Chapter 6: What Tobias Remembers

I stood up on the platform and let my wolf come into my voice.

"Sit down," I said.

I had never done it before, and I had not known I could.

It rolled out across the hall, quiet and certain, and two hundred wolves sat down.

The hunter who had risen first sat so fast his chair scraped.

Even my father turned his head.

I came down the steps and stopped beside Tobias, still on his knees on the stone.

His wrists were scraped raw from the guards' grip.

"Look at me," I said, and he did.

"Tell them what you heard in there."

"Bryn, I don't want to say it."

"Tell them."

He swallowed.

"It was a woman's voice," he said. "She was crying. She came out of the walls, from everywhere at once."

The hall went very still.

"She said, my daughter killed me. She said, she will kill all of you. She said, take her before she takes the pack."

"Whose voice?" I said.

"I don't know. I swear I don't. But I believed her all the way down."

His whole body shook.

"I wasn't angry, Bryn. I wasn't even afraid. It was just true. It was the truest thing I had ever heard, and my hands were already moving."

A woman near the front covered her mouth.

An old man at the second table whispered, "It's her mother."

"It's her mother's ghost, speaking," said someone else.

My father stood at the far end of the table and said nothing.

He let them whisper.

I did not look at him, and I did not want to know what his face was doing.

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