His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 177

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Chapter 177

Kade

Carrick stood up at nine o’clock, before anyone else could, and leaned on his cane, and waited until the hall was quiet.

He hadn’t told me what he would say. I hadn’t asked. He had sat up half the night in the sitting room of the east wing, by the dead fire, with a glass of Sebastian’s whisky he didn’t drink, and en came out at six he was still there, in the same chair, shaved and dressed and gray as stone. Head looked at me, and nodded once, and that was all.

“My name is Garrick Shaw,” he said now. “I’ve sat on the council of Moonhaven for forty-one years. Thirty of them at Nathaniel Blackwell’s table. Most of you know me. Some of you have had cause to wish you didn’t.”

A dry murmur along the curve. Harlan’s mouth twitched.

“I’ll tell you plainly where I stand, so nobody here wastes their time wondering,” Garrick said. “I voted against the pardon for Sloane Sinclair. I voted against it twice. I don’t like the Luna’s light. I don’t understand it, and I’ve said so to her face, and I’ve said so to the Alpha’s, in his own office, more times than either of them would care to count.” He shifted his weight on the cane. “And I didn’t know, until I sat in this hall yesterday, where that girl had gone, or who had sent her, or who the Alpha had been sitting at tables with. He didn’t tell me. He didn’t tell his council. I won’t pretend that sits easy with me. It doesn’t.”

He let that stand. Along the curve, I saw heads nod. Sebastian, at his place, folded his hands and looked down at them with an expression of grave sympathy.

“Yesterday,” Garrick said, “a woman at this table asked the Alpha of Moonhaven a question. He could have lied. Everyone in this hall knows he could have lied. Most of you expected him to. I sat beside him and I expected him to.” His old voice hardened. “He didn’t. He stood up in front of the whole valley and told you a thing that he knew would cost him everything he had. Because you asked.”

He looked along the curve of tables. One face at a time.

“I don’t know what Nathaniel would have done about Malachi Blackwell. I’ve thought about it all night. I don’t know. But I know what Nathaniel was. He was a man who told the truth when it cost him, and kept his word when it cost him more.” He turned his head and looked at me, for the first time that morning. “So is his son.”

He sat down. It took him a long time. Nobody spoke while he did it.

I didn’t look at him. I couldn’t have, and kept my face.

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I stood up. Ryan came forward from the wall and laid the oilskin bag on our table, and unwrapped t and stepped back. I took out the list.

I told them where it had come from. I didn’t soften it. A camp in the high mountains east ofthe pass, five huts dug into a hillside below a frozen waterfall. The witch’s camp, found empty box left behind in a hurry. Malachi Blackwell had carried it down.

I heard the murmur go along the curve at his name. I let it go.

Then I read them the names.

Not all of them. There wasn’t time for all of them, and I didn’t think I could. I read them the old ones, the first page, to show them how far back it went. I read them the place where the ink changed. And then I read them the circles. Eleven names, eleven packs. Seven of those packs had sent trucks to Moonhaven in the autumn to bring their daughters home. Corran’s daughters were on it, both of them, one under the other. I watched him hear their names in that hall, and put his hand over his

eyes.

“This is her hand,” I said. “The same woman who held your daughters in that mountain. She kept a list. Of every girl she took. For years. I want this Council to see it, and copy it, and send it to every pack in the valley, so that anyone who has lost a girl and never known why can come and look.”

The clerk had stopped typing. She was looking at the paper in my hand.

“And who,” Sebastian said pleasantly, “has seen this hand before?”

The hall turned to him.

He hadn’t stood. He sat back in his chair, easy, with one arm along the back of it, and looked at me with an expression of polite, regretful interest.

“I only ask,” he said. “Because none of us has. Not one person at this table has ever seen a line written by this witch. We have Moonhaven’s word that she exists. We have Moonhaven’s word that she cursed the Alpha. And now we have a list, in a hand none of us knows, that was carried down from a camp none of us has seen, by Malachi Blackwell.” He spread his hands. “Forgive me. I’m sure the Alpha believes every word of it. But it’s a great deal to ask.”

I felt the doubt go along the curve, chair by chair.

I had known he would say it. I had lain awake knowing it.

“Then ask the girl,” I said.

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name on this list to a girl who came out of that mountain. Seven who went home. Three who are still

in Moonhaven, who knew their own names and nothing else. One was left.” I looked up. “One girl/and one name. The girl has been in our clinic since the autumn. She answers to Tessa. She doesn’t

emember any other name. She doesn’t remember where she came from.”

I read it out.

“Isla. Greyhollow. Eighteen.”

It was very quiet.

I didn’t look at the Council. I looked at Sebastian.

I had wanted to see his face when he heard it. I had told Ryan so, in my office, with the box on the desk between us. If we tell him in the hall, he has to decide in a minute.

He didn’t take a minute. I don’t think he took a second. Something moved behind his eyes, very fast, the way a fish moves under ice. And then his face was exactly as it had been. Grave. Attentive.

Interested.

“Greyhollow,” he said, as if tasting it.

“I ask the Council’s leave to bring her in,” I said.

Harlan looked along the table. Nobody objected. I don’t think anybody could have.

I nodded to Ryan. He went to the side door and opened it.

*****

Owen brought her in.

She came in walking close against his side, in a plain gray dress Ivy had found for her and a cardigan too big in the sleeves. The last of the bandages were gone from her hands. The scratches from the wisteria had healed to thin pink lines across her palms, and she held her hands curled against her chest, the way she did now, as if they still hurt. Her dark hair had grown out a little since the autumn and fell uneven to her jaw. She looked very young. She looked like what she was, a girl who had been taken out of her own life and put back down in a strange place, and had been waiting ever since for someone to tell her where she belonged.

She saw the Council and stopped.

Owen stopped with her. He didn’t touch her. He only stood there, close, and waited, and after a

moment she breathed and went on.

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That was all. A small smile, steady and warm. And I watched the girl’s shoulders come down an inch.

Marlan cleared his throat. He began, quite gently, to ask her name.

He didn’t get to finish it.

At the service door, at the back of the hall, one of Greyhollow’s guards had come off the wall

the

I saw him because I was facing that way. A big man, fifty or so, gray coming in at his temples, same plain dark clothes as the rest of them. He had been standing at the service door all morning with his hands clasped in front of him, as still as the door itself. Now he had taken one step forward, out of his place. Then another. His hands had come apart. His face-

I have seen men’s faces in battle. I had never seen a face like that one.

“Isla,” he said.

It came out of him cracked and hoarse, as if it had been a long time since he had said it aloud.

The girl turned her head.

“Isla.”

He was crossing the hall. The man beside him at the door reached out and caught at his sleeve, and he tore free without looking round. Sebastian half rose from his chair and said something sharp, a name, and the man didn’t hear it. He didn’t hear anything. He came across the bare floor of that hall, under the eyes of every Alpha in the valley, toward the girl in the too-big cardigan, and his hands were out in front of him, open, shaking.

She took a step back. Owen moved between them. Not all the way. Only enough.

The man stopped in front of him. He didn’t try to get past. He stood there, with Owen’s shoulder in front of him, looking over it at the girl, and the tears were running down into his beard and he didn’t seem to know it.

“It’s Dad,” he said. “Isla. It’s Dad. It’s me.”

She looked at him.

She looked at him with a polite, frightened, empty face. The way you look at a stranger who has stopped you in the street and called you by somebody else’s name.

“I’m sorry,” she said. Her voice was very small. “I don’t- I’m sorry. I don’t know you.”

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that place opening and finding the room empty.

He went down on his knees on the floor in front of her. Not to beg. I don’t think he could stand.

And the girl Tooked down at him, this big gray stranger on his knees with his face wet, and something happened in her face. I saw it. The same thing Abby had told me about, in the backward. A light coming on in a window, very far away. It flickered. She frowned, as if she were listening o something.

Her hand came off the back of the chair. She looked at it, as if it belonged to someone else. Then she reached out, slowly, past Owen’s arm, and touched the top of the man’s head. Very lightly. Just her fingertips, on his gray hair.

“I don’t know you,” she said again. Puzzled. Crying. “I don’t. Why am I-”

He put his arms round her knees and held on, and wept.

Nobody in that hall moved. Not one of them. Thirteen Alphas, and their seconds, and their guards, and the clerk with her hands frozen over her keys. I don’t think anyone breathed.

Then Sebastian Thorne stood up.

***

“Well,” he said.

He said it quite softly. Into the silence. And every head turned.

He came round the end of the curve of tables and walked out across the floor, unhurried, until he stood a few feet from the girl and the man kneeling in front of her. He looked down at them. His face was grave and kind.

“Corwin,” he said. “Get up.”

The man didn’t get up.

Sebastian didn’t repeat it. He turned instead, and looked across at me, and then along the curve at

the Council.

“I owe the Alpha of Moonhaven an apology,” he said. “And my thanks. It seems one of Greyhollow’s daughters was taken from us, two years ago, in my father’s time. I didn’t know. My father didn’t tell me. Perhaps he didn’t know either.” He paused. “Moonhaven found her. Moonhaven has kept her safe. Fed her, and housed her, and cared for her, for months, without knowing whose she was.”

He let that sit. He was very good at letting things sit.

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The silence changed.

“Ldon’t say that to wound anyone,” Sebastian said. “I say it because it’s true. Moonhaven couldn’t protect its own house. It couldn’t protect the Alpha’s mother. It couldn’t protect this girl from being used.” He turned back to Harlan. “She is a daughter of Greyhollow. Her father is standing in this hall. By every law this Council keeps, she belongs to her pack.”

He looked down at the girl, who was staring at him with her wet, bewildered face.

“Then she’s mine,” he said. “I ask the Council to return her to her pack.”

I felt Owen go rigid from across the floor. I felt it through my own body, the way you feel a wolf in your own pack go up on his toes. He didn’t move. He kept his eyes on the girl. But his hand had closed at his side so hard the knuckles were white.

I couldn’t say no.

That was the thing. I stood there and looked for it, and it wasn’t there. She was a Greyhollow girl, with a Greyhollow father kneeling at her feet. There was no law in the valley that would let me take

her home.

Abby’s hand found my sleeve under the edge of the table. She didn’t pull. She only held on.

“Moonhaven has no claim on her,” I said. My voice sounded very far away. “Except that we’ve cared for her. And that she has been used, by the same woman who put that knife in her hand, and who is still out there.” I looked at Sebastian. “She will need guarding. Day and night. The witch can reach her. She has done it before, at a distance, through walls. If she’s in your house, Sebastian, she’s a way into your house.”

“Then I’ll guard her,” Sebastian said. “Better, I hope, than Moonhaven did.”

Harlan looked down the curve. One by one, they nodded.

It was the quickest thing the Council decided in two days.

They took her out by the service door. Her father on one side, Greyhollow warriors round them both. She went without fighting, with that dazed, emptied look on her face, and at the door she turned and looked back. Not at me. At Owen. And then at Abby.

Then she was gone, and the door shut, and Owen stood in the middle of the floor, alone, beside an empty chair.

***

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The rest of the morning went to witnesses.

Tiernan stood up for us. I hadn’t asked him to. He stood at his place at the end of the curve with his hands on the table and told them, in his quiet, unhurried way, that his sister was living in Moonhaven under Moonhaven’s formal protection, and had been for nearly three months, and was as safe there as she had ever been in her life. That Moonhaven had sent seven girls home in the autumn, in its own trucks, and asked nothing for it. That he had known Kade Blackwell for years and had never once caught him in a lie.

“Until yesterday,” Harlan said heavily.

“Yesterday,” Tiernan said, “he told the truth. I was here.”

Then Imogen.

They didn’t want to hear her. I could see that before she opened her mouth. She stood in the middle of the floor in her long black coat, with her gray-streaked hair pinned up and her basket left behind on her chair, and half the Council would not look at her. The red-faced Alpha from the south looked at the ceiling the entire time. Bram of Ashford sat with his hands under the table, as if he were afraid

she would see them.