Chapter 17: Conscience

Caleb's POV

She did not tell me I was imagining it.

Kestrel stood on the front step of my own house with the lamplight behind her, and waited for me to say the rest.

"There was a lantern," I said. "Wet stone, and a woman on the floor with her wrists in iron."

"Go on."

"I stood over her with a cup, and I knew exactly what I was doing. I wasn't angry. That's what I can't get out of my head."

"What were you?"

"Sure." My mouth had gone dry. "I was so sure I was right that I enjoyed it."

Her face did not change.

"Yes," she said. "That was him."

I waited for her to say something harder, and she didn't.

"Ask Ida what that is," she said. "The heaviness. I'm tired of being the only one who knows what it is."

She went back inside to sit with Lenora, and I felt her go up the stairs the whole way.

I took the border watch before dawn, because the hut was the only place where nobody could watch me.

The stove still would not draw.

I had been feeding it green wood for two hours, with one good hand, when Ida came up the river path with a lantern and a stoppered flask.

"Hot tea," she said. "For the Alpha who isn't."

I looked at the flask.

I did not take it.

"You drink first," I said.

Ida stared at me for a long moment over her glasses.

Then she pulled the stopper, drank a mouthful, swallowed, and stuck out her tongue at me.

"There. Plain black tea and a spoon of honey. Is the pack's Alpha satisfied?"

"Not the Alpha."

"That's the first sensible thing you've said all week."

She handed it over.

I drank, and it was only tea, and my hands shook around the cup.

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