His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 191

Chapter 191

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MON

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Chapter 191

The captain of the Council’s guard woke me at a quarter to six by hammering on my bedroom door with his fist, which no one had done in that house since my father died.

I knew before I opened it. I don’t know how. Something in the sound of it. Something in the silence of the house behind it, which was the wrong kind of silence.

He was standing in the corridor in his shirt, gray-faced, with his hair on end and his hands shaking. Behind him, at the end of the corridor, two of my own men were half carrying a third between them, and the third man’s head was lolling on his chest.

“She’s gone,” the captain said.

***

They were still asleep when I got there. The two in the chairs outside the west wing room, one slumped against the wall with his mouth open, the other on the floor where he had slid out of his chair in the night, curled on his side like a dog by a fire. Somebody had put a coat over him. A tin mug lay on its side by his boot, in a dried brown ring.

The door of the room was open.

I went in.

It was exactly as it had been the last time I had seen it, from the garden, through the window. The high bed, the fire, the shelf of books my housekeeper had chosen. Except that the bed was empty and the sheets were thrown back and tangled, and the fire was dead, and the gray blanket was lying on the floor in a heap, as if someone had kicked their way out of it.

Her things were all still there. Her dresses in the wardrobe. Her brush on the vanity, with a few hairpins scattered beside it. A book on the table by the window, closed, with a slip of paper marking the place. All of it left the way a woman leaves things when she means to pick them up again in the morning.

She had taken nothing at all. She had simply gone.

I stood in the middle of that room and breathed in, and smelled her. Snow, and something like light. The smell I had smelled in the garden, under my hand, when her wolf came up to the surface and

looked at me out of her face.

And under it, faint, almost nothing. Smoke.

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to nothing. Out.

I looked at it for a while. Then I crossed the room and picked it up.

The wax was still faintly warm.

Behind me, I heard the captain come into the doorway. I put the candle in the pocket of robe, holder and all, before I turned round.

***

They found the girl on the back stair.

She was lying on the bottom step, sideways against the wall, in her nightdress, with her bare feet blue with cold and a candle on the stone beside her where it had rolled and gone out. There was wax on her fingers. There was wax on the hem of her nightdress, and in a long drip down the stone where

she had carried it.

Her father found her. He had been on the night watch at the river gate, and he came up the back way at six, the way he always did, and found her there, and I heard him from three floors up. One sound. Not a word. The kind of sound a man makes when he has found his daughter at the bottom of a stair and doesn’t yet know if she is breathing.

She was breathing. By the time I got down there, he had her in his arms on the step, wrapped in his coat, rocking her, and her mother was kneeling on the stone beside them with both hands over her mouth, and half the kitchen was in the passage.

I sent them away. The kitchen. Not the parents.

Then I crouched down on the step below them and looked at the girl.

She was waking. Slowly. Her eyelids were moving. Her hand, with the wax on it, opened and closed against her father’s coat. Corwin was saying her name, over and over, very low. Isla. Isla. Isla. As if he could make her answer to it if he said it enough times.

Her eyes opened.

She looked at him first. At his face, a few inches from hers. And there was nothing in it, for a moment. No recognition. The same polite, frightened blankness she had turned on him in the hall.

Then she looked past him, at me.

And then she looked down at her own hand. At the wax on her fingers.

I watched her understand. I watched the color go out of her face, and her mouth begin to shake.

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went to my study.

I shut the door. I sat down behind my father’s desk, and took the candle stub out of my pocket, and set it on the blotter in front of me, and looked at it.

It was nothing. A stub of white wax in a cheap tin holder, the kind you could buy for a few coms in any market in the valley. Burned down almost to the end. A long rope of wax had run down one side of it and hardened.

The last time I had seen one like it, it had been burning on this same desk, at two in the morning with a woman in my chair and her muddy boots on my father’s mahogany.

The girl is mine, she had said. And the room had gone cold enough to frost the window, and the candle had burned blue.

I had heard her. I had understood her perfectly. I had thought I understood her.

I had thought she meant: later. When Moonhaven had fallen, and Kade Blackwell was in the ground, and the Council had finished with its little Luna and had no more use for her. I had thought there would be a moment, a long way down the road, when we sat across this desk from each other and decided between us what happened to her. A bargain. Two people at a table, each with something the

other wanted.

I had thought I was the one with the table.

I sat there and looked at the candle, and I made myself go through it. All of it. The way my father taught me to go through a ledger, line by line, looking for the place where the numbers stopped adding up.

She had come to me. Not the other way round. She had sat in my chair and told me what was happening in Moonhaven, and I had written it down and sent it to the Council, and called it mine. She had given me the traitor and the Rogue King, and I had stood up in my own hall and asked where she was. She had given me the hearing. She had given me the ruling, or near enough. And the Council had looked round for a house to keep the Luna of Moonhaven in, and found it had already been sitting in

one. Mine.