His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 190

Chapter 190

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Chapter 190

didn’t move. I don’t think I could have.

She sat there in the chair by the window with the candle burning beside her, and looked at me, and waited, the way you wait for a frightened animal to decide whether it’s going to run. There was no hurry in her. There never had been. She had sat in that same way, a long time ago, on a stool bende

the stone table where they had chained me, and watched me wake up.

“You’re in my room,” I said.

My voice came out hoarse. It didn’t shake. I was proud of that, afterward.

“I am.”

“There are two guards outside that door.”

“There are.”

“If I scream,” I said, “they’ll be through it before you can stand up.”

Cressida smiled. She tilted her head a little, the way she had in the chamber, considering me.

“Go on, then,” she said.

I stared at her.

“Scream.” She settled back in the chair and recrossed her legs. “Go on, little moon. Call them. As loud as you like. Let’s see what happens.” She lifted her burned hand and turned it over in the candlelight, looking at it. “No one will hear you.’

I got out of the bed.

I didn’t scream. I don’t know why. Maybe I already knew. I crossed the room barefoot with the sheet still clinging to my legs, and went past her chair close enough to touch, and she didn’t move, and I pulled the door open.

The corridor was dark. The lamp on its hook at the far end had been turned down to almost nothing.

The two guards were in their chairs.

The young one from Highmoor had his head back against the wall and his mouth open. The other had slid sideways, his shoulder against the doorframe, one arm hanging down to the floor. A tin mug

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He didn’t wake up. He didn’t even frown.

smelled the mug. Tea, and milk, and under it something green and bitter that I knew from Imogen’s basket. Something she gave people who couldn’t sleep for pain.

“The girl made it,” Cressida said behind me, from the chair. Quite pleasantly. “In the kitchen, at eleven. She brought it up on a tray, and they thanked her. They were glad of it. It’s cold, sitting in a corridor all night.” A pause. “She makes very good tea, I’m told. Her mother taught her”

I stayed on my knees by the sleeping man, with my hand on his chest.

Then I got up, and went back into the room, and shut the door.

***

“What do you want?” I said.

I stood with my back against the door. I didn’t go any closer. Inside me, Diana was so high and so close to the surface that I could feel her lips drawn back from my own teeth, and the light was right there with her, full to the brim, humming. Four days from the full. I could have filled that whole room

with it. I could have filled the house.

Cressida looked at me. At my hands, pressed flat against the door behind me. At my eyes.

“Careful,” she said gently. “They’re turning.”

I held it. I held it down with everything I had. I felt the silver go out of my eyes like a tide going out, and Cressida watched it go, and nodded, very slightly, the way Imogen nodded at the bowl.

“Good,” she said. “Very good. You’ve been practicing.” She leaned back in the chair. “She has taught you that much, at least. Imogen. How to hold it. How to sit on it like a lid on a pot.” Something moved at the corner of her mouth. “She was always good at holding things in.”

“What do you want?”

“The same thing I have always wanted, little moon. You.”

She said it simply. As if it were the most natural thing in the world.

“Not dead,” she said. “Not hurt. Not in chains on a stone table. That was a mistake. I was in a hurry, and I didn’t understand what you were.” She spread her hands. “I want you with me. Willingly. That’s

all.”

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“Don’t you?” She looked round the room. At the high bed, and the cold fire, and the shelf of books Somebody had chosen without knowing anything about me. “Look where you are, Abigail. Look at it. A beautiful room in a man’s house who wants to own you. Two guards on your door who think you’re a monster. A whole Council of old men who couldn’t decide what you are, so they locked you until they could.” Her voice didn’t change. It stayed soft, and patient, and almost kind. “And at home? Where they love you so much? They cross the street when you come out of the bakery. Theyick up their children and carry them the other way. A man who served under your Alpha’s father turned his face to the wall when you walked past.”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t know how she knew that. I didn’t want to know.

“You weren’t made for that,” Cressida said. “For a little town by a lake, and a little clinic, and folding linen, and being looked at sideways by kitchen girls. You were never meant to live among ordinary wolves, little moon. You’re not ordinary. You’ve never been ordinary, not for one day of your life. And they know it. That’s why they’re afraid of you.” She leaned forward, a little, into the candlelight. “I’m not afraid of you. I’m the only one who isn’t. I’m the only one who knows what you are, and what you could be, and isn’t trying to put you in a box until you’re small enough to be comfortable.”

“You put me in chains.”

“And I’m sorry for it.” She said it without any change in her face at all. “I told you. I was in a hurry. I’m not in a hurry now.” She sat back. “We need each other, Abigail. You have more light in you than anyone has seen in seventy years, and nowhere to put it, and nobody who knows what to do with it. And I know exactly what to do with it.” She smiled. “Why make it complicated?”

***

“No,” I said again.

It came out steadier this time. I pressed my back against the door. I thought of the bowl, and the mirror, and the warriors at the foot of the steps with their hands held out.

“You can say whatever you like,” I said. “You can sit in that chair until morning. I’m not going anywhere with you. Not willingly. Not ever. They can keep me in this room until I’m old, and I’ll still

say no.”

Cressida looked at me for a while.

Then she sighed. Very softly. The way you sigh at a child who won’t eat.

“I thought you might say that,” she said. “You’re very like her, you know. Your great-grandmother. She was stubborn too. It didn’t do her much good.”

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And a hundred miles away, at the other end of the thread, Kade’s heart stopped.

I felt it.

I felt it the way you feel the ground drop out from under you on a stair in the dark. Through the bond, all that long way, faint and thin and stretched to nothing, I felt the thing in his chest move AN at once. It came up off the bottom of him where it had been coiled for weeks, and it closed. Round his

heart. Like a fist.

And his heart stopped.

One beat. Two.

I was on my knees. I didn’t remember getting there. I was on my knees on Sebastian Thorne’s carpet with both hands pressed to my own chest, as if I could reach him through it, and I couldn’t breathe, and I couldn’t feel him, I couldn’t feel him at all-

Cressida opened her hand.

His heart started again. Hard, and ragged, and too fast. I felt him gasp. I felt him wake, in the dark, in our bed at home, a hundred miles away, with his hand on his chest and no idea what had happened

to him.

Then she did something else.

She turned her open hand over, and laid it flat on her knee, and smoothed it, gently, the way you would smooth a blanket over someone sleeping.

And the thing in Kade’s chest lay down.

I felt it go. All of it. The way it had gone at the first binding, when Imogen and I had knotted it down together, only more. It went down, and down, into the bottom of him, and lay quiet. Not sullen. Not waiting. Quiet. For the first time in weeks, quiet. And I felt Kade, at the other end of the thread, lie back on the pillow, and breathe. One long breath, all the way down. And then another.

He was asleep before the third.

I knelt there on the floor and cried. I couldn’t help it. I hadn’t felt him sleep like that since the

autumn.

“There,” Cressida said softly. “You see?”

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When I could look at her again, she was still watching.

That’s what I can do,” she said. “Either way. You’ve felt both now. I can close my hand, or can open it.” She looked down at her own scarred fingers. “I made that blade, little moon. I can make it. I can take every thread of what I put in him out again, and leave him whole. As if it had never been. He’d live to be an old man, with his pack and his mother and his lake.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Or,” she said, “I can do nothing at all. And in four days the moon will be full, and your witch will try to hold it down on her own, without you, and she won’t be able to.” She tilted her head. “And you’ll feel that too. From here. Every second of it. And there won’t be a single thing in the world you can do about it, because you’ll be sitting in this room, being good.”

The candle flame stood straight up between us.

“Come with me,” Cressida said. “Tonight. Of your own will. And I’ll take it out of him. All of it.”

“Why should I believe you?” My voice was raw.

“Because you can feel him.” She said it simply. “You’ll feel it the moment I do it. You’ll know if I lie.” She smiled. “And because I don’t need him, Abigail. I never needed him. He was only ever the way

to you.”

***

I knew it was a trap.

I want to say that clearly. I knew. I knelt there on the floor of that room with my face wet and my heart going like a drum, and I knew exactly what she was. I had been on her stone table. I had felt her burned hand over mine. I had held Cassandra’s blood in my hands, and seen the list, and my own name at the bottom of it, circled twice.

I knew.

And at the other end of the thread, Kade was asleep. Properly asleep. For the first time since the autumn. I could feel him breathing, slow and deep and easy. And I could feel, too, very faintly, the thing in his chest, lying quiet where she had put it. Not gone. Only lying there. Waiting for her to close her hand.

Four days.

I thought about the moon coming up over the lake, full and white. Imogen in the training hall

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12:19 Mon, Nov 2

“If you’re lying,” I said, “if you hurt him, I’ll know. And I’ll find a way to make you sorry. I don’t care

what it costs.”

know you will,” Cressida said. She sounded almost fond. “That’s why I came myself.”

****

She let me dress.

She turned her back to give me privacy, which was somehow the most frightening thing she had done all night. She stood at the window with her back to me and looked out at the dark garden, and hummed, very softly, the same tuneless song I had heard in my dreams.

I put on the warmest things I had. Wool stockings, the gray dress, my coat. Boots. My hands were shaking so badly that I could barely do the buttons.

I didn’t take anything else. There was nothing in that room that was mine.

My hand went to my throat.

The crescent was there. My mother’s white-gold moon, on its fine chain, warm from my skin. I had worn it for as long as I could remember. I slept in it. I had sat in front of the Council in it, under the blue dress, where nobody could see. I had forgotten it was there, the way you forget your own

heartbeat.

I closed my hand over it, through the wool of my dress, and held it.

Cressida turned round.

“Ready?” she said.

***

The girl was waiting in the corridor.

She was standing in the middle of the red carpet, between the two sleeping guards, in a white nightdress, barefoot, with a candle in a tin holder in her hand. Her eyes were open. There was nothing in them at all.

I stopped dead.

“Isla,” I said.

She didn’t look at me. She didn’t hear me. She stood there with the candle held out in front of her,

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