Nwoke up in his bed.

I knew where I was before I opened my eyes. I knew it by the smell. Woodsmoke and leather worked so deep into the pillow and the blankets that I was breathing it in with every breath, and under it faint, the cold clean smell of the mountain. For a moment I lay very still with my face in his pillow and didn’t think about anything at all.

Then I opened my eyes.

Light. That was the first thing. Bright white light, coming in through the small window at the end of the room and lying in a long square across the floor. Not storm light. Sun on snow. The kind of light that makes you squint.

The storm was over.

I lay and listened. No wind. No screaming in the pines. Only a long, deep, ringing quiet, and somewhere outside, very faint, the scrape of a shovel.

I sat up slowly.

Everything hurt. Not badly. Everywhere. My hands were stiff, and the skin across my knuckles was cracked and raw from the cold, and my face felt tight and hot, the way it does after a day in the wind. My leg ached from the hip to the heel, a deep, dull, grinding ache that I already knew would be with me all day. When I put my feet on the floor, the boards were cold through my socks.

I looked down at myself. At his shirt, the flannel one, worn soft and gray-blue and so big on me that the shoulders came halfway down my arms. At the wool trousers rolled three times at the ankle. I remembered him turning his back to face the wall while I put them on under the blankets with shaking hands. I remembered Teague turned the same way, by the door, like a man in church.

I remembered the rest of it too.

His arms round me in front of the stove. His voice in my hair. I let you go. My own voice, muffled against his chest, saying things I hadn’t meant to say out loud.

I put my face in my hands for a moment.

Then I took them away, and stood up, and that was when I saw the stick.

It was lying on the floor beside the bed. My stick. The one I had been leaning on the morning

Brask’s men came through the door and put a sack over my head.

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I stood and looked at it for a long time.

My boots were by the stove.

My old boots. The pack-made ones, worn soft at the heel, with the broken lace I had knotte badly in two places. I had left them there to dry, that last morning. They were exactly where I had let them,

side by side on the hearthstone, with the toes turned toward the fire.

Nobody had moved them either.

The cabin was empty. The fire was banked down low, and there was a pot on the back of the stove with a lid on it, and a cup beside it, upside down on a clean cloth, as if someone had put it out for me and gone. The table was scrubbed. The kettle was warm.

I put my old boots on. They still fit. Of course they did.

Then I went to the door and opened it.

The cold hit me first. Then the light. It was so bright I had to put my hand up over my eyes and stand in the doorway blinking, while the whole clearing slowly swam into shape in front of me, white

and blue and dazzling.

The snow was deep. Up to the porch rail on one side, where the wind had drifted it. The woodpile was a long white hump. The trees round the edge of the clearing stood loaded and silent, every branch bowed under it, and above them the sky was the hard, clean, endless blue that only comes after a

storm.

They were both out there.

Teague was at the north edge of the clearing, where the wire ran. He was digging it out. He had a shovel in his good hand and the other tucked against his chest, and he was working along the line of the wire one-handed, slowly, freeing the tin cans from the drift one at a time and shaking the snow out of them. Every so often one rattled.

Malachi was halfway between him and the cabin, shoveling a path.

He had his coat off. In this cold. His sleeves were pushed up to the elbow and his breath was going up in long white clouds, and he was digging through the drift that lay between the porch and the woodpile with long, steady strokes, throwing the snow off to one side, the way he had split wood every morning I had lived here. As if it were something that needed to be done, and he was the one to do it, and there was nothing else to think about.

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Neither of us said anything.

At the wire, Teague stopped too. He looked at me across the clearing. Then he looked at Malachi Then he went back to the cans.

“You’re up,” Malachi said finally.

“I’m up.”

“How’s the leg?”

“It hurts.”

He nodded, as if that was the answer he’d expected. He leaned the shovel against the porch rail and came up the steps. He stopped two steps below me, so that his eyes were level with mine.

He looked tired. More tired than I had ever seen him. There were shadows under his eyes, and his hands were red with cold, and I realized, looking at him, that he hadn’t slept. Not in the chair by the fire, where he’d said he would. Not anywhere.

“There’s food,” he said. “On the stove.”

“I saw.”

“You should eat.”

“I will.”

He didn’t move. Neither did I.

“Sit down,” he said. “There’s something I need to say to you. Before you eat. Before you-” He stopped. “Sit down, Sloane.”

***

His coat was hanging over the end of the porch rail, where he had thrown it. He picked it up and shook the snow off it, and before I could say anything, he put it round my shoulders. He didn’t ask. He settled it there, drew the front of it closed over his own shirt, and let go, all in one movement, the way you do something without letting yourself think about it. It was warm from the sun on the rail, and heavy, and it smelled of him.

I didn’t give it back.

We sat on the porch steps. He brushed the snow off the top one with his sleeve, and I sat down on it,

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“There’s a town,” Malachi said. “On the other side of the mountain. Down in the valley, past the crossroads, about two hours by the road when it’s clear.” He didn’t look at me. “It’s unclaimed land. Ne pack holds it. Never has. There’s a sawmill, and a few farms, and people who came there because nobody asks them where they came from.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Teague can drive you down,” he said. “When the road’s open. Tomorrow, maybe, or the day after. He knows people there. Somebody will give you work. Somebody always needs hands.” He was quiet for a moment. “Nobody would know you. You could be anyone. Start again.”

I looked at the side of his face.

He was still looking at the clearing. His jaw was set. He had said it the way you say something you

have rehearsed, all night, in a chair by a fire, so that when the time came you could get through it

without stopping.

“That’s what you want,” I said.

“That’s what’s best.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

He didn’t answer.

“Let me stay,” I said.

His hands went still between his knees.

“Here,” I said. “Let me stay here. With you and Teague.” I made myself say it plainly. “I can’t go down to some sawmill town and pretend to be someone else. She’ll find me. You know she will. She found you. She found this place.” I looked out at the wire, at Teague digging it out one-handed. “She’ll find me in a week, and nobody there will even notice I’m gone.”

“She’ll find you here too.”

“Maybe.”

“Not maybe.” He turned his head and looked at me, finally, and his eyes were very dark. “She’s been here, Sloane. She stood right there.” He pointed with his chin at the edge of the clearing where the road came up out of the trees. “At the end of the road, not long after you were gone, with three rifles in the trees behind her and a red light on Teague’s heart. She did that to his hand from twenty feet away without lifting a finger. To make a point. To show me she could.” His voice dropped. “This is the most dangerous place in the mountains for you. This is the place she knows best.”

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to look?”

He didn’t say anything.

can’t go back,” I said. My voice had gone very quiet. “You know that. Moonhaven thinks set fire to their stores and ran from the council so they couldn’t judge me. By now, they’ll be saying an to you. To the Rogue King. The traitor and the Rogue King, together in the mountains.” I swallowed. “If they find me, they won’t bother with another hearing. And no other pack in the valley would let me past their border. Not after Jax. Not after the field. Not with your mark on my neck, even faded

I touched it. The place below my ear. It didn’t hurt anymore. It hadn’t in weeks. But it was stil there, a pale ghost of a thing, and anyone who looked would see it.

“There’s nowhere,” I said. “That’s the truth. There’s nowhere left for me to go. This is the only

place.”

He was looking at me. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. I had never been able to.

“And I’m not asking to be looked after,” I said. “I want to be very clear about that. I’m not the girl with the broken leg anymore. I can walk. I can run, a little. I can shift.” I lifted my chin. “I was the best fighter in my year at Moonhaven. I can hold a knife, and I can track, and I know how she thinks better than anyone except you. I watched her for weeks. I watched what she did in that temple. I watched what she did to those girls.” My voice hardened. “She put a collar on me. She dragged me onto that field and put her curse in my heart and stood there smiling while I said those words to you. She’s in Moonhaven right now, Malachi, inside a girl who doesn’t know she’s there, walking her round in her sleep with a candle.”

I took a breath.

“I want her stopped,” I said. “As much as you do. Maybe more. And I can’t stop her from a sawmill.”

The clearing was very quiet.

Malachi looked away. He looked down at his hands between his knees for a long time, and I watched him, and I saw it. I saw him start to answer, and stop. I saw him look for the next thing to say, the

thing that would make me go, and not find it. Or find it, and not say it.

He didn’t argue as hard as he could have. I noticed that. I didn’t say anything about it.

“Sloane,” he said. Very low. “It would be better for you. Away from me. I mean that.”

“I know you do.”

“I’m the reason she’ll come. I’m the one she wants to hurt. Anyone standing next to me-”

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his shoulder and the bad hand tucked against his chest, and snow in his beard, looking at Malachi.

He didn’t say anything else. He didn’t need to. He looked at Malachi a moment longer, steadily, the way I had seen him look at a horse that wouldn’t go into a trailer, and then he went past us up the stops and into the cabin, and we heard him take the lid off the pot on the stove.