His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 174

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Chapter 174

Abby

Lam put the box on Kade’s desk a little before ten, still in its oilskin, and stood back from it as if it were something that might go off.

He had come straight up from the hut. There was snow melting on his boots, and his face had the look it had when he had been awake too long and was holding himself together by the collar R came in behind him and shut the door, and stood against it. Imogen came last. She didn’t sit he went to the window and stood with her back to the room and her hand pressed flat against her coat, over the inside pocket, as if something there needed holding in.

Kade unwrapped the box. He laid the papers out on the green leather in the order Liam told him, and read them, one sheet at a time, without a word.

I stood at his shoulder and read them with him.

I had known there would be a list. Liam had told me that much on the phone, the night before, in a careful voice. I had lain awake half the night thinking about it, and I had thought I was ready.

I wasn’t ready for the brown ink. For how many there were, crossed out, one after another, going back and back until the writing was so faded you had to tilt the page to the window to read it. I stopped reading the names after the first sheet. I couldn’t. I only looked at the lines through them, and counted, and lost count, and started again.

Then the ink changed, and there were the circles, and Liam’s own page laid alongside, in his square, careful hand. Seven names, matched. Three more. And one left over, on its own, that I read twice

before it meant anything.

Isla. Greyhollow. 18.

“Tessa,” I said.

“We think so.” Liam’s voice was rough. “Imogen thinks so.”

I didn’t look at the bottom of the last sheet. I knew what was there. I had felt Liam know it, all the

way up the hill from the hut, the way you can feel weather coming. I let Kade turn to it on his own.

He looked at it for a while. Then he put his hand flat over it, the way he had put his hand over the Council’s letter, and left it there.

***

Liam told the rest of it. The hut, and the girls, and Imogen’s reasons for thinking Tessa’s name had

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opened it on the desk, beside the list, and stood back.

It was a scrap of paper. Brown, and burned black round the edges, no bigger than my thumbnail. There were a few words on it in a round, old-fashioned hand. I bent to read them. -not past the third

and below that, half burned away, the cold, and then—

“It was in the box,” Imogen said. “Caught in the lid.”

She told us whose writing it was. She told it shortly and flatly, standing by the desk with her arms folded, looking at the scrap and not at us. An old witch named Elspeth, under the hill at Blackdge Two pupils at one table. A story about a Luna with light in her, told once, without a name. Cressida asking and asking. The coven, and the girl from the village, and the day they put Cressida out A grave sealed with a book in it, and the same grave found open, eight winters ago, full of ash.

When she said eight winters, Kade’s hand moved on the desk. Very slightly.

“The winter after the raid,” he said.

“The same winter,” Imogen said. “Yes.”

Nobody said anything. I watched Kade’s face and couldn’t read it. Liam was looking at the floorboards. Ryan, against the door, had his jaw set so hard I could see the muscle in it.

I looked at the scrap of paper on the desk.

Not past the third.

I didn’t know what it meant. But something about the round, careful hand made me think of a teacher bending over a pupil’s shoulder, holding her wrist, saying no, slower, not like that. It made me think of Imogen with the bowl, saying only what he needs, not one drop more.

And of someone else, in a stone chamber, a long time ago, saying the opposite.

“She taught me something,” I said.

They all looked at me.

“Cressida. In the chamber. When I was chained.” My voice sounded strange to me, very level. “I’ve never told anyone. I forgot it, for a long time. It came back the night of the attack.” I made myself go on. “She put my hand flat on the stone, and put her own hand over it. The burned one. And she said, It wants to go somewhere. Let it.” I looked at Imogen. “That’s what she taught me. To push it out. All of it. As hard as I could. Whatever it cost.”

Imogen didn’t say anything for a while.

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“And the other half?”

“Is what was in that book.” She put the handkerchief back in her pocket and pressed her hand over it again. “When to stop.”

****

Kade made his decisions that afternoon, standing at the window of his office with the box shu on the desk behind him, and I stood beside him and helped him make them.

The list would go to Greyhollow. All of it, every sheet, in the oilskin, in Ryan’s own bag. It was the one piece of proof we had that Cressida was a real woman with a real hand, who had taken girls from packs all over the valley, for years, and written them down like stock. Liam would carry a copy. Nester would make it, that night, at the council table, and say nothing to anyone.

The three girls in the long room would be told, tomorrow, where they came from. And Hester would write to their packs, the same day.

And Tessa would come with us.

That was the hard one. Ryan didn’t want it. Liam didn’t want it. I didn’t want it either, if I was honest, and I didn’t pretend to be.

“The Council will ask for her anyway,” Kade said. “An attack in the Luna’s private rooms. She held the knife. If we leave her here, it looks like we’re hiding a witness, the same as it would look if I left Abby.” He turned from the window. “And she’s the best thing we have. She’s a Greyhollow girl, taken from Greyhollow, and Cressida had her for two years. If anyone in that hall still thinks Cressida is a story Moonhaven made up to cover for its Luna, I want them to look at her.”

“And Thorne?” Ryan said. “We tell him?”

Kade looked at him.

“No,” he said. “Not before. If we tell him now, he has a week to decide what to do about it. Bury it, or claim her, or say we’re lying and the witch wrote whatever name we liked.” His mouth thinned. “If Y we tell him in the hall, in front of the Council, he has to decide in a minute, with every Alpha in the valley watching his face.”

“And her?” I said.

Kade turned to me.

“Tessa,” I said. “Isla. She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know her own name, and we do.” I held his eyes. “I won’t carry her into that hall to be a piece of evidence and let her hear it there for the first time,

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Ryan shut his mouth again. Liam, by the desk, made a small sound that might have been a laugh.

Kade didn’t answer for a while. Then he nodded.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “You, and nobody else. Owen on the door.”

Imogen wrote to her coven that night. I didn’t know she had until the next morning, when canie into the training hall for the last drill before we left and found her sitting on the mat/with the bowl in front of her and a letter in her lap.

It was on cream paper. Thick and soft, with a deckled edge. It had been folded very small, and the creases were sharp. She didn’t try to hide it when I came in. She didn’t offer it to me either.

“It came at dawn,” she said. “They don’t waste time, when they want to say no.”

“Who are they?”

“The ones who are left. Five, now. Six, if you count me, and they don’t, much.” She turned the letter over in her fingers. “I told them what was in the box. I told them about the scrap. I told them where Cressida had been all these years, and what she had been doing, and what she was doing now, to a pack of wolves who had never done anything to any of us.” She looked down at the paper. “I asked

them for help.”

I waited.

“She is yours now,” Imogen read out. Her voice was very dry. “We cast her out once, and it cost us. We will not go to war with her for a wolf.” She folded it up again, small. “And then a great deal about the old ways, and the dangers of meddling in the affairs of the packs, and my own judgment, which

they have always had doubts about.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I knew what they’d say.” She put the letter in her pocket, with the other thing, and pressed her hand over both. “I wanted it in writing. That’s all.” She looked up at me, and there was something hard and bright at the back of her eyes that I hadn’t seen there before. “People change their minds, Abigail. Even witches. It helps to be able to show them, afterward, what they said the first time.”

Then she pointed at the bowl.

“Sit,” she said. “Eyes.”

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one who had sat at the trestle table in the autumn and written their frames down.

He did the telling. He sat on the end of the next bed with his notebook on his knee and told them, ne at a time, gently and plainly, the name of a pack beside each of their names. Where it was. How far That the Alpha had written to each of them that morning, and that the letters were already on their way.

The first girl didn’t say anything at all. She sat with her hands in her lap, and her lips moved, saying the name of the pack over to herself, silently, again and again, the way you say a word in a language you’re trying to learn.

The second one asked if her mother was still alive. Liam said he didn’t know. She nodded, as if she had expected that, and looked at the stove.

The third was the one from the north. She heard the name of her pack and frowned, and shook her

head.

“I don’t remember it,” she said.

“That’s all right,” Liam said.

“It isn’t.” She looked up at him, and her chin was trembling. “If they come, I won’t know them. I won’t know any of them. They’ll be strangers. They’ll look at me and want me to be someone, and I won’t be.” She pressed her hands together. “What if I don’t want to go?”

Liam looked at me.

I came and sat down on the bed beside her. I didn’t touch her.

“Then you don’t go,” I said. “Nobody here is going to put you in a truck.” I waited until she looked at me. “They might come. If they do, you can sit in a room with them, and see. And if you want them to go away again, they’ll go away. That’s yours to decide. Nobody else’s.”

She looked at me for a while, searching my face.

“Can I stay here?” she said. “Until I know?”

“As long as you like.”

She nodded. Then she put her face in her hands, and the girl on her other side put an arm round her, and the first girl, still mouthing the name of her pack to herself, reached across and took hold of

her sleeve.

Liam and I went down the stairs without saying anything. At the bottom, he stopped, and leaned his forehead against the wall for a moment, with his eyes shut.

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Owen was on the chair outside the back ward. He stood up when he saw me.

“She’s awake,” he said, before I could ask.

“I need to tell her something, Owen. On her own. Leave the door open, if you like.”

He looked at me. He looked at the door. Something in his face tightened and then let go.

“I’ll be here,” he said.

She was sitting up against the pillows, the way she had been before, with her bandaged hands in her lap. She didn’t flinch this time. She watched me come in and sit down on the edge of the bed, and she

didn’t move away.

I had thought about how to do it all night. In the end, there wasn’t any way except to say it.

“Tessa,” I said. “Some papers were found. Up in the mountains, where she kept you. A list. Of names. Every girl she ever took. Yours is on it.”

Her hands moved a little in her lap.

“We think,” I said, carefully, “that Tessa isn’t the name you were born with. We think it’s what they called you, up there. We think the name you were born with is Isla.”

She looked at me.

Nothing happened in her face for a moment. Then something did. It was very small and very quick, like a light coming on in a far window and going out again. Her lips parted. Her eyes went past me, to the blank wall, as if there were something written on it.

Then it was gone. She was only looking at me again, puzzled and tired.