Chapter 23: The Book

Eleven months later I wrote my name in the Greywater book, on a Sunday, in my own hand.

The pack had asked me to come.

Joss had stood in the cabin doorway with his hat in his hands, and he'd said they had something to put right and I could tell them how.

I said I would come on the Sunday before Midsummer, and I wanted the blood-book on the stone.

The lawn was full by noon.

Three hundred wolves stood in the same ring as before, but nobody carried a torch, and nobody looked at the ground.

Some of them were shifting again.

It had come back to Greywater slowly, over the winter, in small pieces.

The old teacher had shifted in April and cried for an hour.

They were slower than they used to be, and a lot of them were weaker.

They were wolves, and they were their own.

I stepped up onto the Claiming Stone in a blue dress and the grey wool socks, with Caspian standing at the edge of the lawn.

He had come in a plain car with no guards, and he wouldn't stand any closer than the ropes.

He said it was my day.

The old elder came forward with the blood-book under his arm.

He didn't have the shears.

He put the book on the stone and opened it to a page with a line drawn through it, in dark ink, in his own hand.

"Thora Haldane is no wolf of Greywater."

I read it again.

My name had been struck through with one ruled line.

"I'll write the correction myself, if you'll let me," the elder said. "But it should be your pen."

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