Chapter 21: The Crown

"Take her," I said to the old guard.

My mother stopped laughing.

"You can't," she said. "I'm Osric's wife."

"You're a dead woman who came back to kill him," I said. "Take her."

Two guards went up the marble steps and took her by the arms.

She did not fight.

She looked at me the whole time, with her grey eyes and her braided hair coming loose, and she did not stop smiling.

They took the Regent's seal out of her hand and threw it down the steps.

It rang once on the stone and lay still.

Behind me, from the ridge, a long horn sounded.

The gate beyond the courtyard filled with wolves.

Northmark came in first, with the one-eyed Alpha on a grey horse.

The River followed in its boat-shaped chair, with two hundred rifles lowered in salute.

Iron came after, the old Alpha with a grandson on each hip.

The border Alpha rode at the back, bareheaded, with a rope in his fist.

At the end of the rope walked Dorian.

His hands were chained in front of him, and his feet were chained to each other, and he wore only a prisoner's grey shirt.

Beside him, tied to the same rope, stumbled my uncle.

Percival had lost his glasses, and one side of his face was swollen shut.

Three thousand wolves filled the drive and the lawn and the gates, and every one of them looked at the steps.

Garrick came up the drive behind them on foot.

He had washed his face.

He stopped at the bottom of the marble stairs and looked at me.

I looked back, and the courtyard disappeared.

"Majesty," he said, very quietly, and went down on his knee.

My throat closed.

The Keeper limped out of the Alphas' ranks on the arm of an Iron wolf.

She stopped in front of me.

In her hands was my father's iron crown.

I had seen it all my life on a velvet cushion in the Moonhall.

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