Chapter 15: The Spy

The sentry was the youngest of the four, a lanky man with a chipped front tooth.

He held the tin against his stomach with both hands.

"Hedda," he said.

"Where are you taking that?"

"Nowhere."

"It smells like burnt sugar and salt," I said. "I drank it every night for ten years."

"I can smell it from the other side of the yard."

His face crumpled.

"I was going to put it in the coffee urn," he said. "I swear I wasn't going to."

"Then why did you carry it out of the barn?"

"I don't know."

I did not raise my voice.

I did not need to, because the yard had gone quiet around us.

Torin's sisters had stopped in the kitchen doorway.

A line of Saltclaw wolves stood in their rows in the field and looked over, and the old people in their blankets at the Den porch turned their heads.

Bjorn banged his cane on the boards.

"Bring him up here!" he bellowed. "Let him say it where everybody can hear!"

The young sentry came up the Den steps slowly, one at a time.

He stood in front of forty elders and a hundred Ridge wolves, and he set the tin on the porch rail.

His hands shook so hard it rattled.

"Sunniva met me at the road," he said.

"When?"

"The night after Arne drove home, she came back alone in a car."

"She said Hedda was sick, and that everyone who loved her wanted her well."

"She said the tea was the only medicine Hedda would take from friends, and that it had to go in slowly, so she wouldn't notice."

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Alpha's Birthday Wish Came True No More Noise and No More Daughter from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.