His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 159

Liam

Chapter 159

Nhad been snowing since noon.

Big, soft, slow flakes, coming straight down out of a white sky with no wind behind them, so that by three o’clock the whole shore of the lake was smooth and new, and every footprint we made rrying the wood down filled in again behind us. The pines along the water were heavy with it. The laketself had frozen a week ago, gray and solid from shore to shore, and the snow lay on that too, unbroken, all the way across to the dark trees on the far side.

I carried wood with the rest of them. Everybody did, on the Longest Night. It didn’t matter if you were the Beta or a boy from the kitchens. You carried your share down to the shore, and you stacked it where the old women told you, and you didn’t argue.

Ryan argued about the drums. He always did. He wanted them by the boathouse, where the sound would carry over the ice, and old Mrs. Aldous wanted them by the steps, where they had always been, and in the end they went by the steps. He came past me with an armful of birch afterward, scowling.

“Every year,” he said.

It was the first thing he had said to me in a week that wasn’t about the watch. I didn’t make anything of it. I said, “Every year,” and he went on down to the fires, and I went back up the path for more wood, and felt a little lighter than I had.

Kaia carried wood too. Nobody had asked her to. She had come down the path behind me at two in her boots and her red scarf, with her hair stuffed up under a hat, and picked up an armful of split logs without a word, and nobody had stopped her. By three she had snow on her eyelashes and her cheeks were pink with cold, and one of the old women had already taken her aside to show her how to stack the kindling so it would catch.

“In Ravenwood we burn a log,” she said, when she came back past me. “One. In the hall. And everyone stays up till it’s gone.” She looked down the shore at the six great stacks rising along the water. “You lot don’t do anything by halves.”

“We used to have more to burn.” I nodded at the black ruin of the storehouse, just visible behind the kitchens up the hill. “Not this year.”

She looked at it. Then at me.

“It’s enough,” she said.

***

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Kade and Abby came down last.

saw people turn. I turned myself. Kade in his dark coat, walking carefully, the way he did now though only Abby and I and Imogen knew why. And Abby at his side, with her hand through his arm.

She was wearing a dark dress, deep blue, almost black in the dusk, and over it a long coat ad never seen before. Pale gray wool, lined with white fur that came up round her throat and her wrists, and worked all down the front and along the hem with silver thread, in a pattern of leaves and running wolves. When she moved, the embroidery caught what was left of the light. With the show in her hair, and the two silver streaks at her temple, she looked as if she had been made out of the same stuff as the night.

“Cassandra’s,” Kaia said quietly, beside me. It wasn’t a question.

“Must be.”

I had never seen Cassandra wear it. But I knew, the moment I saw it, that it had been made for a Luna, and that it had been folded in a chest somewhere for eight winters, waiting.

Down the shore, people were looking at Abby. Most of them the way you look at something beautiful. Some of them, not. I saw it. A glance, here and there, at the silver in the coat and the silver in her hair, and then away, at the fires. I saw two of the warriors from the training yard look at each

other.

Abby saw it too. I watched her chin come up a little. She kept walking.

***

Kade lit the first fire.

That was the Alpha’s, always. He took the torch from the old woman who held it and walked to the first stack at the water’s edge and put it in, low down, where the kindling was. It caught at once. The flames went up through the birch and the pine, crackling, throwing orange light out across the snow and the ice, and the whole pack let out its breath together, the way it did every year, and the drums began.

One by one, down the shore, the other fires went up..

Then the lanterns.

They were stacked on long tables by the steps. Plain paper lanterns, white, each with a stub of candle in a tin cup at the bottom. You took one, and you lit it from the Alpha’s fire, and you walked out onto the ice with it and set it down in the snow, for somebody who wasn’t there anymore. That

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The snow squeaked under our boots. Behind us, the drums. Ahead, the dark lake, and the first few lanterns already glowing on it, scattered, little and gold, like the lights of a town seen from a long way

We set it down together. For Adrian and Naomi Hayes. For our mother, who had laughed at everything, and our father, who had been Nathaniel’s Beta before I was Kade’s. Abby crouched beside it for a while in her white fur collar with her hand on the paper, and I stood behind her, and either of us said anything.

When we came back to the shore, Cassandra was setting hers down a little way out from the steps.

For Nathaniel. I knew that without being told. She knelt in the snow in her plain black coat, with her hair coming loose under her hood, and settled it carefully, and stayed there a moment with her hand on the paper. Then she stood up.

And she took a second lantern from under her arm. A smaller one. She lit it from the first, and walked a few yards further out, away from the others, and set it down alone on the ice.

She didn’t look round. She didn’t say anything to anyone. She came back up the shore with her hands in her pockets and her face perfectly composed, and went to stand by the fire.

Nobody else had lit a lantern for Sloane Sinclair. Nobody could. She wasn’t dead. And if she had been, half the people on that shore would sooner have put it out than light it.

I looked at that one small light out there on its own, a little apart from all the others.

Then I looked at Cassandra, by the fire. She didn’t look back at me. But she knew I had seen.

***

It came about ten minutes later.

I was standing at the edge of the ice with Kaia, a little away from the fire, watching the lanterns. There were hundreds of them by then, scattered across the snow on the lake as far as the light reached, and the drums were going steady and slow behind us, and somebody had started the old song by the third fire. Kaia’s hand was in mine, inside my coat pocket, because she had forgotten her gloves.

At the very back of my head, something moved.

It was faint. So faint that at first I thought it was the drums. A thread, out at the farthest edge of the link, where the pack thinned out into the forest and the mountains and nothing. Somebody, very far off, reaching.

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Kaia’s hand jerked in my pocket. I must have gripped it too hard.

oane? It went out of me before I could stop it. All of it, every bit of the last ten days, every morning at the line, every night not finishing the sentence. Sloane, where- Are you- Goddess, are you all right?

I’m all right. Her voice in my head was ragged, and close to breaking, and so completely hers shat my eyes stung. Liam. Listen to me. I need you to get Kade.

“Liam?” Kaia was looking up at me. “What is it?”

I couldn’t answer her. I turned away from the ice, toward the fire.

Where are you?

On the old logging road. The western one. Coming down. A pause. I can feel the pack. I can feel you. We’re close. Maybe ten miles.

We.

I knew before she said it. I think I had known from the moment I heard her voice.

He’s with me, Sloane said. Malachi. He’s here. He came down with me. Another pause, and her voice steadied. He’ll talk to Kade. He’ll tell him what he knows. All of it. But it has to be soon, Liam, and it has to be somewhere he can stand without anyone calling the watch. He won’t cross the line.

I stood on the shore with my back to the lake and the firelight on my face.

Out there on the ice behind me was a paper lantern with a candle in it, for Adrian and Naomi Hayes. And ten miles away, on the western logging road, walking down toward my home through the snow, was the man who had led the raid that killed them. I had wanted to kill him for eight years. I had stood beside Kade on the road the day he was exiled and wanted to so badly my hands shook.

And Sloane had gone to him. On her own feet, with a bad leg, through a storm, because there was nowhere else in the world she wanted to be.

Liam?

I’m here. I made myself breathe. Hold on.

***

I didn’t go to Kade. I reached for him through the link, and across the length of the shore, by the

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beside him in her white fur collar, and Garrick Shaw not six feet away, talking to my back. Kade didn’t move at all. But I saw his hand close very slowly at his side.

Where? he sent back.

Somewhere outside the line. He won’t cross it.

The shepherd’s hut, Kade said at once. On the western slope. Past the line.

I knew the one. Everybody did. A low stone hut a mile outside the border, where the old shepherds used to winter their flocks before anyone could remember, with a turf roof and a door that didn’t shut properly. Nobody went there anymore. Nobody had for years.

When?

A pause. I watched him look at the fires, at the drums, at the hundreds of people on the shore

around him.

First light, he said. Tomorrow. While they’re all still down here.

I passed it on. Sloane took a moment to answer. I could feel her turn away, out there in the dark, to say it to someone else. Then she came back.

He says yes. First light. Something in her voice shifted, very slightly. He says he’ll come alone. Teague stays at the cabin. Another pause. We’ll go to the hut tonight. I know the way from the road. We can be there before midnight.

Sloane. I didn’t know what I was going to say until I said it. Is he- Are you safe? With him?

The silence went on so long I thought I had lost her.

Yes, she said at last. Very quietly. I’m safe.

Then the link thinned, and stretched, and she was gone.

***

Abby had come to me.

I didn’t see her cross the shore. She was simply there, beside me, with her face white in the firelight and her eyes enormous. Kade must have told her through the bond. She took both my hands in hers and held them hard.

“Is it true?” she said. Barely a whisper. “Is she really—”

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one small lantem sitting apart from the others on the ice. I saw her look at it for a while.

Then she put her hand on my back, between my shoulders, and left it there.

It was a very long night.

Nobody sleeps on the Longest Night. That was the point of it. You keep the fires going, and you keep the drums going, and you keep the lanterns burning on the ice until the sun comes back so that the dead can find their way, and so can everyone else. The old women told stories by the third fire The children ran up and down the shore until they dropped, and were wrapped in blankets and put down to sleep in heaps near the warmth anyway. People came and went from the packhouse with soup

and bread and flasks.

I stood by the fire and didn’t taste anything I was given.

Kade spent most of the night going from fire to fire, the way the Alpha did, talking to people. He was very good at it. You would never have known, watching him, that he was counting the hours. Only I could see it, and Abby, and once, when he passed close, I saw his hand go to his side and press there, just for a moment, before he smiled at the old man in front of him and asked after his hip.

Abby stayed close to the fire. She said she was cold. She was. It was the darkest night of the year, with no moon at all, and I had seen her face when the sun went down, the way it had gone pale and tired all at once, as if somebody had turned a lamp down inside her. Diana was quiet tonight. Abby sat on a bench by the first fire in Cassandra’s white coat with her hands wrapped round a cup, and smiled at everyone who came to speak to her, and didn’t once look west.

Imogen had come down too.

I don’t think anyone had asked her. She was standing at the far end of the shore, by the boathouse, past the last fire, where the light only just reached. She had her shawl over her head and her basket on her arm, and she was alone. Not by accident. There was a space round her in the snow, a few yards wide, that nobody stepped into. People going between the fires with soup and blankets walked round it without seeming to notice they were doing it.

I noticed. I watched a woman steer two children away from the boathouse by their shoulders, quite gently, toward the next fire. I heard one of the drummers say something low to the man beside him, and the man glance down the shore at Imogen and back again.

She came, and then the girl started walking.

I didn’t hear the words. I knew them anyway. They had been going round Moonhaven for a fortnight, along with the others. She was in the hall when the lights went. She’s been teaching the Luna. Teaching her what? Before the fire, the warriors had only muttered behind her back, in the corridors.