His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 199

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Chapter 199

Liam

hey came in over three days, and every one of those days, Kade stood at the gate.

He didn’t have to. Ryan had men on the gate. There was a list in the hall downstairs with every name on it, and who was coming in person and who was sending someone, and which rooms ey would have, and Hester had made it out in her neat square hand and pinned it to the board by the kitchen door. Kade knew all of it. He went and stood at the gate anyway, in the cold, with his hands in his coat pockets and his collar turned up over the black threads at his throat, and watched every car come up the lake road and turn in.

I stood with him when I could. He didn’t talk. Once, on the second afternoon, when a long gray car with Highmoor plates came round the last bend, he said, “Twenty-one,” very quietly, to nobody, and I

knew he wasn’t counting cars.

Twenty days to the moon.

By Wednesday night we had all of them but one. Some had come themselves. Corran of Millford, gray and tired, who shook Kade’s hand at the gate and held it a moment too long. Aurelie of Highmoor, who got out of her car and looked up at the packhouse and then at Kade’s throat, and said nothing at all. Bram of Ashford. The big red-faced Alpha from the south, whose name turned out to be Holt, and who walked past Kade at the gate without a word. Others had sent a son or a Beta, with a letter of authority in an envelope, and the envelopes had all gone into a box on Harlan’s desk in the

library.

Tiernan came on Wednesday, with Ravenwood’s letter in his own pocket because he was Ravenwood. My uncle didn’t come. Blackridge had never sat on the Council. It was too far north, and it had always kept to itself. He had rung Harlan anyway on Monday night, and told him he was staying where he was, with his men watching the mountain, and that Blackridge would stand with Moonhaven whatever the Council decided.

Greyhollow came last. Thursday morning, an hour before the session, in two black cars.

We used the dining hall. It was the only room big enough. The long tables had been pushed together into a curve under the windows, the way they had been at Greyhollow, with jugs of water and the clerk’s laptop and little white cards with names on them. Moonhaven’s table stood alone in the middle of the floor.

Kade sat at it. Garrick on one side of him, with his cane. Me on the other.

That was what the Council was. I understood it properly that morning, sitting in our own dining

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words. Just a sort of steady, terrible pressure, like a man holding a door shut with his back. Under it,

the thing in his chest, turning. It had been worse since Monday night. He had been angry for three days without stopping, and it fed on that.

Breathe, I told him.

I am breathing.

Breathe slower.

He didn’t answer. But after a moment, I felt him try.

***

Harlan opened it.

He stood up in the middle of the curve, a big heavy old man in a dark suit, and didn’t sit down again for a long time. He told them why he had called them. The Luna of Moonhaven, placed in the Council’s custody at Greyhollow by the Council’s own ruling, had been taken out of it. Out of a guarded room, in a guarded house, past the Council’s own guards. And since then, there had been new testimony, and he had heard some of it himself, and he did not think the Council could wait until spring to hear the rest.

“I have been in this house for nearly two weeks,” he said. “I came here to look for a woman everyone told me had run. I have searched every building in this town. I have sat in their training hall on the night of the moon and watched what that woman left in the Alpha’s chest.” He looked round the curve of tables slowly, one face at a time. “I am going to ask you to hear three people today. Then I’m going to ask you to decide quickly. I’ll tell you why when they’ve spoken.”

He sat down.

“Greyhollow,” he said. “Bring your witness.”

****

Bash brought her in himself.

I don’t know what I had expected. I had seen her last at Greyhollow, at the hearing, in Ivy’s gray dress and Owen’s cardigan, standing in the middle of that hall with her father on his knees in front of her. She had looked lost then. She had looked like a girl who had woken up in somebody else’s life.

She looked worse now.

Bash had her by the arm. Above the elbow, hard, the way you hold someone you think will run, and he walked her down the length of the hall between the tables and across the floor, faster than she

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“Here,” Bash said. “Here’s your culprit.”

la stood where he had left her. She didn’t look at anyone.

“This girl,” Bash said, “got out of her bed in my house on the night in question. She went down to my kitchen at eleven and made tea, and put something in it to make a man sleep, and carrier it up on a tray to the two guards outside the Luna’s door. The Council’s guards.” He turned his head toward Harlan. “Your own men, Harlan. They thanked her for it. And then they slept. Then she opened the door. Whatever happened after that, she was the one who opened it.”

Behind me, at the back wall, Owen was standing with Ryan. I felt him through the link before I saw him. He didn’t move. He didn’t make a sound. But I felt what went through him when Bash said

culprit.

Isla lifted her head and looked past the Council, past Bash, to the back of the room. I watched her find him. I watched her face change.

Then she looked at me. And at Kade.

“Well?” Bash said. “Tell them. You were happy enough to tell your father.”

***

She told them.

Not well. Her voice shook so badly that the clerk asked her twice to speak up, and the second time Harlan told the clerk, quite gently, to move her recorder closer instead. Isla stood in the middle of our dining hall with her hands knotted together in front of her and told the Council of the Packs that she had no memory of that night at all. None. She had gone to bed. She had woken on the back stairs at six in the morning, cold, with her father kneeling over her and her mother crying, and her feet bare and black with dirt.

“And the tea?” Aurelie said.

Isla looked at her.

“They said I made it,” she said. “I suppose I did. I don’t remember.” She swallowed. “I don’t remember any of it. I never do. It was like that at Moonhaven too. Before. I’d wake up, and there’d be things I’d done, and I hadn’t done them.” Her voice cracked. “She does them.”

“Who does?”

“The witch.”

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head and she’s been in mine. Her hands are warm.” Her chin came up, trembling. “It was the other, one. The cold one. The one who sounds like her and isn’t. She was in my head that night. She walked me down those stairs. She made me carry the tray.”

Bash’s face didn’t move.

“Where did she take the Luna?” Holt said, from the end of the curve. He didn’t sound unkind. Only blunt. “If she was in your head, girl. Where did she go?”

Isla shook her head.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know anything. She doesn’t leave anything behind. Only the cold.” She looked down at her hands. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I wish I knew.”

***

It was Corran who laughed.

Not loudly. It was barely a sound. But it was a laugh, and in that hall it went off like a shot.

“Forgive me,” Corran said. He didn’t look sorry. He was looking at Bash down the length of the tables, with his tired gray face, the face of a man whose two daughters had been taken by that same witch. “I’m only trying to picture it, Sebastian. Help me. A girl of eighteen. Asleep, by her own account and yours. She gets out of bed in the middle of the night, in your house, with your guards on every door and the Council’s guards on the stairs. She walks down to your kitchen without anyone seeing her. She brews tea. She carries it up to two of the Council’s own guards, and puts them to sleep with it. She opens a locked door, and walks out a Luna in silver chains, past your river gate, and out of your grounds.” He spread his hands. “Single-handed, Asleep.”

Somebody at the end of the tables made a sound into his water glass.

“It must be a remarkable house you keep,” Corran said.

Bash smiled. It was a good smile. It always was.

“The witch is remarkable,” he said. “That’s rather the point.”

“Then who was looking after the Luna while the witch was being remarkable?” Aurelie said.

She hadn’t raised her voice. She never did. She sat with her hands folded on the table in front of her, very upright, her gray hair pinned close to her head, and looked at Bash the way she had looked at Abby at Greyhollow. Steadily. As if she were reading something written very small.

“The Council placed her in your house,” Aurelie said. “Under your roof, and your guard. You gave us your word for her. You gave it in that hall, in front of all of us, and we took it.” She tilted her head.

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“I told the Council what I believed,” Bash said.

Yes,” Aurelie said. “That’s what concerns me.”

I didn’t look at Kade. I didn’t need to. I could feel him through the link, all at once, pulled ght as

wire. The kind of quiet that comes before something gives.

Bash looked along the curve of tables. Slowly. At Corran. At Aurelie. At Holt, who wouldn’t meet his eyes. At Harlan.

“If the Council wishes to inquire into Greyhollow’s keeping of its prisoner,” he said, “Greyhollow welcomes it. I have nothing to hide.”.

“Good,” Harlan said. “Because the Council will.”

He nodded to the clerk, and she typed it.

Bash inclined his head. Gracefully. Then he turned and walked back to his chair at the end of the tables, and sat down, and folded his hands.

He didn’t look at Isla again. She stood alone in the middle of the floor, where he had left her.

One of his men took her by the elbow and sat her on a chair against the wall, behind Greyhollow’s end of the tables, and stood beside it.

***

Daphne brought Cassandra in at eleven.

I heard the wheels on the boards before I saw her. Then the side door opened, and Daphne came through it backwards, pulling, and turned the chair round, and there she was.

Cassandra Blackwell, in a wheelchair, with a blanket over her knees and her braid down over one

shoulder and her face so thin that the bones showed. She had dressed. That was the first thing I noticed. Not a nightgown and a shawl. A dark green dress I had seen her wear at every council since I was a boy, and her good earrings, and her wedding ring, loose now on her finger. Daphne had done her

hair.

She had refused, Daphne told me afterward, to be carried in.

Corran stood up when she came through the door. Then Tiernan. Then Aurelie. Then, one after another, all down the curve of tables, the whole Council of the Packs, until only Bash was still sitting.

And then he stood too.

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Kade made a sound beside me. I don’t think anyone else heard it.

She told it plainly. Daphne stood beside her chair with one hand on its back the whole time and

didn’t say a word.

She had gone to the Luna’s rooms that night because she had heard something. A voice. She had opened the door. Abby had been against the wall with her back flat to it, and the girl, Tessa, they called her then, had been standing in the middle of the room with a candle in her hand and knife in the other.

“I looked at her face,” Cassandra said, “and it wasn’t her face. I’ve known a great many faces. I knew that one wasn’t hers. Something was looking out of it. Something old, and cold, and very pleased with itself.” She stopped. Her hands had closed on the blanket. “And then the knife. And then I was on the

floor.”

“And the Luna?” Harlan said quietly.

“She had her hands on me.” She lifted her chin. “Before I lost it. Before everything went. I could feel them. Warm. When I couldn’t feel anything else at all. I was going. I knew I was going. And she held me here.” She looked down the curve of tables. “I have been told what some of you think she is. I have been told what the Alpha of Greyhollow’s men said about her eyes, and her voice, and her light. I don’t know what she is. I’m an old woman, and I was asleep for a month. But I know what she did. She kept me alive with it.”

“Did her light harm you?” Aurelie said. “In any way. Then or after.”

“It kept me alive,” Cassandra said again.

She looked at Isla, ‘sitting on her chair against the wall with a Greyhollow man beside her.

“And that girl didn’t hold the knife,” she said. “Not really. Somebody held it with her hands. I saw her eyes afterward, when it was done, before I went under. Just for a moment. They were her own again. And she was screaming.”

Isla put her face in her hands.

***

Harlan let Kade speak last.

He didn’t stand. I think he knew he couldn’t trust his legs, or his voice, or what he would do with either if he stood up. He sat at our table with his hands flat on the wood, the way he had sat in his

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