Chapter 13: The Bloodline Stone

Nobody moved after my father said it.

Forty thousand people had heard a man call his own daughter dead, and none of them knew where to put it.

Then Rosamund began to laugh.

It was a thin, shaking laugh, and she pressed her fan to her mouth and let it out anyway.

"She said it herself," she cried. "Thornwell has one daughter, and she is standing here beside the Alpha."

Corvin saw his chance and took it.

He pushed himself up from the sand with the tears still wet on his face.

"Your Majesty, you have heard him," he said. "The Queen is a runaway with a wolfsbane grudge and a forged story."

"Forged by whom?" Lysander asked.

"By her. By someone who wants my place."

I did not look at him.

I looked at my father, who had sat back down and was staring at his own knees.

"Your Majesty," said the eldest judge, in a dry, careful voice. "A Thornwell claim can be settled in one way only. The seat stone."

"Bring it," Lysander said.

"Bring it," Aldous said at the same moment, and I saw him smile.

Six guards carried the stone onto the sand on a litter.

It was a gray block as tall as my hip, with a hollow worn into the top by fifteen generations of Thornwell hands.

I had seen it once, in a hall with a high window, when I was five.

My mother had lifted me up to touch it, and it had glowed gold under my palm.

"It answers the wolf in the blood," Rosamund called out, loud enough for the stands. "It has never answered a liar."

"Then it will answer me," I said.

She went first.

She came down from the Thornwell box in her pale silk, with her chin up and the whole arena watching, and laid her hand in the hollow.

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