The Luna He Failed to Protect novel · Chapter 19 of 32

Chapter 19: Rain

The elder didn't answer him right away.

He walked down the row of boxes with his candle, slowly, one at a time.

At each one he stopped and read the notch on the stake.

When he got to the end he turned around.

"You understand what you're asking," he said to Cale. "You'll stand in this hall and swear against your own blood. In front of your father's chair."

"Yes."

"And you understand that he can't stop you. Not at the Moon Court. Not even the Alpha can stop a witness."

"I understand."

The elder looked past him to me.

"Sorrel Vardy," he said. "Will you take him?"

The whole hall was waiting.

I looked at Cale.

At the rags on his hands.

At the ash in his hair from a hill I'd lived on for two years, and he'd stood on for one day.

"Yes," I said.

The elder nodded once.

"Then you have three," he said. "Go home. All of you. Let these seven lie quiet until the moon."

Nobody went home.

They stood in the hall a long time, looking at the boxes.

Then, one by one, they started walking past them.

Not fast.

The baker. The honey seller. A mother with a baby on her hip.

Some of them touched a lid as they went by.

Some of them only looked.

I walked out onto the round hall steps.

It had started to rain.

Not hard yet.

Fat cold drops on the stone, the kind that come before a storm off the north ridge.

Cale came out behind me.

He stood a careful arm's length away.

"Sit down," I said. "On the step. Give me your hands."

He sat.

He held them out.

I unwound the rags.

His palms were open blisters from the shovel handle.

Two of his knuckles were split to the white.

There was ash ground into all of it.

"You didn't wear gloves," I said.

"I forgot I had them."

"For ten hours."

"I wasn't thinking about my hands."

I poured water from my flask over them, and he hissed through his teeth, and didn't pull away.

The rain was coming harder.

It ran down off the roof of the round hall in strings.

It ran down his face and washed lines through the ash.

Under it I could see his skin, and the bruise his father's decanter had left.

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