Claiming The Spare Twin novel · Chapter 23 of 24
Chapter 23: The Ring
"Silver," the old elder said, and his staff rang on the stones. "The challenge is to the yield. No silver, Greta. You know the law."
"I know it better than you," my mother said.
She stood bare in the first sun with her ash-blonde hair loose, with the long blade in her fist, and she did not lower it.
The old guard who had handed it to her looked at his own hands.
I stood in my wolf's skin with blood running down my shoulder, and I felt the silver from across the yard.
One touch of that blade would put me on the ground.
She knew it.
"Come on, Linnea," my mother said. "You wanted this."
I let my wolf go.
It was easy.
I stood up on two legs in my green dress, with my arm bleeding, and I held out my empty hands.
Finlay made a strangled noise behind the stones.
My mother smiled, and ran at me.
She was quick.
Thirty years of fights had taught her to be quick, and the silver cut a line across my forearm before I had moved.
It burned, and I felt the blood come hot.
I didn't back away.
I had peeled potatoes for ten years, and my hands were strong and quick, and they had never once cut themselves on the paring knife except the time I was twelve.
When she swung again, I stepped inside the blade.
I caught her wrist.
It was thin, and old, and I felt the bones in it.
She stared at me from a hand's breadth away, and I saw all my life in her pale blue eyes.
"Let go," she said.
"Drop it, Mother."
"Never."
I turned her wrist the way I had turned Odette's.
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