His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 172

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Chapter 172

Abby

ogen brought a mirror on the first morning.

A small one, with a cracked tortoiseshell back, the kind of thing that lives at the bottom of an old woman’s handbag. She propped it against the side of the bowl so that I could see my own face over the water, and sat down opposite me on the mat with her knees creaking, and looked at me.

“Eyes,” she said.

“What about them?”

“That’s what they’ll watch. Not your hands. Nobody in that hall will know what to look for in your hands.” She tapped the edge of the mirror with one finger. “But every one of them has heard about the Luna of Moonhaven’s eyes going silver in her own hall. Thorne will have seen to that. So they’ll watch your eyes. And if they see it once, even once, it won’t matter what you say afterward. They’ll have seen it for themselves.”

Her wrist was still wrapped where the red wool had cut it. She hadn’t mentioned it, and I hadn’t

asked.

“Light the bowl,” she said.

I lit it. That part was easy now. A little at a time, down my arms, into my cupped hands, into the water, until it glowed soft and steady and white, like milk with the moon in it. I could have held it there all morning.

Imogen let me hold it for a minute. Then she began to talk.

She told me what the letter said. She said it in a dry, bored voice, the voice of a clerk reading out a list, and she got every word right. A power held by the Luna which is said to be beyond her control. An attack in the Luna’s private rooms. Then she said it again in a different voice, slow and pleasant, with a little lift at the end of every sentence, and I knew whose voice it was before she had finished the first line, and the light in the bowl jumped.

“Eyes,” Imogen said.

I looked in the mirror. There was a thin bright ring round the blue.

“Again,” she said.

We did it all morning. She read me the charges in Sebastian Thorne’s voice, and in Garrick’s, and in

a soft, sorrowful voice I didn’t know at all, which was somehow worse. She asked me what Cassandra’s

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On the second morning, it came less.

On the fourth, she said everything she had said before and some new things too, and I sat on the mat with my hands round the bowl and the light lying in the water like something asleep, and looked in the mirror, and saw only my own face. Tired. Blue-gray. Mine.

Imogen sat back on her heels.

“Better,” she said.

It was the most she had ever said to me in praise. I didn’t trust my voice, so I only nodded.

“They won’t only talk.” She took the mirror away and turned it face down on the mat. “Someone will touch you. Take your arm, or your hand, to see what happens. Someone will bring a candle close to you to see what you do. Someone will bring up your mother.” She looked at me. “You’ll answer what they ask, and nothing else, and you’ll keep your hands in your lap. And if it starts to rise, you put it in your Alpha. Quietly. A little. He’ll feel it and he’ll know.”

“And if he’s the one it’s rising for?”

Imogen didn’t answer that for a while.

“Then you put it into the stone under your feet,” she said, “and hope Greyhollow is built well.”

***

Owen was sitting outside the back ward when I came down that afternoon.

He had a chair tipped back against the wall and his phone in his hand, and he dropped the chair onto four legs when he saw me and stood up. He had been on that door for a week. Ryan had offered to send someone to take turns with him, and Owen had said no, and Ryan, from what Liam told me,

hadn’t argued.

“Luna,” he said.

“Is she awake?”

“She’s awake.” He hesitated. He was looking at the door, not at me. “She doesn’t sleep much in the day. She’s afraid to. Daphne gives her something at night, so she can.” He put his phone in his pocket. “The Alpha said-”

“I know what he said.” Kade had said it at breakfast, quietly, with his hand over mine. He hadn’t forbidden me. He had looked as if he wanted to. “I won’t be long. You can leave the door open.”

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wrist. At night Daphne still tied her hands with soft cloth, Owen had told me, to the frame of the bed. In the day she left them free.

She saw me and flinched.

It went through her whole body. Her shoulders jerked up and her bandaged hands came off the blanket, and for a moment I thought she would try to get off the bed and away from me, into the corner, the way she had huddled against the stove in the long room on the night of the fire when she stopped. She put her hands back down. She sat there with her breath coming fast and her eyes on my

face.

I didn’t go to her. I sat down on the chair by the door, where she could see all of me, and folded my hands in my lap.

“Hello, Tessa,” I said.

She didn’t say anything.

“I won’t stay if you don’t want me to.”

She looked at me. At my hands. At my hair, where the fourth silver strand lay against the dark. Then back at my face, as if she were looking for something there. I knew what she was looking for. I held very still and let her look.

“They told me,” she said at last. Her voice was thin and hoarse, as if she hadn’t used it in a long time. “About the Alpha’s mother.”

“Yes.”

“Is she going to die?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think so. Daphne doesn’t think so.”

She nodded. Her eyes filled. She didn’t wipe them. I didn’t think she could, with her hands like that.

“I don’t remember it,” she said. “I went to sleep. And then I was here. And there was blood on my nightgown and Owen wouldn’t look at me.” She swallowed. “I don’t remember climbing anything. I don’t know how I got up there. My hands-” She looked down at them. “Daphne says I climbed the

wisteria.”

“You did.”

“I’m afraid of heights,” she said. She sounded almost angry. “I always was. Even when I was little.”

She stopped. She looked surprised, as if she had reached into a drawer she didn’t know she had and

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you. That’s how she does it. That’s why I thought-” She stopped again. “At the fire. I told them it was you.”

“Lknow.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

“It was my hands,” she said.

I got up then. Slowly, so she could see me do it. I crossed the little room and sat down on the edge of the bed, not close, and held out my hand, palm up, on the blanket between us. And waited.

It took her a long time. When she moved, it was so slowly that I wasn’t sure at first she had. Her bandaged hand crept across the blanket, an inch at a time, and stopped beside mine, and then she laid it in my palm. Very lightly. As if it might burn.

I closed my fingers round it. I didn’t let the light anywhere near it. I only held her hand.

She was shaking. Then, after a while, she wasn’t.

“Yours is warm,” she said.

I didn’t understand, at first.

“Your hand.” She was looking at it. “Hers is cold. In the dream. She holds my hands and they go cold all the way up.” She looked at me with her wet eyes. “I didn’t know that. Until now. That you’d be

different.”

I sat there with her hand in mine until Daphne came to change the dressings, and neither of us said anything else.

Owen didn’t look at me when I came out. He was looking past me, through the open door, at the girl on the bed. His face was very carefully empty, the way a young man’s face goes when there is something in it he doesn’t want anyone to see.

***

The next day, at noon, I went with Kade to the warriors’ hall.

Ryan had his list. He had been working on it for three days, at the long table in the back of the hall with the duty rotas spread out round him, crossing out and writing in, and that morning he had brought it up to Kade’s office and put it on the desk without a word. Twelve names. Kade had read it and handed it back and said, Tell them yourself. We’ll both be there. And then he had looked at me.

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dooks, into the noise and the smell of wet wool and woodsmoke and too many young men in one

room.

changed. I had known it would.

Not all at once, and not loudly. The men nearest the door saw us first, and stopped talking, and then the ones beyond them, and it went on down the hall, a little wave of quiet that ran ahead of us all the way to the board at the far end. Somebody put down a mug. An older warrior I knew by sigh gray at the temples, one of the men who had served under Kade’s father, looked at me across the room Ther he picked up his coat from the bench and went out by the side door, quite unhurriedly, as if he had only just remembered something he had to do.

Kade’s arm went hard under my hand.

I felt the light stir. Just a little. Just the edge of it, warming in my chest, the way it always did now when he was angry. I thought of the bowl. I thought of the mirror, face down on the mat. I let it

settle.

Ryan stood up on the bench by the board, so they could all see him, and read out the names.

He didn’t make a speech. He said where we were going, and when, and for how long, as far as anyone knew. He said that the men he named would be on the doors at Greyhollow, day and night, in pairs, for as long as the Alpha and the Luna were under that roof, and that any man who drank so much as a cup of ale there would be walking home. Then he read the twelve names, one after another, in his flat, even voice. When he had finished, he folded the paper and got down off the bench.

Nobody said anything.

Then somebody at the back of the hall said, “Gamma.”

It was Callum Fletcher. He was standing among the younger ones by the stove, and he was red to the ears. He came forward through the others, and they let him through, and he stopped in front of Ryan

with his hands at his sides.

“I want to go,” he said.

Ryan looked at him. “You weren’t on the list.”

“I know.” Callum swallowed. He didn’t look at me. He was looking at Ryan, very hard, the way you look at something so that you won’t have to look at anything else. Then he lifted his hands and held them out, palms up, between them. In the gray light from the windows you could still just see it, across both palms, where the skin was newer and paler than the rest.

“She healed my hands,” he said.

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a boy. “So I don’t care what anyone says about her eyes. I’d follow her anywhere. Sir.”

The hall was so quiet I could hear the stove ticking.

yan didn’t answer him. He looked past Callum at Kade. And Kade, beside me, said nothing at all, and gave him the smallest nod.

Ryan unfolded the paper again, and took the pencil from behind his ear, and wrote.

Somebody by the stove let out his breath. Then the boy who had been standing next to Call stepped forward too, and stood beside him, and didn’t say anything. And another. And a young man from further back, with a long pale face, whom I didn’t know by name. I had seen him once before in the doorway of my rooms on the worst night of my life, saying Goddess and stepping back. He came and stood at the end of the little line, and looked straight at me, and nodded.

That was all. Four of them, in a hall of seventy. Most of the men along the walls looked at the floorboards, or at the board, or at Ryan. The side door stayed shut.

But nobody laughed.

“I’ve got my twelve,” Ryan said, to the four of them. Gruffly. He looked at the paper in his hand for a moment. “I’ll take the Fletcher boy. The rest of you, I’ll see.”

I found I couldn’t say anything. I stood there with my hands folded in front of me, the way Imogen had told me, and held the light down where it was, warm and quiet and very close, and didn’t let one drop of it reach my eyes. Beside me, Kade moved his hand to the small of my back, and left it there.

***