His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 148

Chapter 148

Abby

the end of the week, I had run out of things to do.

Kade was back at work. He was in his office by seven every morning now, with Liam and Ryan and the watch reports and the lists of what the storehouse fire had cost, and what it would take to go through the winter without it. He was good at it. He had always been good at it. I could feel him through the bond all day, steady and busy and careful, and every so often a flicker of the ache in his chest when he forgot himself and stood up too fast.

He didn’t need me in that office. I sat in on the mornings, and then the meetings turned to grain prices and roof timbers, and I felt myself becoming the person in the corner nobody knew what to do

with.

So I left. And then I walked.

I walked the corridors of the packhouse, and the garden, and the path down to the lake. I went to the kitchens to ask if they needed help with the new stores coming in, and the big cook in the apron said, very politely, that they had everything in hand, Luna, thank you, and didn’t quite look at me. I went to the training yard and stood at the fence and watched the morning drills for a while, until I noticed that two of the younger warriors kept glancing over at me and missing their blocks. Then I left

there too.

Everywhere I went, I was thinking about her.

Three days. She had been gone three days. I didn’t know where she was. I didn’t know if she had found what she was looking for, or if she was still walking, or if she was lying somewhere in the snow. Last night the wind had come off the mountains so hard it rattled the glass in Kade’s windows until morning, and I had lain awake listening to it, and so had he.

I didn’t know what to do with my hands.

So, in the end, I went to the clinic.

***

I had been going there since I was fifteen.

At first it was only to carry things. Clean linen up, used linen down. Then Daphne had let me roll bandages, and then fold them, and then hold a cub’s hand while she set his finger, and somewhere along the way I had become one of the volunteers in borrowed scrubs who came in after school and stayed until supper. I had never been very good at anything else. Liam was the fighter, and Sloane was the best at everything, and I was the quiet one who liked being useful. The clinic was the one place

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Daphne came out of the back room with a basin in her hands and stopped.

Luna,” she said.

“Don’t,” I said. “Please. Not in here.”

She looked at me. At my pushed-up sleeves, and my face, and whatever was in it. Then she the basin into my hands.

“Warm water,” she said. “Bed four. The Fletcher boy’s dressings need changing, and I have to go up to the girls.” She paused at the foot of the stairs. “And Abby. Don’t go up there.”

I knew why. I had seen Tessa’s face when I came through that door the morning after the fire. I

nodded.

Daphne went up. I carried the basin down the ward.

***

Callum Fletcher was nineteen.

I knew him a little. Everyone in Moonhaven knew everyone a little. He was one of Ryan’s younger warriors, tall and freckled and too thin for his height, the kind of boy who always seemed slightly surprised by how long his arms were. He had been on the hose the night of the fire. When the back wall went up, and the lamp oil with it, somebody had been standing too close. He had got them out of the way. He had done it with his hands.

He was sitting up in bed four with a tray on his knees and both hands wrapped to the wrist, trying to eat soup with a spoon jammed between two fingers. He wasn’t managing very well. When he saw me coming, he went red to the ears and tried to put the spoon down, and dropped it in the soup.

“Luna-”

“Abby,” I said. “I’m only here to change your dressings.”

He looked doubtful about that. But he held out his hands.

I took the first one onto my knee and began unwinding the linen.

I had seen burns before. Not many. Wolves heal fast, and most things that happen to us are gone in a day or two, and Daphne’s ward was usually empty except for cubs with broken arms and old men with chests that rattled. But I had seen enough to know that this was bad. A week after the fire, and the skin across his palm and the inside of his fingers was still raw and shining and red, puckered at the

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“Then it will.”

“She says it might heal tight.” He swallowed. “Across here.” He looked at his fingers. He tried to close them, very slightly, and stopped, and his face went white. “If it heals tight, I can’t make a fist. And if I can’t make a fist, I can’t hold anything. And Ryan won’t put me back on the watch with hands that can’t hold anything.”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. I bathed the palm in the warm water, the wa Daphne had taught me, very gently, and he set his jaw and looked at the ceiling.

And somewhere under my breastbone, Diana lifted her head.

I felt her do it. She came up out of the quiet place where she had been lying since the binding slowly, and pressed close against the inside of my ribs, and looked out through my eyes at the boy’s hand lying in mine. I could feel what she wanted. I could feel the light in her, low and warm, the way you feel a coal under ash.

No, I told her. Daphne said.

She didn’t argue. She didn’t lie down either.

I looked at Callum’s hand. And under the raw skin, under the heat of the burn, I could feel him. His wolf. Not the way I felt Kade, not through any bond. Only faintly, the way you feel someone breathing in a dark room. A young wolf, and tired. Worn right down. Doing everything he could to close the burn, and getting nowhere, and getting slower every day.

I didn’t decide. That’s the truth. I didn’t sit there and weigh it up. I only thought, he’s so tired, and

Diana heard me, and I let her.

It wasn’t much. Nothing like the training hall. Nothing like the moon. Only a little warmth going out of my palms into his, the way heat goes out of your hands into a cup. I didn’t push anything into him. I didn’t touch the burn at all. I only reached for that tired wolf of his, under the skin, and gave him what Diana gave Kade. More. Louder. Go on.

His wolf woke up.

Callum gasped. His whole arm jerked, and I held on.

“It’s-” He was staring at his hand. “Luna, it’s—”

It was itching. I could feel it through my own palms. A fierce, crawling heat, the way a cut itches when it closes, only all at once, a week’s worth of it in a minute. Under my fingers, the red edges of the burn drew in. The shine went dull. The skin across his knuckles loosened, and paled, and went pink, and then pinker, until it was only the color of a scar a month old.

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that my teeth knocked together.

Callum was looking at his hand.

Slowly, very slowly, he closed it. All the way. Into a fist.

He opened it again. He closed it again. He looked up at me, and his eyes were wet.

“Do the other one,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like mine. “Quickly. Before Daphne comes down.”

Daphne came down while I was doing the other one.

She stopped at the bottom of the stairs. I felt her stop. I didn’t look up. I didn’t dare look up until it was finished, and Callum was sitting there with both hands in his lap, opening and closing them, over and over, staring at them as if he had never seen hands before.

Then I looked up.

The ward was very quiet. I hadn’t noticed how many people were in it. Old Mrs. Aldous in bed one, with her wrist in a splint. A clinic girl I didn’t know, younger than I had been when I started, standing by the linen cupboard with her arms full of towels. And at the foot of Callum’s bed, Corin Fletcher, his older brother, who had come in to bring him clean shirts and was still holding them.

They were all looking at me.

My hands were shining. Faintly. I hadn’t felt it. A silver glow along the lines of my palms, going out slowly as I watched, like embers.

Callum said, “Thank you,” in a voice that broke in the middle. And Corin put the shirts down on the bed and came round it and took my cold hand in both of his and held it to his forehead, the old way,

and I didn’t know what to do.

And by the linen cupboard, the little clinic girl took one step back.

Only one. She bumped into the cupboard door and stopped there with the towels clutched against her chest. She didn’t say anything. Her eyes were very wide.

In bed one, Mrs. Aldous had put her good hand to her throat.

Daphne crossed the ward. She put her hand on Corin’s shoulder and moved him back, gently, and

took my wrist, and pressed two fingers to the inside of it, and looked at my face. Her mouth was very

thin.

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“I know.”

let go of my wrist. She looked down at Callum’s hands. She took one of them and turned it over and looked at the pink, new skin across the palm for a long time, and ran her thumb across it very gently, the way you touch something you don’t quite believe.

“Well,” she said at last. Her voice was odd. “Well.”

*****

Imogen came at noon.

She came in out of the cold with snow on her shoulders and her basket over her arm, and stopped inside the door, and sniffed the air like a dog. Then she looked down the ward at me, sitting by the stove with two blankets round me and a cup of Daphne’s worst tea in my shaking hands.

“Oh, for pity’s sake,” she said.

She came and sat down beside me. She took my hand without asking, the way Daphne had, and turned it over and looked at the palm.

“Who?”

“Callum Fletcher. Burns. Lamp oil.” I nodded toward bed four, where Callum had fallen asleep sitting up, with his mouth open and both hands resting on top of the blanket in plain sight, as if he wanted the whole world to see them. “I healed him.”

“You did not,” Imogen said.

I stared at her.

“You can’t heal anybody. You haven’t got it in you. Neither had she, the one in your story.” She let go of my hand. “That boy healed himself. You only woke his wolf up and told it to work ten times as hard, and it did. He’ll sleep for a day and wake up and eat like three men, and he’ll be thin as a rake for a week. That’s what it cost him.” She looked at me. “And it cost you this. A little light, out of the bottom of the well, for a boy you hardly know.”

“He couldn’t close his hands.”

“I know.” Something in her face softened, very slightly. “It was kindly done. I’m not saying it wasn’t.” She glanced down the ward. At Mrs. Aldous, who was pretending to sleep. At the little clinic girl, who had found a reason to be at the far end, folding the same towel over and over. “But you did it in front of four people, and by supper it’ll be forty, and by the end of the week every one of them will

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“That’s not fair,” I said.

“No,” Imogen said. “Very little is.”

***

She went up to see ‘Tessa after that.

Daphne had given her a sleeping draught after breakfast, the way she did most days now, sohe would sleep through the afternoon and not lie awake staring at the lamp. Imogen went up the stairs alone. I stayed at the bottom, because I had promised, and listened to the boards creak overhead as she crossed the long room to the bed by the stove.

She was gone for half an hour. When she came back down, her face was quiet and closed.