His Loyalty Test Became My Pack's Funeral novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: The Wounded Come Back

We buried them twice.

The first time, I had been in the dark, with Corvin's riders digging beside me and no one to read the names.

This time the families did it themselves.

They walked the rows of mounds in the morning light, each carrying a plain wooden marker, and set it at the head of the right grave.

I walked with them.

Maud came with her stick and a bucket of paint.

"I've been writing the names of the babies I delivered since before you were born," she said. "I'll do these."

She wrote them one by one, in her cramped round hand, while the families stood watching.

I found my brother's mound at the end of the third row.

Someone had already set a small thing on top of it: a dandelion, pulled up by the root.

I knelt.

I put the wolf tooth beside the flower and pressed it into the earth with my thumb.

"I was wrong about him," I said quietly. "I thought he died for the man who killed him. He didn't. He died doing what he thought was right. I should have known you'd sign it."

The mark on my wrist stayed warm.

Corvin knelt beside me and did not speak.

I leaned against his shoulder and cried for the first time since the white flag, and I let it all come, hard and loud.

When I finished, I felt scraped clean.

A shadow fell across the grave.

I looked up.

Thirty men stood behind us in a ragged line.

They were thin, with scorched hair and bandaged hands, and their eyes would not meet mine.

They were the wounded.

They were the men Joss had let out of the gate alive, to carry his story to Moonwatch.

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