His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 175

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Kade

Chapter 175

left at five, in the dark, in four trucks.

Ryan had planned it down to the seat. The first truck was his, with four of his men and the ilskin bag on the floor between his boots, where he could feel it every time we went over a rut. The Abby and me, with Garrick in the front beside the driver and his cane across his knees. Then Liam an Imogen and the rest of the warriors. And last, a little way behind the others, the one with the canvas back, where Owen sat with the girl wrapped in a blanket and two of Ryan’s steadiest men across from them, and nobody would see her get in or out.

The packhouse was dark when we pulled away. Only one light, at the back, in the clinic. I looked at it through the rear window until the trees took it.

Abby didn’t look back. She sat beside me with her hands in her lap and her eyes on the road, and when we turned out onto the valley road, she reached across without a word and took my hand, and held it on the seat between us all the way to the river.

***

It was six hours to Greyhollow.

Down the long valley, and over the river at Millford, and then south and west through country I hadn’t seen since I was a boy, riding in the back of my father’s car with my face pressed to the window. Low hills. Bare oak woods. Sheep in the white fields, gray against the snow. The road got wider and better as we went, and the farms got bigger, and the stone walls along the fields got higher and straighter, until it seemed as if every wall for twenty miles had been built by the same hand.

“His father’s,” Garrick said, from the front seat. It was the first thing he had said since Millford. “Old Thorne had every wall in the territory rebuilt the year he took the chair. There was nothing wrong with the old ones. He wanted people to see them.” He shifted his cane. “The son’s cut from the same

cloth. Just better tailored.”

Abby was looking out at the walls.

I felt it through the bond, a long way down, under everything else. The light. Quiet and still, held in, the way Imogen had drilled it into her every morning for a week. Like a candle in a closed room. I could feel how much it cost her. I didn’t say anything about that either.

My own chest was quiet. That was the only mercy. The binding had held. The thing under my ribs lay curled where she had put it, heavy and sullen, and I could feel it there all the time, like a stone in a shoe. But it slept. In the mirror that morning, the threads at my throat had been faint and gray, a few fine lines above the collarbone. Ivy had put me in a shirt with a high collar and a dark coat over it,

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Greyhollow sat on a rise above a slow gray river, and you could see it for miles.

It was a big house. Bigger than ours, and older, built of the same pale gray stone as the walls weathered dark under the eaves, three stories high with a wing on either side and a long gravel drive between rows of bare lime trees. The windows were tall, and all of them were lit, though it was barely three in the afternoon. Smoke went up straight from a dozen chimneys. There were cars drawn along the front already, a long row of them. I knew some of them. Ravenwood’s green truck. Coran’s old blue Land Rover, with the dent in the door.

Ryan’s truck stopped at the foot of the steps. Ours stopped behind it. And before the engine was off, the great front doors opened, and Sebastian Thorne came down the steps to meet us himself.

He was in a gray suit, very well cut, with no coat, though the wind off the river was bitter. He came down the steps with his hands open, smiling, and two of his men behind him, and a woman behind them with a clipboard. He looked like a man welcoming old friends to a wedding.

I got out. I made myself do it in one movement, without a hand on the door. Abby got out after me, on her own, before I could turn to help her. And I felt the whole front of that house watching from its tall lit windows.

“Kade,” Sebastian said warmly. He held out his hand. “You made good time. I was afraid the river

road would be bad.”

I took his hand. His grip was firm and dry and brief. He let go first.

“Luna.” He turned to Abby and took her hand, exactly the way he had in my hall at the reception, and smiled at her. His eyes went to her hair. To the silver, braided in. Only for a second. Then back to her face. “You’re very welcome at Greyhollow. I hope you’ll be comfortable. If there’s anything at all you need, you have only to ask.”

“Thank you,” Abby said. “You’re very kind.”

Her voice was perfectly steady. So were her eyes.

“Garrick.” He shook the old man’s hand too, and Garrick shook it as if it were something he had found on his shoe. “And Liam Hayes. And-” His gaze moved past us, to the last truck, with its canvas back, pulling in behind the others. And then to Imogen, getting down from the third truck in her long black coat with her basket on her arm. His smile didn’t change. “And a witch,” he said lightly. “How

thorough of you.”

“She’s here to answer for the binding,” I said. “The Council will want to hear from her.”

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“Of course.” He turned back to me, all warmth. “I’ve had the east wing made ready for you. You’ have the whole of it to yourselves. Your own stair, your own doors. I thought you’d prefer it.” He

Niled. “Dinner is at seven. Everyone’s here. Just a small welcome. Nothing formal.” He stood back to let us go up the steps ahead of him. “Tomorrow will be formal enough for all of us.”

李*

The east wing was beautiful.

That was the worst of it. I had braced myself for rooms over the kitchens, for smoke through the floor, for everything Garrick had told us at my council table. Instead there was a long corridor carpeted in dark red, with tall windows down one side looking out over the river, and a fire laid in every grate. There were fresh flowers in the rooms. White hellebores, in winter. Somebody had gone to a great deal of trouble.

The rooms at the end were for Abby and me. A sitting room and a bedroom, and a bed so wide you could have lost each other in it. There was a door at the end of the corridor, and a stair going down,

and another door at the bottom of that.

Ryan walked the whole wing before he let anyone unpack. Every room, every window, every cupboard. He tapped the walls. He went down the stair and tried the door at the bottom, and found it locked from the outside, and came back up with his face like stone.

“Our own doors,” he said. “But not our own keys.”

He put two men at the top of the stair and two at the bottom, on our side of the locked door, and two at our own door, and sent the rest to sleep in shifts. He put Owen and the girl in the room next to ours, with Imogen across the corridor from them. Then he went to stand at the window at the end, looking down at the river, with his hands behind his back.

“It’s a good wing,” Garrick said, behind him. He had come along the corridor slowly, with his cane, looking at everything. “Best in the house, I’d guess. Furthest from everything.” He stopped beside Ryan at the window. “Furthest from everyone else too.”

Ryan didn’t answer.

*******

Dinner was in the hall. It was the oldest part of the house, long and high, with tall windows down one side onto the dark terrace and a fireplace at the far end big enough to stand in, and Thornes going back two hundred years looking down from the walls in heavy frames. Sebastian had been Alpha for a few months, and he hadn’t changed any of it yet. Somebody had put the tables together into one long one, with a white cloth and good glasses, and low candles in glass holders all the way down it under the lights. Every Alpha in the valley was at it, in dark suits, with their mates in evening dresses beside

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I saw what that was the moment the housekeeper showed us to our places. Every eye at the table came to us as we walked the length of it. Every one. And every one of them would be able to see me

evening, at the top of the table, in the full light of the candles, beside a man who was perfectly at his ease.

Abby sat at my right, in the dark green dress Ivy had chosen for tonight, with her mother’s rescent at her throat and her shoulders straight. Garrick beside her. Liam and Ryan were halfway down the table, between Stonecrest and Ashford, where they could see us and every door.

“I hope you don’t mind,” Sebastian said pleasantly, as I sat down. “I thought you should have the place of honor. You’ve come the furthest.”

“That’s kind of you.”

“Not at all.”

I sat down as if it were my own table. I could feel the stone under my ribs turn over once, slowly, at the sound of his voice. I kept my hands on the cloth and my face still and let it turn.

They came to us, one by one, before the soup.

Tiernan first. He came round the table and gripped my hand hard, and said in his quiet way, “Ravenwood is here, Kade,” and that was all. Then he bent and kissed Abby’s cheek, and asked her about Kaia, and she told him Kaia sent her love and a great many instructions. He laughed. It was the only real laugh I heard at that table all night.

Harlan of Stonecrest came next, heavy and white-haired, and told me he had known my father, as he always did. He held my hand in both of his and looked into my face a little too long, and I knew he was looking for something. The gray in my skin, perhaps. The way I held my shoulders. I let him look. He let go at last and patted my arm, the way you pat a horse you aren’t sure of, and went back to his

chair.

Corran of Millford didn’t come round. He lifted his glass to me down the length of the table, and then to Abby, and held it there, so that everyone could see him do it. His two daughters had come home in the autumn in Moonhaven trucks. He had not forgotten. I didn’t think he would.

Aurelie of Highmoor didn’t lift anything. She sat very upright, halfway down the table, with her mate silent at her shoulder, and watched Abby. Only Abby. Steadily, without blinking, with her sharp gray eyes, as if she were reading something written very small.

Bram of Ashford knocked his water glass over, and went scarlet, and didn’t look at either of us all

evening.

***

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Sebastian talked to me about the river. About the flooding the year before last, and the new bridge

Millford, and whether Moonhaven had had the same trouble with ice on the lake this winter. He was easy and charming and well informed. He asked after my mother, gently, with real concern in his voice, and said he hoped she was mending, and that he had been so sorry to hear. He asked Abby how she found the east wing, and whether the hellebores were to her taste, because his housekeeper had chosen them especially.

And all the time, I felt the table watching.

They watched me lift my glass. They watched me cut my meat. When I turned in my chair to speak to Tiernan, I felt a dozen pairs of eyes go to my collar, to see whether it moved. Harlan’s wife watched my hands. Aurelie of Highmoor watched Abby, and never once stopped.

Abby ate. She talked when she was spoken to, quietly and well, about the town and the clinic and the girls who had come home in the autumn. She smiled at Corran’s wife across the table. She thanked Sebastian for the hellebores. She sat with her back straight and her hands in her lap between courses, and the candlelight lay on the silver in her braid and on the side of her face, and her eyes were blue-gray and steady and her own.

I could feel what it cost her. Every minute. The light, held down. Held in. Like a hand closed on something burning.

It was just before the sweet that Sebastian stood up.

He did it easily, with his glass in his hand, and the table quieted for him the way a table quiets for a host. He smiled down the length of it.

“I won’t make a speech,” he said. “We’ll all hear more than enough speeches tomorrow.” A ripple of laughter. “I only want to welcome you to Greyhollow. Some of you have come a long way, in bad weather, on the Council’s business. I know my father would have been glad to see this table full.” He lifted his glass. “And I want to welcome, especially, the Luna of Moonhaven. Whom so many of us

have heard so much about.”

He turned. And with his free hand, quite naturally, the way a host adjusts a centerpiece, he reached out and drew the nearest cluster of candles a little way along the cloth. Toward her. So that the light fell full on her face.

“There,” he said warmly. “Now we can all see her.”

The table had gone quiet.

Every face turned. Every one. Harlan, and his wife, and Bram of Ashford with his ears burning, and Aurelie with her sharp gray eyes. They all looked at Abby. At her eyes. Waiting.

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12:08 Moh, Nov 2

My whole body went tight. Under my ribs, the stone stirred and lifted its head.

And then I felt her catch it.