One Girl, A Pack Of Beasts novel · Chapter 6 of 32

Chapter 6: Notches

Market day in Saltmarket meant the whole river came to town.

Traders shouted over braziers.

Children ran between the stalls with roasted chestnuts, and somewhere a fiddler was losing a fight with the cold.

I walked into it with my hood in my pack and my own face out.

Tobiah walked at my left, muttering. Kell walked at my right, and the crowd split around him.

My thirty-one cores were in the pouch at my belt. The thief had missed them.

He hadn't missed anything else.

"There," Tobiah said.

Brannon stood at the jeweler's table at the head of the square, in a new wolf pelt with the head still on it.

Hester hung on his arm.

A crowd had gathered, because a crowd always gathered around Brannon.

On the table between him and the jeweler lay a bonding collar.

Silver links. A blue stone at the throat.

"Seventy," the jeweler was saying. "And not a core less."

Brannon untied a heavy purse and tossed it down. "Count it."

The jeweler tipped it into his tray.

Cores rolled out, glowing blue.

I walked up to the table.

"Before you take those," I said to the jeweler, "would you hold one up to the light?"

Brannon turned.

For a second he didn't know me. I watched him not know me, the way he'd never really looked.

Then he did, and his lip curled.

"Look who crawled to town."

"Hello, Brannon."

"Go away, Willa. You're embarrassing yourself."

The jeweler was old and cautious.

He looked from Brannon's pelt to my plain face, and picked up a core between two fingers, and turned it to the light.

On its flat side were three small cuts.

Spread in a fan.

"There'll be the same mark on every core in that tray," I said. "Seventy-two of them. I notched every one with my own knife. I've done it since I was nine."

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