His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 176

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Chapter 176

Abby

Nound the pins at seven, when I took the blue dress out of the case.

The velvet bag was tucked into the fold of the skirt, exactly where Ivy had said it would be, with the string pulled tight. I hadn’t forgotten. I had only not let myself think about it. I stood in the middle of Sebastian Thorne’s beautiful bedroom with the dress over my arm and the little bag in my palm and for a moment I couldn’t do anything at all.

Kade came out of the bathroom with his shirt half buttoned, and saw my face, and stopped.

“Ivy,” I said.

He didn’t ask. He came and took the bag out of my hand and opened it, and tipped the pins into his palm, and looked at them. The small pale stones caught the gray light from the river.

“Sit down,” he said.

I sat at the dressing table. He stood behind me and braided my hair. Badly. He had never done it in his life, and he did it with his big careful fingers and his tongue between his teeth, and when I told him to weave the silver in, he did that too, frowning, strand by strand. Then he coiled it low at the back of my neck and pinned it with her grandmother’s pins, one by one, and stood back.

Then I put on the blue dress, and did up the high collar over my mother’s crescent, the way Ivy had told me to, so that it lay against my skin where nobody could see it but me.

The braid wasn’t as neat as Ivy’s. It was a great deal better than I had expected.

“There,” he said. “Ivy would kill me.”

I laughed. It came out of me so suddenly that it was almost a sob, and he put his hands on my shoulders and held on, and in the mirror I watched both of us not say any of the things there were to

say.

***

They held the session in the hall.

It looked different by daylight. The long table from dinner was gone. In its place, someone had set out a row of tables in a wide shallow curve across the far end, under the tall windows, with chairs behind them and water jugs and glasses and a name card at every place. Thirteen places. Thirteen Alphas. Below them, facing them across twenty feet of bare floor, a single table with three chairs, and a small one off to the side for the Council’s clerk, the woman with the clipboard who had stood behind

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There were people along the sides of the hall. Betas and seconds on chairs against the walls. Greyhollow’s warriors at every door, in pairs, in plain dark clothes, with their hands clasped in front of hem. A few of the house staff at the back, by the service door, as if they had come to clear something and stayed.

Our table was the one in the middle of the floor.

Kade sat in the center. I sat at his right. Garrick sat at his left, with his cane against the edge of the table, and his old face set like a wall. Behind us, on chairs against the wall, Liam and Ryan. And Imogen, a little apart, in her black coat, with an empty chair on either side of her that nobody had taken.

I folded my hands in my lap.

Eyes, I thought.

****

Harlan of Stonecrest had the chair. He was the eldest, Garrick had told me in the truck, and it went to the eldest, every year, wherever the Council sat. He opened the session in a heavy, slow voice, and read the representations aloud from the clerk’s copy, exactly as they had been written in the letter. The fitness of the Alpha. The traitor, pardoned and concealed. The Luna’s power, beyond her control or her pack’s. The attack in the Luna’s rooms.

I had read those words a hundred times. They sounded different, said out loud in that hall, under those portraits. They sounded true.

Then Harlan looked down the curve of the table.

“Greyhollow brought these representations,” he said. “Greyhollow will speak to them first.”

Sebastian stood up.

He didn’t go to the middle of the floor. He stayed at his own place, halfway along the curve, with one hand resting on the back of his chair. He wore a dark suit and no tie, and he looked tired, and grave, and sorry. He looked like a man who had been asked to do something unpleasant and had come to do it properly.

“I want to say first,” he said, “that I take no pleasure in this.”

His voice was quiet. It carried to every corner.

“Moonhaven is our neighbor. Its Alpha’s father was a friend to my father, and to many of you. When Moonhaven was attacked eight years ago, every pack at this table sent help. I would send it again

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He did it beautifully. I would give him that, afterward, when I could think about it at all. He didn’t exaggerate anything. He told them how he had come to Moonhaven under the old right, to hear any answer from a woman who had refused him. He made it sound reasonable and a little foolish, a young man’s errand, and two of the older Alphas smiled. He told them how the Alpha of Moonhave had, refused a fair challenge, under the old law. First to yield. He said it gently, as if he regretted Waving offered it.

And then he told them what had happened next.

“I said something I shouldn’t have,” he said. “I admit that freely. I was angry. I spoke about the Alpha’s father.” He looked across the floor at Kade. Very directly. “I apologize for it. It was beneath

me.”

Kade didn’t move. I felt him not move. Under his ribs, the stone shifted and settled.

“The Alpha’s wolf came up,” Sebastian went on. “Which is natural. Any of us would have done the same. But something came up with it.” He paused. “I don’t know what it was. I won’t pretend to. I saw his throat. There were marks on it. Dark lines, under the skin, climbing toward his jaw. And he went down on one knee, on his own floor, in front of his own pack, as if something had hit him from

inside.”

There was a small sound along the curve of tables. Not a word. A shifting.

“And then his Luna came down the stairs,” Sebastian said, “and knelt beside him, and put her hands

on him. And I saw what she is.”

He turned to the clerk.

“I’d like the Council to hear from two of my warriors,” he said. “They were with me. They saw it too. I don’t want anyone at this table to have to take my word alone.”

***

The first was young. Twenty, perhaps. He stood in the middle of the floor with his hands behind his back and his eyes fixed on a point somewhere over Harlan’s head, and told it in a flat, careful voice, as if he had said it many times. The air going tight. The hair on his arms standing up. The lamps along the walls flickering, all of them at once, the way they did in a storm when the power was about to go. He had heard a buzzing. He had felt something pull, he said, although he couldn’t say what. He had backed up to the door. He wasn’t ashamed of it.

“And the Luna?” Harlan said.

The young man looked at me for the first time. Then away.

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He didn’t look over Harlan’s head. He looked straight at me, and kept looking, all the way through

said what the young one had said. The air. The lamps. The eyes. Then he said the rest.

“Her wolf came up,” he said. “Not all the way. Halfway. I’ve never seen a wolf come up like that in a woman’s face. Her nails went to claws. On her own hands. Standing there in a dress.” His moth twisted. “And she spoke to my Alpha. In a voice that wasn’t hers. And she told him to get outs

“What did your Alpha do?” Harlan said.

“He went.” The gray-bearded man’s eyes didn’t leave my face. “We all went. I’ve served three Alphas at Greyhollow. I was at the river crossing in the bad winter. I’ve never in my life walked out of a hall because a girl told me to. I walked out of that one.” He paused. “And I was glad to.”

He sat down.

The hall stayed quiet.

I sat with my hands in my lap. I could feel it moving in me. Not rising, yet. Only stirring, low down, like something turning over in its sleep at the sound of its own name. I thought of the bowl. I thought of the mirror, face down on the mat. I thought of Ivy’s grandmother’s pins at the back of my neck, and the kitchens, and the clinic, and Callum Fletcher holding his hands out across the warriors’ hall.

I let it settle.

I didn’t look at Kade. I could feel him beside me, and his whole body was saying I’m here.

***

Kade answered.

He stood up for it. I felt what that cost him, and I watched him do it as if it cost nothing at all. He stood behind our table with his hands at his sides and his collar buttoned to the throat, and spoke to the curve of Alphas in a level, even voice, the way I had heard him speak to his own council a hundred

times.

He didn’t deny anything they had said. That was the first thing that surprised them. I watched it

surprise them.

He told them there was a curse on him. That it had been put there by a witch, the same witch who had held the girls in the mountain that autumn, the same witch who had taken his Luna and chained her in a stone room. That his Luna’s light was the only thing that had kept it down. That what Sebastian’s warriors had seen in his hall was his Luna saving his life, in front of them, with her own

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That landed. I saw it land. Corran of Millford sat back in his chair. Tiernan, at the end of the curve didn’t move at all, but something in his face eased. Harlan wrote something on the pad in front of hing.

For a moment, I thought it might be all right.

Then Aurelie of Highmoor spoke.

She hadn’t said a word all morning. She sat upright in her chair halfway along the curve, with her hands folded on the table in front of her and her mate silent behind her, and she had been watching me the whole time. Steadily. Without blinking. The way she had watched me all through dinner.

Now she turned her sharp gray eyes to Kade.

“The fourth representation,” she said. Her voice was light and dry and very clear. “The traitor. Sloane Sinclair. Pardoned by your council in the autumn, on the condition that she remain where Moonhaven could see her.” She tilted her head. “Where is she, Alpha?”

****

I felt Kade’s heart change. Under my own ribs, through the bond, as if it were mine.

“She isn’t in Moonhaven,” he said.

“That isn’t what I asked.”

“She was moved for her own safety. After the fire. There were people in my pack who-”

“Who wanted her dead. Yes. We heard.” Aurelie didn’t raise her voice. “I asked where she is.”

The hall was very quiet.

Sebastian hadn’t moved. He was sitting at his place with his hands folded on the table, looking at nothing, with an expression of polite patience. As if he were waiting for a bus.

And I understood, all at once, sitting there with my hands in my lap. He knew. He knew exactly where she was. Somebody had told him. And if Kade lied now, in this hall, in front of every Alpha in the valley, Sebastian Thorne would stand up and say so, and then nothing else Kade said would

matter. Not the curse. Not the witch. Not me.

I felt Kade understand it at the same moment I did.

He looked down at me. Only for a second. Nobody else would have seen anything. A man glancing at

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knew what it would cost. That I would rather he lost everything in this hall than stood up in it and lied to them, the way they all half expected him to.

That I was here.

He looked back at Aurelie.

“She’s east of the pass,” Kade said. “In the mountains. With Malachi Blackwell.”

******

It wasn’t loud at first. It was worse than loud.

Somebody along the curve drew a breath in through their teeth. Somebody’s chair creaked. At the end of the row, Bram of Ashford said, “What?” in a cracked, boyish voice, and then looked as if he

wished he hadn’t.

Then Harlan said, “Blackwell,” and the hall broke.

Everyone spoke at once. Harlan was on his feet. So was one of the Alphas from the south whose name I didn’t know, a big red-faced man, shouting something about the raid, about Nathaniel, about bodies in the square. Corran had gone gray. Along the walls, the Betas and seconds were half out of their chairs, and the Greyhollow warriors at the doors had straightened, and somewhere at the back a glass went over and smashed.

Kade stood through all of it. He didn’t sit down. He didn’t raise his voice. He waited, the way he waited out a storm on the lake, until Harlan had banged the flat of his hand on the table three times and the noise had fallen back, ragged and furious, to a mutter.

“I sent her,” Kade said into it. “Myself. The night after the fire. With a message for him.” He didn’t look away from them. “She went because I asked her to. Not to escape. And I have sat at a table with Malachi Blackwell since. Once. On the far side of my own border. With my Beta and my Gamma and my Luna beside me.”

“He killed your father,” the red-faced Alpha said. His voice was shaking. “He killed your father, boy. In your own square.”