His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 173

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Chapter 173

Liam

The fire in the shepherd’s hut wouldn’t draw.

I had been at it for twenty minutes. The wood was damp, and the chimney was full of something, old nests or snow, and every time I got a flame going, the smoke rolled back down into the hut and sat under the turf roof in a gray layer at the height of my eyes. I knelt in front of the little hearth and fed it split pine one piece at a time, and blew on it, and swore at it under my breath, and it smoke at me.

“They’re not coming,” Ryan said.

He was standing at the crooked door with his shoulder against the frame, looking out at the snow He had been standing there since we arrived. The sky over the eastern ridges was going from black to gray. There was nothing on the hillside. No tracks, no movement, nothing on the wind but pine and

cold.

“She said first light,” I said.

“It is first light.”

“It’s nearly first light.”

Ryan didn’t answer that. He shifted his weight against the frame.

“She might come,” he said, after a while. “I’ll give you that. She’s got some reason to, now. But him.” He jerked his chin at the empty hill. “That rogue bastard’s been halfway across the mountains with a box full of her papers for a week. If I were him, I’d have read every one of them by now and burned the lot, and be three valleys away.”

“Then why did he call us?”

“He didn’t. She did.”

I put another piece of pine on the fire. It caught, for once. A thin yellow flame ran up the side of it, and the smoke thinned, and went up the chimney the way it was supposed to.

Behind me, on the stool by the wall, Imogen opened her basket and took out a dented tin kettle and a paper bag of tea, and set them on the hearthstone beside my knee without a word.

I filled the kettle from the bucket of snow by the door, and put it on.

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I didn’t get up. I made myself put one more piece of wood on the fire, and settle it, before I turned round.

They came down out of the trees side by side. Sloane was limping. Not badly, but more than she had a month ago, and she was moving the way a person moves after a long time on a bad leg, carefully, putting it down as if it might not hold. Malachi walked half a step behind her, close enough to catch her if she slipped, and far enough that she wouldn’t have to notice.

At the bottom of the slope, where the snow was deep against the wall of the sheepfold, she put her foot wrong. It was nothing. A stumble. His hand was under her elbow before she had finished it, and gone again as soon as she was steady, and she didn’t look at him, and he didn’t look at her. They just

kept walking.

Ryan saw it too. I felt him see it.

“Well,” he said, under his breath. “Would you look at that.”

***

Ryan stood back from the door to let them in. He didn’t say anything to either of them. He looked at Malachi as he ducked under the lintel, a long flat look, the way you look at a dog you’ve heard has bitten someone, and Malachi let him look, and went past him into the hut, and set his pack down against the wall.

Sloane came in after him, stamping the snow off her boots.

“Liam,” she said.

Her face was thinner. There were shadows under her eyes. But she looked at me straight, and her mouth moved, very slightly, at one corner.

“You came,” I said.

“I said we would.”

“Ryan didn’t think so.”

“Ryan never thinks so,” Sloane said, and went past me to the fire, and held her hands out to it.

Imogen had got up. She poured the tea. There were only three cups in the basket, and two tin mugs, and she handed them out without asking anyone whether they wanted one: Sloane first, then Malachi, who looked at the mug in his hand as if he had never been given anything by a witch before and wasn’t sure what it meant. Then Ryan. Then me. She kept the last cup for herself, and sat down again

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Then Malachi put his mug down on the table, and knelt by his pack, and undid the cord.

He unwrapped it carefully. An oflskin, and inside the oilskin a shirt, and inside the shirt a pain wooden box, the kind you’d keep letters in, with a split along one side of the lid. He set it on the table and stepped back from it, and stood against the wall by the hearth with his arms folded. As if were hers. As if he didn’t want to be the one to open it.

Sloane opened it.

She took the papers out and laid them on the table in order. The old sheets first, brown and soft at the edges, the ink faded to rust. Then the newer ones. She smoothed each one flat with the side of her hand. Then she turned the last sheet round so that it faced me, and put her finger on the place where

the ink changed.

“From here,” she said. “These are the girls from the mountain. The ones with circles.”

I looked.

Eleven names. A pack beside each one. An age. And a small neat circle in black ink.

I had brought my own list. I took it out of my coat. A page torn from a notebook, folded in four, worn soft at the creases. I had written it in the autumn, in the community hall, sitting at a trestle table with Cassandra beside me and the girls coming up one at a time in their borrowed clothes to tell us who they were. Seven of them had known. Their names, their packs, their mothers. We had sent them home inside a week, in Moonhaven trucks, with Moonhaven warriors to see them to their gates.

I laid my page beside hers.

The first name on my list was the third on hers. The same name. The same pack. The second name on mine was the seventh on hers. I went down them one by one, and Ryan came and stood at my shoulder and watched, and nobody said anything. Seven names. Seven packs. Seven circles.

Seven girls who had gone home.

That left four circles on Sloane’s page. And four girls in the long room over our clinic, who had come off the mountain knowing their own first names and nothing else. Nothing about their packs or their parents or the road home. Whatever had been done to them in that place had taken the rest. We had stood them by the wall at the reception in their borrowed dresses, and every Alpha in the valley had walked past them, and not one had stopped.

At the bottom of my page, under a line, I had written four names on their own. I had looked at that

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at it and something went tight in my throat,

“She’s from somewhere,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like mine. “She’s been in that room for four months not knowing, and she’s from somewhere.”

Sloane didn’t say anything. She put her hand on the table beside mine.

The second name matched. Then the third.

Then there was one name left on my page, and one circle left on hers, and they weren’t the same.

Tessa, my page said, in my own handwriting.

On Sloane’s list, the last circled name before the gap was one I had never seen before.

Isla. Greyhollow. 18.

Nobody said anything for a while.

The fire cracked. The kettle, pushed back on the hearthstone, ticked as it cooled.

“That’s not her,” Ryan said at last. “That’s not her name.”

“It’s the only one left,” I said.

“Then the witch got it wrong. Wrote it down wrong. Or there was a twelfth girl, and she died up there, and Tessa’s someone else entirely, someone who isn’t on this list at all.”

“Every other name matches,” Sloane said quietly. “Every one. Packs and all. She doesn’t write things down wrong, Ryan. That’s the one thing she never does.”

Ryan didn’t answer.

“She told us her name was Tessa,” I said. “The first morning. Daphne asked her, and she said it. She answered straight away.”

“Because it’s what she was called.”

It was Imogen. She hadn’t moved from her stool. She was holding her cup in both hands and looking at the list, not at us.

“Up there,” she said. “For two years. By the people who fed her and the woman who walked into her head at night.” She turned the cup in her hands. “The others were there for months. She was there

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I thought about Tessa in the back ward, with her bandaged hands. Saying she had been afraid of heights since she was little. Abby had told me that last night. She had said it as if it were something precious, a coin found in the snow.

“Greyhollow,” Ryan said.

He said it slowly, as if he were tasting it.

“Sebastian Thorne’s pack,” he said. “His own pack. One of his own girls, taken out of his own territory, and she’s been in our clinic since the autumn. And he stood in our hall at the reception and walked right past her.” He looked at me. “He didn’t know her.”

“Of course he didn’t,” Sloane said.

We all looked at her.

She was standing very straight by the table, with her arms folded, and her face had gone hard and cold in a way I remembered from when we were children.

“I’ve known Bash since he was fourteen,” she said. “Since he was the Alpha’s heir and came to the summer gatherings with his father and walked round like he owned the lake. He never once in his life looked at anyone who couldn’t do something for him.” Her lip curled. “A guard’s daughter. A maid’s daughter. Some girl from the bottom of the town who went missing one winter. He wouldn’t have known her if she’d been living in his own kitchens. He wouldn’t have noticed she’d gone.”

“You don’t know she was a guard’s daughter,” Ryan said.

“No. But I know she wasn’t anybody’s. Not anybody who mattered to him. Or he’d have turned the valley over looking for her, just to be seen doing it.”

Malachi hadn’t said anything. He was standing against the wall with his arms folded, watching her. I don’t think he had taken his eyes off her since she started speaking.

“And now the Alpha’s taking Abby there,” Sloane said. “Into his house.”

“In three days,” I said.

She looked at me. Something moved behind her eyes..

“What else?” she said. “There’s something else. I heard it on the phone, Liam. You didn’t tell me

everything.”

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I kept it short. The window in the Luna’s rooms, and the wisteria, and the girl with the candle and the kitchen knife. Cassandra going between them. The clinic. Daphne. The small room at the back, with the window onto the garden, and Cassandra lying in it, breathing, for nearly two weeks now, and

no waking.

Sloane sat down.

I don’t think she meant to. Her leg just went, and there was the bench behind her, and she sa She put both hands flat on the table on either side of the list, and looked at them.

“Cassandra,” she said.

“Daphne thinks she’ll wake,” I said. “She moved her hand last week.”

Sloane nodded. She went on nodding, slowly, looking at her hands, and didn’t say anything. Her face had gone white. Cassandra, who had pulled her up off the frost with her own two hands on the night of the fire. Cassandra, who had been the only one in the packhouse who looked at her as if she were

still a person.

Her mouth shook once. She pressed it shut.

Malachi came away from the wall.

He didn’t say anything to her. He didn’t touch her face, or her shoulder, or do anything that anyone in that room could have pointed to. He sat down on the bench beside her, close, the way a man sits down beside someone at a crowded table, and put his hands on his knees under the edge of the board. After a moment, one of them moved.

I couldn’t see it. But I saw her hand leave the table and go down under the edge of it, and her shoulders come down, very slightly. And I saw her breathe out.

Ryan saw it too. He looked away, at the fire. For once in his life, he didn’t say anything.

***

It was Sloane who remembered the scrap. She had herself together by then. She still had her hand

under the table.

“There’s something else,” she said, a little hoarsely. “In the lid. I almost forgot. It was stuck in the

crack.”

She reached across with her free hand and tipped the empty box toward her, and worked a fingernail into the split along the lid, and drew something out.

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Sloane held it out on her palm. “I thought it might be–”

Imogen was on her feet.

I hadn’t heard her get up. She was standing at the table with her cup still in her hand, and her face had gone the color of the ash in the hearth. She was looking at the scrap on Sloane’s palm She didn’t

touch it.

“Where did you get this?” she said.

Her voice was very quiet.

“It was in the box,” Sloane said. “I told you. In the crack in the lid.”

Imogen put her cup down on the table. Carefully. I saw that her hand wasn’t steady. Then she held out her own hand, palm up, beside Sloane’s, and Sloane tipped the scrap into it.

She turned it to the light from the door. She bent her head over it, and I saw her lips move, reading the few words that were left, and then she closed her hand over it, very gently, and held it against her

chest.

“That’s Elspeth’s hand,” she said.

Nobody knew what that meant. Nobody asked. We waited.

Imogen sat down on the end of the bench. She kept her fist against her chest.

“She taught me,” she said. “When I was fifteen. Everything I know, near enough. Where to put my hands and when to keep them still, and what you can take from the world and what you have to give back for it. She was old when I came to her. She was the oldest of us. She had a cottage under the hill above Blackridge, and she kept bees, and she wrote everything down. Every working. Every sickness she ever saw. And every one of us who came to learn from her, she wrote that down too.”

She opened her hand and looked at the scrap.

“There were two of us, that winter,” she said. “Two girls, at the same table. Elspeth taught us both.”

“Cressida,” I said.

Imogen didn’t look up.

“You knew her,” Ryan said. Slowly. “All this time. You knew her before.”

“Of course I did.” Imogen closed her hand again. “We learned at the same table for six years. We

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