Chapter 19: Earn It

The king's guards took Harlan down to the cells under the keep, and he did not look back at the road.

Two hundred wolves watched him go.

None of them spoke.

I stood on the wall above the gate with Torren and the king, and my daughter's weight was warm in my arms.

"They've come to see which of us they follow," the king said.

"They've come to see what I do," Dalton said.

He had climbed the steps behind us, slowly, with his hand on his side.

"Let me go down," he said to me. "Alone."

"They might tear you apart."

"Then they will."

I looked at the road full of faces, and at the man beside me.

"Go," I said.

He took off the heavy silver chain of the Alpha of Cold Fork as he went down the steps.

I watched from above as the small gate opened and he walked out into the snow.

He stopped in front of the nearest wolves and laid the chain on the ground at their feet.

"I'm Dalton Ravenshaw," he said.

His voice carried to the back of the crowd.

"Not three weeks ago I stood in the infirmary and rejected Miriam Averill an hour after she bore my children."

"You know it. Most of you were in the room."

An old man near the front looked at the ground.

"She isn't wolfless," Dalton said. "She never was."

"Harlan poisoned her with tea from the age of twelve, and my father signed the order. The king holds the page."

"I was the Alpha who threw the king's daughter out of her own pack with no shoes."

A woman at the edge of the crowd began to cry.

"I'm not here to ask for my seat," he said. "Take it, if you want it."

"Every one of you let it happen, and so did I. She is the only one of us with the right to say what comes next."

For a long moment the road was silent.

Then a young man in the second row said, loud enough for the whole crowd to hear, "She left. Why should we want her back?"

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