Chapter 22: The Gate

Conrad's POV

The night the offering was due, I went down to the gate as I had for forty years.

I carried a lantern I did not need.

The wolves on watch looked at me and then at the ground.

They had never once spoken to me about the gate.

"Leave me," I said, and they went.

The road ran up from the south between black pines, empty in the starlight.

I stood where I always stood, with my back to the open gate and the keep behind me.

I had done this on the first night, when I was seventy-two and sure that I would find her by morning.

I had done it on every night since, through wars and a plague winter, and a spring I could not remember.

I had never told Hazel.

She had known anyway, and every year she left a lamp burning in the gatehouse window and said nothing.

Footsteps came behind me.

I knew them by now, light and quick on the stone.

"I thought I'd find you here," Saskia said.

She had a blanket round her shoulders and her hair down, and the mark showed at the neck of her nightdress.

She stopped beside me.

"You don't have to do this anymore," she said.

"I know."

"Then why?"

I thought about how to say it.

"For a hundred years I was waiting," I said. "I was not sure what for. Someone to walk up that road and look at me and not be afraid."

"I was afraid."

"You were furious. It is better."

Keep reading free with an account. Start My Family Sent Me to the Lycan King to Die, So I Walked In Alive from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.