His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 188

Next Chapter Chapter 188

#

Rate Chapter

Send Gift

Comments

22

MON

2

O

Mon

Chapter 188

Imogen

Wincent Brynmor opened his own door to me, which told me most of what I needed to know before

he said a word.

The last time I had stood on this step, in the autumn, there had been a boy to take my band a warrior at the gate and Maren in the kitchen doorway with flour on her hands. Now there was only Vincent, in his shirtsleeves, gray-faced, with a dish towel over one shoulder. Behind him the hall was quiet. Somewhere at the back of the house, a radio was playing very low.

៩

He looked at me. Then past me, at the road, as if there might be someone else coming up it.

“You’ve heard,” I said.

“The whole valley’s heard.” His voice was flat. “Harlan of Stonecrest rang me the night of the ruling. He thought I should know, as her mother’s brother.” He stood back from the door. “Come in. You look

frozen.”

I went in.

***

He made me tea in Maren’s kitchen and sat down across the table from me, with his big hands folded in front of him, and listened while I told him.

Not all of it. He didn’t need all of it, and I didn’t have the stomach to say it twice in one week. I told him what mattered. The blade in the Alpha’s chest, and the thread running back from it to the woman who had put it there. The camp, and the list, and his niece’s name at the bottom of it, circled twice, so hard the pen had torn the paper. The ruling. The room in the west wing at Greyhollow, with Sebastian Thorne’s men in the corridors, and a witch who had walked into that house once already and could walk in again.

He didn’t interrupt. When I had finished, he sat for a while with his hands folded, looking at them.

“She sent me a letter,” he said at last. “Abby. After the autumn. After she came here with the Alpha and went up the mountain.” He turned his mug slowly on the table. “She thanked me. For the ledgers, and the mountain. She said-” He stopped. “She said she was glad to know where she came from. Even the hard parts.”

I waited.

“What do you need from me?” Vincent said.

MON

2

22

|||

Г

“Then you don’t need me,” he said. “You need him.”

They had brought Aldric down from the mountain in the first week of the new year.

Vincent told me on the stairs. A bad fall on the ice outside his hut. A broken wrist, and a night on the ground in the cold before anyone found him, and after that a cough that wouldn’t clear. Vincent had gone up himself with four of his warriors and a stretcher, and the old man had cursed them all the way down the mountain and hadn’t stopped since.

“He’s worse since the autumn,” Vincent said, with his hand on the banister. “Since they came. He used to go weeks without saying a word to anyone. Now he talks. In the night, mostly. To her.” He didn’t say who her was. “Some days he knows where he is. Some days he thinks it’s seventy years ago, and he’s waiting for her to come in from the lake.”

“And today?”

“I don’t know.” Vincent looked at me. “I’ll tell you one thing for nothing, Imogen. He hates your kind. He always has. He blames them as much as he blames himself.” He paused. “Maybe more, on the bad days.”

“I know.”

“Then you know he may not say a word to you.”

“I know that too.”

Vincent looked at me a moment longer. Then he went on up the stairs.

***

They had given him the best room in the house. A big square room at the end of the upstairs corridor, with two windows looking out over the lake, and a fire, and a high bed with too many pillows,

which he wasn’t in.

He was sitting in a chair by the window. A very old man, long and gaunt, wrapped in a blanket, with one arm in a sling and the other hand lying on the arm of the chair, all knuckles. His hair was thin and white. His eyes, when he turned his head, were gray as the lake.

He looked at Vincent. Then at me.

I watched him smell me. I watched his face change.

MON

002

22

|||

r

12:18 Mon, Nov 2

“Yes.”

With the silver in her hair.”

“Yes.”

He closed his eyes.

“How much,” he said.

I didn’t understand at first.

“Silver,” he said, without opening his eyes. “How much silver has she got. In her hair, Now.”

“Four strands,” I said. “At her temple. The last one came a few weeks ago.”

His face changed. I can’t describe it any better than that. Something went across it and through it, very fast, like the shadow of a bird crossing water. Not despair. Recognition. And when it had gone, he looked a hundred years old.

“Sit down, witch,” he said.

I sat. Vincent brought me a chair from the wall and set it near the window, a little apart from the old man, and then went and stood by the door with his arms folded. Aldric didn’t look at either of us. He looked at the lake.

“They came one at a time,” he said. “The strands. You know that. I told her.” He meant Abby. “One, and then another. Every time she gave me more than she should have. She laughed about it. She said she was going gray early, from putting up with me.” His mouth moved. It wasn’t a smile. “And then there were too many to count. And then, the last year, the brown was the part you noticed. Not the silver.”

He was quiet.

“And that last year,” he said, “she was cold.”

I didn’t move.

“I didn’t think anything of it. Why would I? It was winter. Everyone was cold.” His voice had gone very far away. “But it didn’t stop. It didn’t stop in the spring either, or the summer. She wore my coat in the house. In June. I used to laugh at her for it. I used to say she’d married a wolf and turned into a

22

12:18 Mon, Nov 2 through the handkerchief.

The cold, and then.

She still came with me,” Aldric said. “When I rode out. When there was trouble on the borders. She still stood behind me, and I still felt it go into me, all that strength. Only it felt different, that last year. Thinner. As if she were pouring it out of something nearly empty.” He was silent for a moment. “And I took it anyway. I took it every time. Because it still worked. Because I didn’t look at her.”

“And then the pass,” I said.

“And then the pass.” He closed his eyes. “And after the pass, all the rest of it went white. In one

night.”

Nobody spoke.

“Your witch came,” Aldric said. “Afterward. When it was finished. When she was lying in that bed, the one night she lived after. Your Elspeth came up the road in the dark, running, with her basket, and her face-” He stopped. “I’d never seen a witch weep. I didn’t think they could. She stood at the foot of that bed and wept, and said she was sorry. She said she should have told her. She said she

hadn’t known.”

“Hadn’t known what?” I said. My voice didn’t sound like mine.

He opened his eyes and looked at me.

“When to stop,” he said. “She said she’d taught her how to give, and never how much was too much. Because she didn’t know herself. Nobody had ever had that much to give. She said she’d never seen it before, and she didn’t know where the bottom was, and by the time she found it, it was too late.” His voice cracked. “I threw her out. I put her out of my house with my own hands, in the snow, and told her if I ever saw her face again, I’d tear her throat out. And I never did. And the next spring I cut every page of it out of the ledgers, and burned them.”

He looked down at his hands.

“And I never once,” he said, “asked her what she’d learned.”

***

I stayed until the light began to go.

He didn’t say much more. He was tired, and his cough came back, and Vincent gave him something in a glass that made him sleepy. But before it took him, when Vincent had turned away to the fire, he put out his good hand, without looking at me, and caught my sleeve.

MON

2

3

22

|||

12:18 Mon, Nov 2

“Then there’s time.” His eyes were half closed. “Not as much as she thinks. There never is. Watch er hair, witch. When the silver starts to outrun the dark, when she can’t get warm, that’s the end coming. And when it all goes white, it’s already here.” His fingers tightened, weakly. “She doesn’t know. Does she? Nobody’s told her.”