A Hunger Most Dark novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: Midwinter Reckoning

Davren's POV

The Midwinter Reckoning filled the Gilded Scales to the back wall.

Four hundred merchants sat in their furs with their breath smoking.

On the dais the Master of the Scales read the first matter, in a voice that did not carry as far as it had in summer.

"The petition on the unfitness of Lord Ashkarr."

I stood at the rail.

Lenore stood beside me in the green gown with the collar open and her left shoulder bare to the guilds.

Nobody in that hall missed it.

"I wish to speak to the petition," she said.

"The pledge is dissolved, Miss Rooke," said the Master. "You have no standing."

"I am the person he is said to have fed on. I have standing."

She walked to the front of the dais, and the hall went quiet.

"I am Lenore Rooke," she said. "For six years, from the age of eight, I tormented a boy in my father's cellar."

A murmur ran along the benches.

"I told him a pale man in the well would eat him if he cried. I scratched his door every night. I enjoyed it."

She waited for the murmur to stop.

"I learned it from my brother, who held me over that well when I was eight. That is not an excuse. It is where it came from."

Corwin sat in the second row, smiling a little.

"On the night the boy turned fourteen, he woke into his hunger," Lenore said. "I went down to frighten him as I always did, and he bit me here."

She turned and showed them the scar.

The sound in the hall was one long, low breath.

"My father said I had stolen blood from an unwoken ward, so no bite would stain the family name."

"Corwin Rooke witnessed the order that sent me over the border at fourteen with forty crowns."

"It is in the guild strongroom under your own ring, Master. Open it."

The Master of the Scales did not move.

Keep reading free with an account. Start A Hunger Most Dark from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.