His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 197

Chapter 197

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Chapter 197

Abby

The truck stopped for the last time in the middle of the night, and nobody came to take me down.

cooled.

I sat on the bench in the dark with the sack over my head and waited. The engine ticked as Outside, men were moving about, unloading something heavy, and their boots crunched on how and then rang on rock. Nobody spoke. They never did. In all the days on the road I had heard Cressie’s men say perhaps twenty words, and none of them to me.

The wind was different here. That was the first thing I noticed. It didn’t come and go in guses the way it had on the hilltops. It came steadily, from one direction, long and low and cold, as if it had a long way to run before it reached me and nothing to stop it on the way.

Then hands on my arms, and I was walked down out of the truck and across the snow. Uphill, a little. Over stones. Through a doorway so low that the man in front of me pushed my head down with his hand, and then out of the wind all at once, into still air that smelled of old smoke and dry herbs and

cold stone.

Somebody sat me down on something soft. A chain clinked. I felt it drawn through the links between my cuffs and fastened somewhere behind me.

Then her hands at my throat, the way they always were, and the cord loosening, and the sack coming up over my face.

***

It was a house.

I don’t know what I had expected. A cave. A cellar. Another barn. It was a house, old and low and built of stone, one long room with a hearth at one end and a heavy door at the other, and a ceiling of dark beams so close above me that I could have touched them if I stood. Somebody had already lit the fire. The light from it moved over the walls, over shelves of jars and bundles of dried plants hanging from the beams and a narrow bed against the far wall, made up with gray blankets, and a table, and

one chair.

I was sitting on a pallet by the side wall. My chain ran back to an iron ring set into the stone behind me. The ring was rusted brown with age, but it was solid.

Everything in that room was old. The table had been scrubbed so many times that the grain stood up out of it in ridges. The jars on the shelves were clouded glass, with paper labels gone the color of tea. But nothing was falling down. Somebody had swept the hearth. Somebody had stopped the gaps round the window with fresh moss. Somebody had kept this place, year after year, and kept it well.

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“Welcome home, little moon,” she said, without turning round.

Adidn’t answer.

“Not yours. Mine.” She touched the glass with one finger of her burned hand. “I found it when I was younger than you are. I was out walking in the snow, a long way from where I was supposed be, and I came over the ridge, and there it was. Empty. Forgotten. Built by somebody nobody remembered, for some reason nobody remembered either.” She was quiet for a moment. “I never told them. My sisters. I lived with them for years after that, in their warm house, with their bees and their rules and their not past the third, and I never once told them I had somewhere else to go.”

She turned round and looked at me.

“Some things you keep to yourself,” she said. “Or other people start telling you what you may do

with them.”

***

I slept a little, that first night. I hadn’t meant to. The fire was warm, and the pallet was soft, and after all those days of jolting in the back of the truck, my body simply stopped and wouldn’t start

again.

When I woke, there was gray light in the window, and I could see out of it.

A slope of snow and black rock, falling away steeply below the house. Below that, a long way down, a long flat sheet of ice, narrow and white, running away between two walls of mountain until it bent out of sight. Pines along the far shore, dark and small with the distance. Above them the mountains went up and up into cloud.

I knew it.

I didn’t know how. I sat on the pallet with the chain cold across my lap and stared at it, and it was like hearing a voice in a crowded room that I was sure I recognized and couldn’t put a face to. The length of it. The way the shores ran so straight and close and then bent. The color of the ice, gray-white under a gray sky.

Diana lifted her head at the bottom of me. Under the silver, slowly. I felt her sniff.

I know this, she said.

So do I. From where?

But she didn’t know either, or she couldn’t reach it through the silver. She lay down again.

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and gray rolled off onto the ice. A stone. Then they turned the sled and went back toward the shore/ for another.

counted the stones already lying out there. I couldn’t be sure from so far up. Twelve, perhaps. Thirteen. Set out in a curve. Not a whole ring yet. Part of one.

Cressida came in from outside with snow on her shoulders and saw me looking.

“They’ll be finished in a week,” she said. She shook the snow off her coat and hung it on a pe by the door. “Stones are heavy. Ice is slippery. Men are slow.”

“What is it?”

“You know what it is.” She crouched down in front of me with the cup of water, the way she did every morning. “You’ve seen a circle before.”

I had. I had stood inside one only nights ago, on a hilltop, with the marks of it smoking round my feet. But that one had been drawn in salt and ash, and a few steps across.

The one on the ice was going to be the width of a house.

***

She told me that evening. Not all of it. As much as she wanted me to know, sitting in her one chair by the fire with her hands folded in her lap, while I sat on the pallet with my back against the wall and

the chain between my wrists.

“At the full moon,” she said, “we’ll go down onto the ice. You and I. Into the ring.”

“And then?”

“And then I’ll bind you to me.” She said it calmly. She might have been telling me what we would eat. “The way a wolf is bound to her mate. You know what that is. You feel it every minute. That line running out of you to him.” She tilted her head. “It will be like that. Only it will run one way. From

you, to me. Whatever you have, whenever I want it. And nothing coming back.”

The fire hissed. I couldn’t feel my hands.

“I already have a mate,” I said.

“I know you do.”

“That bond doesn’t- You can’t just- It doesn’t go away.”

“No.” Cressida looked at me with something that was almost kindness. “But inside that ring, it

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She didn’t answer at once. She looked down at her burned hand in her lap, and turned it over, and looked at the palm.

That depends on you,” she said.

I stared at her.

“You could make it easy,” Cressida said. “Walk into the ring on your own feet. Lie down when tell

you to. Give me what I ask for, all of it, at once, without fighting me.” She lifted her eyes to me. “And afterward I’ll open my hand, and he can do whatever he likes with what’s left of his life or you can make it difficult.” She paused. “I’d rather you didn’t. It wastes so much.”

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.

Cressida got up out of her chair. She went to the window and looked out at the dark, where the ice was, and the stones, and the men.

“It’s a good place for it,” she said, half to herself. “Seraphina thought so too. She gave every last drop of herself away on that ice. To him.” Her voice dropped. “Seventy years. I’ve always thought it ought to be finished properly.”

And then I knew.

It came up through me all at once. A white path winding up through pines, and the trees getting smaller and smaller, and little piles of stones every few hundred yards. A low cabin under an overhang of rock. An old man’s rough voice saying she was lying on the ice. And a night walk down to the shore, with Vincent carrying the lantern, and Kade’s coat held up for me to undress behind, and Diana stepping out onto the snow for the first time in that place and lifting her nose.

The lake smelled of ice and stone.

Blackridge.

I was looking at Blackridge. From the far end, high up, from a side I had never