Chapter 18: Dashiell's POV

Dashiell's POV

Aldous's cane lay in the snow outside the east gate, snapped in two.

He had carried it for thirty years and had never once needed it.

I knelt by the pieces, and my wolf came up under my skin all at once.

Beside the cane were boot prints, six sets, and a long smear where someone big had been dragged.

"Riders," I said. "Honora's. They came on foot so the horses would not wake the yard."

Elowen stood behind me with the silver barely lit along her arm.

She had dressed in the dark, fast, and her hair was still wet from the spring.

"They took him because he read them the law," she said. "Because he stood beside me."

"Yes."

"Go and get him."

I looked up.

"I can't leave you here with a sick pack and Honora's guards on the wall."

"Fenn is here, and the herbwife, and every wolf who's had the clean water."

She lifted her chin.

"You answer to me for a year, Dashiell."

"Elowen..."

"So this is an order. Go."

I had never in my life been so glad to be commanded.

I stripped at the edge of the pines and gave my clothes to the young guard.

Then I let it come.

It started in my spine and rolled outward, a pull and a crack.

I dropped to all fours in the snow with my pelt rising black and thick.

My nose filled with the whole mountain.

Pine and snow and woodsmoke, and under them the trail of six men.

A seventh scent ran among them, old and familiar, tobacco and wool and peppermint.

I ran.

The trail went east along the Council road for six miles and then cut up through the trees.

It ended at a hunting cabin I had passed a hundred times.

Smoke rose from the chimney, and two wolves lay on the porch.

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