Chapter 11: The Stone

They walked up the bluff together in the grey afternoon, the Luna, her grandmother, the Alpha and the Beta who had resigned.

Behind them, without a word being said, came every wolf from the mill yard.

Rosalind did not look back.

She could hear them, three hundred boots on the packed snow, a long, slow sound.

The pack house door stood open.

Pippa was standing in the middle of the great room with a teacup in her hands.

She had been waiting.

"Dorian," she said. "You've been gone since dawn. I was so worried."

"Where's the Stone?" Dorian said.

"It's where it always is, darling." She laughed lightly and put the cup on a table. "Why?"

"Step aside."

"I think the Luna's too ill to be climbing around the house."

"Pippa."

The room was very quiet.

Pippa's smile stayed on her face for a breath.

Then she stepped to the side and folded her hands in front of her, and the smile went with it.

"Of course," she said. "Please go ahead."

The Hearth Stone lay in the floor in front of the great fireplace.

It was a flat slab of grey granite as wide as a wagon wheel, worn smooth by four hundred years of boots.

Rosalind had walked across it every morning of her marriage, and she had never once looked down.

Maud knelt beside it with a grunt, and brushed her hand across the edge.

"There," she said. "Read it."

Rosalind bent over.

Names ran around the rim of the Stone in a close spiral, each cut by hand.

The letters at the outer edge were big and square, and the ones near the middle were tiny and cramped.

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