His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 187

Chapter 187

Rate Chapter

Send Gift

Comments

O

MON

22

2

|||

O

Г

Mon,

Chapter 187

Imogen

took me three days to get there, and I spent most of them rehearsing what I would say, and none

of it was any use.

That is the trouble with old women. You can plan a speech for a hundred miles, and the moment you walk into their kitchen and they look at you over the top of the teapot, you are fifteen again, and you

have forgotten to shut the gate, and the goats are in the cabbages.

The house hadn’t changed. It never did. Long and low and gray, with its back into the hill above Blackridge and its windows looking out over the valley, and smoke going up from both chimneys, and the hives along the south wall wrapped in sacking for the winter, the way she had always wrapped them. Somebody still kept her bees. Of course they did. Nobody had ever been able to bring themselves to stop.

I stood at the gate for a while, in the snow, looking at the hives.

Then I went up the path and knocked, because I was not going to walk into that house as if it were

still mine.

***

There were five of them at the table, and they had known I was coming. They had known since the moment I crossed the river, I imagine. You don’t keep a house like that for sixty years without knowing who is coming up the road.

Agnes was at the head of it. She was the eldest. She had been the eldest when I first came, and she had been old then. Now she was something past old, small and bent and white as paper, with her hands folded on the head of a stick and her eyes as sharp as they had ever been. She had been Elspeth’s first pupil. She had sat at this table when Elspeth sat at the head of it, and she had never once, in all the years I had known her, sat anywhere else.

The others I knew too, more or less. Ruth, who had never liked me, and had never pretended to. Mairead and her sister, Bryony, who had been girls together at this table a few years before I came and still finished each other’s sentences. And Joan, the youngest of them, which meant she was only a

little older than me, who looked at me when I came in with something that might have been pity.

Nobody stood up.

“Imogen,” Agnes said.

“Agnes.”

MON

22

2

<

Mon, Nov

I sat. I had tea. Nobody said anything while it was poured. That was the way of that table. You didn’t alk until you were warm. Elspeth had said once that nobody ever said anything worth hearing with cold hands.

When my hands were warm, I took out the letter.

I laid it on the table in front of me. Their letter. The cream paper with the deckled edge, folded small. I didn’t open it. They all knew what was in it. Ruth had written it, I was fairly sure. It had her way with a full stop.

“You got my answer, then,” Ruth said.

“I did.”

“And you came anyway.”

“I came anyway.”

“We said no, Imogen.” Ruth didn’t raise her voice. She never did. “We said it plainly. We cast that woman out forty years ago, and it cost us. We lost Elspeth over it, near enough. She was never the same after. We lost three good years putting this house back together. We did our duty. We did it in the old way, in front of the whole coven, and we have kept to it since.” She folded her hands. “Cressida is not ours anymore. She hasn’t been for forty years. Whatever she is doing out there to a pack of wolves, it is not our business, and it is not our war.”

There was a little murmur round the table. Mairead nodded. Bryony looked at her tea.

“I know,” I said.

Ruth’s eyebrows went up.

“I know all of that,” I said. “I was in the room. I was the one who went to fetch Elspeth when the girl from the village was found. I stood in that doorway-” I pointed at it “–and watched Elspeth stand up and say the words, and watched Cressida walk out of it. I know exactly what it cost.” I looked round the table. “I’m not here to ask you to take her back. I’m not here to ask you to fight wolves’ wars.”

“Then why are you here?” Joan said. Gently.

I took the handkerchief out of my pocket.

***

I laid it on the table beside the letter, and unfolded it.

MON

2

22

O

Г

12:16 Mon, Nov 2

Then Agnes leaned forward. Slowly, with both hands on her stick, until her face was a foot from the loth. Her lips moved. I watched her read the few words that were left, and read them again.

She sat back.

“Where,” she said.

Her voice had gone very thin.

So I told them.

All of it. I had meant to tell it in order, the way I had rehearsed on the road, and I didn’t. It came out of me the way things come out of you when you have been carrying them alone for too long. The Alpha of Moonhaven with a blade in his chest that wasn’t his. The girl with the light in her. The camp in the mountains, and the box, and the list. Eleven girls circled, and the ones before them crossed out, and the ones before those, going back and back until the ink was brown. A girl in a clinic bed who had been made to climb a wall in her sleep with a candle in her hand. The Alpha’s mother on the floor in a pool of blood. The Council, and the girl in the blue dress standing up to say yes.

And the scrap. Caught in the lid of the box, where it must have fallen when Cressida packed in a hurry and ran.

I didn’t stop until I had finished. Nobody interrupted me. When I had finished, the kitchen was very quiet, and the fire had burned down, and nobody had got up to put more wood on it.

“The grave,” Bryony said at last. Very low. “When Joan found it open. We thought it all burned.”

“So did I.”

“She got some of it out,” Mairead said. “She got her hands on some of it, and she has been-” She stopped. She looked at her sister.

“-using it,” Bryony said. “All this time.”

Ruth hadn’t moved. She was looking at the scrap. Her face had gone a curious color, like old candle

wax.

“It changes nothing,” she said. But her voice wasn’t as certain as it had been. “It’s terrible. I won’t pretend it isn’t. But it changes nothing about what she is to us. She is not ours. We cannot answer for every wrong a cast-out woman does in the world for the rest of her life.”

“I’m not asking you to answer for her,” I said.

MON

2

22

|||

O

Г

They looked at me.

Elspeth asked to be buried with that book,” I said. “Every one of you heard her ask. She sat at the head of this table and said she wanted it in the ground with her, so that nobody could ever use what was in it. So that the woman she had helped could be forgotten. She had given her word to that woman’s mate, and she kept it, and she took it into the ground.” I looked at Ruth. “And we lit be dug up.”

“We didn’t let-”

“We sealed that grave. Us. With our own hands, in this coven, the old way. And it wasn’t enough. Somebody walked up to it in the dark and opened it, and took what she had asked us to keep, and has been using it for eight years to hunt girls.” I didn’t raise my voice. “That is not a wolf’s war, Ruth. That is our teacher’s grave.”

Ruth opened her mouth. Then she closed it.

“She taught every one of us,” I said. I looked round the table. At each of them. “Every one of you sat where I’m sitting, at fifteen, or twelve, or nineteen, with your hands too cold to work, and she put them right. She taught you where to put your hands and when to take them away. She taught you what you can take from the world and what you have to give back for it. She taught you to stop.” I swallowed. “Everything any of us knows about our own work, we know because that old woman sat at this table for sixty years and gave it to us, for nothing, and asked nothing back. Except that one thing. That one book, in the ground, with her.”

Nobody said anything.

“Cressida took the half of what Elspeth taught that she wanted,” I said. “She took the pouring, and the pushing, and the taking. She never took the stopping. She never wanted it.” I looked at Agnes. “And now she has the book. Or what’s left of it. And she has a girl with more light in her than anyone has seen in seventy years, and no one to teach that girl when to stop except me.”

I sat back.

“I’m not asking you to fight her,” I said. “I’m asking you to finish what Elspeth started, the day she stood up in this kitchen and said the words. She cast Cressida out. She didn’t finish it. She was too kind to finish it.” My voice wavered. I let it. “I think she would want us to.”

***

Nobody broke the silence.

Joan was crying. Quietly, without moving her face, the way some people do. Mairead had taken her

MON

2

22

|||