Chapter 24: Born in Silver

We buried Lena at dawn, under the apple tree behind my mother's house.

Maud carried the bones up from the salt barrel herself, wrapped in a clean cloth and washed three times in the kitchen well.

She wouldn't let anyone else touch them.

"Soup bones," she muttered all the way up the hill. "I burned a whole sack of soup bones for you, my girl, and nobody even thanked me."

Dane had dug the hole.

He stood next to it with the spade in his hands and his head bare, and he didn't say anything.

Mother Elder stood on the other side with her stick.

That was all of us.

I had wanted it small.

I knelt at the edge of the grave and unfolded the silver pelt across the cloth.

It spread out soft as water and settled around the bones.

The white blaze lay over the place where her heart would have been.

"You hated that," I said.

"You said it made you easy to find."

I laughed, and it broke in the middle.

"I found you anyway."

I took the claw ring off the cord at my throat.

It was the one I had cut from the captain's thumb, and I had worn it every day since the hall.

I laid it on the blaze.

"Sleep," I said.

Dane took my hand, and we filled it in together.

The baby came on the coldest night of that winter, three months later, in the east tower.

I had been up since midnight, walking the floor with one hand on the wall.

Keep reading free with an account. Start She Wore My Twin's Hide, So I Carried Her Mate's Heir from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.