One Girl, A Pack Of Beasts novel · Chapter 7 of 32
Chapter 7: The Hall Rules
By noon the next day, every hunter in Saltmarket had crammed into the Hall.
They stood on the benches.
A boy had climbed onto the crossed tusks over the door and refused to come down.
The tables had been dragged to the walls. In the middle of the floor was a ring of raked sand.
I stood at the edge of it in my gray hood with my voice pitched low and my hands steady.
The guild master sat at his scarred table with the council behind him, six old hunters in a row.
"Gray Knife," he said. "Your fee."
I set down a purse. One hundred cores, every one notched.
He counted them and wrote in his ledger.
"The fee is good. Your team is entered."
A rumble went around the room.
"But there's been a complaint."
Hester sat in the front row in her white fox cape, hands folded, eyes lowered.
Brannon stood behind her with the lion and the bear.
His arms were crossed over his new wolf pelt.
"Hall custom," the guild master said, "is that a hunter is known. A hunter who hides his face must either show it to the council, or prove his name in the ring against the Hall's champion. That's an old rule. Nobody's used it in forty years."
"Nobody hid his face in forty years," Brannon said loudly.
Laughter.
"So," the guild master said. "Which will it be?"
Behind me, I heard Tobiah stop breathing.
If I took off the hood, Gray Knife was over.
A woman on the board.
A woman in the Hunt.
The guild would strike my name and my entry before the cheering died.
"The ring," I said.
The crowd roared.
The Hall's champion stepped onto the sand.
He was a bull beastman as wide as a door, with two stubby horns at his temples.
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