His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 196

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Liam

Chapter 196

Nernan’s truck came down the eastern road a little after ten in the morning, with three people in the cab who had no business being anywhere near Moonhaven.

I was in the yard when it came through the gate. I saw it stop. I saw the passenger door ope, and Sloane get down, stiffly, in a man’s coat too big for her, with her hair tied back and her face thinand set. I saw Malachi get down after her, and stand beside the truck with his hands at his sides, way he had stood in the snow outside the shepherd’s hut. Teague stayed in the cab.

Half the yard had stopped what it was doing to look.

Sloane saw me. She came across the yard, limping a little, and stopped in front of me, and looked at the mark on my neck above my collar. Her mouth moved.

“You did it,” she said.

“Six days before they took her.”

“Good.” Her voice cracked on it. “Good. She’d have been so happy.” She looked past me at the packhouse. “Where is he?”

***

It didn’t go well. I hadn’t thought it would.

By the time they reached the foot of the packhouse steps, the yard was full. Warriors from the hall, still in their training clothes. Kitchen boys. Two of the old men who sat on the bench by the gate every morning. People coming out of doorways and round the corners of buildings, and the word going ahead of them, low and fast. Blackwell. It’s Blackwell, Here.

Ryan met them at the foot of the steps. He gave Malachi one long, flat look, and said nothing, and stood aside. That was more than I had expected from him.

Garrick was on the top step.

I don’t know how he heard so fast. Somebody ran for him, I suppose. He was standing in the doorway of the packhouse with his cane in both hands and his face gray, and when Malachi came up the steps toward him, he didn’t move out of the way.

“Take him,” Garrick said.

Nobody moved. Not at once.

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head. “Ryan. Chain him. Now.”

Behind me, someone in the crowd said it out loud. Then someone else. Not loudly, at first. Then ouder.

Chain him.

Hang him.

Kill him where he stands.

Two of the young warriors at the front had come forward a step. Then three. I saw one of them with his hand on the knife at his belt.

Malachi stopped on the steps.

He didn’t turn round. He didn’t reach for anything. He lifted his hands, slowly, both of them, empty, palms out, to the height of his shoulders, and stood there on the third step with half of Moonhaven at his back, and didn’t move.

“I’m not here to fight anyone,” he said.

He said it quietly. The yard went quiet to hear it.

“I’m not here for your forgiveness. I don’t want it. I don’t need it.” He looked up at Garrick. “I came for him. Your Alpha. And for her. His Luna. That’s all. The woman who made the blade in his chest has her, and I know that woman. I know how she thinks, and where she keeps things, and what she wants. Nobody else in this valley does.” He held his hands where everyone could see them. “Put chains on me if you like. Cuff me. I won’t stop you. I’ll sit in that office in irons and tell your Alpha everything I know, and then I’ll walk out of your gate and you’ll never see me again. But I won’t stand aside. Not if

it might keep her alive.”

“And her?”

It was a woman’s voice. From the crowd, somewhere by the woodpile. Sharp and high.

“What about her?” the woman said. “The traitor. Brought back here on his arm. She sold our Luna to him once, in the autumn, and now she walks back into this yard as if-”

“Rogue’s whore,” someone else said. Louder.

Sloane didn’t flinch. She was standing at the foot of the steps with her chin up and her face white, and she didn’t say a word. I saw her hands close at her sides.

Malachi came down the steps.

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“Say what you like to me,” Malachi said. “I’ve earned it. All of it, and more.” He looked at the crowd. Slowly. One face at a time. “Not to her. Stay away from her.”

Nobody spoke.

Behind me, I heard Tiernan push off from the side of the truck.

Behind Garrick, in the doorway, someone else had come out.

Harlan of Stonecrest stood there in his dark coat, with his hat in his hand, looking at the nan on the

steps.

He had never seen Malachi Blackwell. I realized it as I watched his face. Every Alpha in the valley

knew the name. Hardly any of them had ever seen the man.

“You know who I am,” Harlan said.

“Yes.”

“You know what the Council has ruled.”

“Yes.”

Harlan looked at him a while longer. Then he looked past him, at Sloane. At me. At Tiernan, who had come to stand at the foot of the steps with his arms folded.

Kade came out of the door behind him.

He looked terrible. He hadn’t slept. The threads on his throat were black against his skin, up past the hinge of his jaw. He stood in the doorway of his father’s house and looked down at his father’s brother on the steps; and his face didn’t change at all.

“Put your hands down,” Kade said to Malachi. “Nobody is chaining anyone on my steps.’

Malachi lowered his hands. He didn’t step away from Sloane.

“I asked for them,” Kade said.

Harlan turned his head.

“Not in so many words,” Kade said. “But I asked. My mother told me to send for anyone in this valley who might know where Cressida would take a girl like Abby. So I’m sending.” He looked at Harlan. “You can carry every word that’s said in my office this morning back to the Council yourself. I want you to. I want you in the room. Sit in the corner and write it all down, if you like.”

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Malachi. “If there’s any chance he can tell us where she’s taken my wife, I will hear him. I’ll hear him if it costs me my seat. I’ll answer to the Council for it afterward. All of it.”

Harlan looked at him.

Then he stepped back out of the doorway.

“I’ll be in the room,” he said.

Garrick was still standing there. His jaw was working. His hands were white on the head of his cane.

Kade put his hand on the old man’s shoulder.

“Please,” he said.

That was all. I had never heard Kade say that word to Garrick in my life.

Garrick looked at him. Then at Malachi, two steps below. Then he turned, slowly, without a word, and went back into the house. Not to his rooms. Toward the office.

He wasn’t going to leave them alone in there either.

***

There were nine of us in Kade’s office. It wasn’t built for nine.

Kade behind his desk. Harlan in the chair in the corner, as he had promised, with a notebook on his knee. Garrick by the window, standing, because he wouldn’t sit in the same room as Malachi. Ryan by the door. Tiernan against the bookshelves. Imogen in the chair across from the desk, still gray from the moon, with a shawl round her shoulders and her basket on the floor beside her. Sloane on the arm of the old leather sofa. Malachi standing behind her, against the wall, with his arms folded. And me.

Nobody sat on the sofa.

“Tell them,” Kade said to me.

So I did. I laid it all out on his desk, the way I used to lay out patrol reports when we were eighteen and his father was still alive. In order. Every piece we had.

The night Abby went. The guards drugged with tea the girl had made. The girl at the bottom of the back stair, and what she had said when she woke. It wasn’t the Luna. It was the other one. The cold one. Tiernan had that from Corran, who had it from the girl’s father himself, whispered across a stable yard when nobody from Greyhollow was looking.

The fist round Kade’s heart at two in the morning. The sleep. The silver.

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I’m alive. Don’t let them-

When I had finished, the room was quiet.

“She let her out,” Malachi said.

Everyone looked at him.

“Into her wolf. Under the moon.” He was frowning at the floor. “That’s not like her. She doesn’t take chains off anything once she’s put them on. Not for an hour. Not for a minute.” He was quiet for a moment. “Unless she needs something from it. Unless there’s something she wants the girl to have, that she can’t get with the silver on.”

“The moon,” Imogen said.

Malachi looked at her.

“Silver keeps the moon out,” Imogen said. “It doesn’t only hold a wolf. It starves her. A few days of it, and the girl’s light would start to go down.” Her mouth thinned. “Cressida doesn’t want it going down. She wants it full. As full as it will go. That’s why she let her out. Not out of kindness.”

“She wants her whole,” Malachi said. Very low. “I told you.”

Sloane had gone white. I watched her hand find Malachi’s wrist behind her, against the wall, and

hold on.

“Full for what?” Ryan said. “What’s she going to do with her?”

Nobody answered.

***

“Where?” Kade said.

He was looking at Malachi.

Malachi didn’t answer at once. He stood against the wall behind Sloane with his arms folded, and looked at the window, at the gray sky over the lake.

“I don’t know,” he said at last. “I want to be clear about that. I don’t know. I knew her places. The mill house on the river. The old tower above the eastern road. The camp in the mountains, below the waterfall. She’ll go to none of them. She knows I know them. She knows I’m alive.”

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about anything. A woman.” He frowned. “A Luna. Long ago. With the light. The Moonsilver Luna, she) called her. The way you’d talk about something out of a story. She’d sit by the fire some nights and talk about her for hours. What she could do. What she must have been. What it must have been like to stand next to her.” His jaw tightened. “I thought it was a story. Something she’d heard as a girl and couldn’t let go of. The witch told us about her in the hut. Her teacher’s story. The woman nobody would name.” He looked at Imogen. “I thought that was a story too.”

Imogen didn’t say anything.

“Decades,” she said at last. “That’s how long. She’s been chasing that woman for most of her life. Since the night Elspeth first told us about her, at the kitchen table. It’s the only thing she ever wanted.” She looked down at her hands. “If she has a place she’s never taken anyone, a place that

matters to her more than any other-”

She stopped.

I watched it go through her face. All at once.

“Blackridge,” she said.

Nobody moved.

“That’s where it happened,” Imogen said. “All of it. Whatever happened to that Luna happened there. It’s where Elspeth lived. It’s where Elspeth is buried. It’s where the book was taken from, out of Elspeth’s grave.” She lifted her head. “If Cressida has a place she’s never told anyone about, a place she’s gone back to all these years, I would put money on it being somewhere in those mountains. Somewhere she could sit and look down at the lake.”

“What lake?” Malachi said.

***

It was Kade who answered.

He had been sitting very quietly behind his desk the whole time, with his hands flat on the wood, listening. Now he looked up.

“The lake at Blackridge,” he said. “Where she died.”

Malachi looked at him.

“Her name was Seraphina,” Kade said. “Seraphina Brynmor. She was the Luna of Blackridge, seventy

years ago. Her mate was Aldric. He’s still alive. Abby and I sat in his hut in the mountains last autumn and he told us.” His voice was very even. “Her hair started going silver the year after they were mated. One strand, then another. He took everything she had. Every fight. Every winter. He never once asked

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“She was Abby’s great-grandmother,” Kade said.