The Luna He Failed to Protect novel · Chapter 32 of 32
Chapter 32: A Year On
I took the pen.
I wrote my answer beside his line, small, in my own hand.
Yes.
A year later the roll still lay open on the table at the side of the dais, because the elder said it was the page people asked to see.
The ink had dried.
My yes had gone a little brown.
The Luna's court sat in the round hall every full moon.
That night there were three grievances.
The first was a grandmother from the east road.
She was eighty if she was a day, and she stood on the moon stone with her stick and pointed it straight at the Alpha's chair.
"His truck," she said. "Every morning at dawn. Down the east road. Knock, knock, knock, like a woodpecker with a grudge. I haven't slept past five since the spring."
The benches laughed.
Cale sat in the Alpha's chair and looked at his boots.
He sat in it now.
He hadn't for the first two months.
"Does the Alpha answer?" I asked.
"The Alpha," said Cale, "is very attached to that truck."
"That's not an answer."
"No, Luna."
"Then the Luna rules the Alpha fixes his engine by the next moon," I said. "Or walks."
The grandmother banged her stick on the stone.
"Ruled," said the elder, and didn't even try to hide his smile.
The second grievance was a fence.
The third was a girl of nineteen whose father wanted her promised to an elder's son.
She didn't want him.
She said so on the moon stone with her chin up and her hands shaking.
The youngest stood up on the benches to listen, very straight.
I ruled that the girl's yes was hers to give, and nobody else's.
Her father didn't like it.
He sat down anyway.
The truck from the Ash Line came up the valley the next afternoon.
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