The Warlord of Wycliffe: The Dethroning of My False Mate novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: New Moon

They came up the road in the thin morning, forty, then eighty, then more than a hundred.

Old women in patched coats walked with their hands on young men's arms.

There were children in carts, and a blind man led by a girl with a stick.

Every one of them wore a strip of black cloth at the wrist.

The wolves of Greyhollow drew back to let them pass.

The Wycliffe column stopped at the foot of the ridge.

A woman in a grey cloak came out of the front rank.

She was my mother's age, with my mother's chin.

She pushed back her hood, and I knew her.

"Aunt," I whispered.

"Elowen." She crossed the grass and took my face in both her hands. "You are alive. You're really alive."

"You were killed. They said every one of you was killed."

"Seven of us were in the winter cabins on the far side of the mountain. Another forty were out on border duty. Others ran when the lodge burned." She pressed her forehead to mine. "We thought you were dead. We thought the Greyhollow Alpha had taken your body."

"He took my name."

"I heard," said my aunt. "I heard what you did with it."

She looked up at the iron circlet on my head and smiled through her tears.

"Your father would have had that made into a drinking cup," she said.

I laughed so hard that I cried.

All around me the Wycliffe wolves were finding one another, calling out, falling into arms.

Hester stood among them, weeping into her braid.

The sergeant and his ten old soldiers stood at attention in a row, and the Wycliffe survivors saluted them one by one.

Verity stood beside Dorian, with her hand on her sword.

"This is what you were fighting for," she said.

"It's what I'm going to do," I said. "From now on."

I held up my hand, and the ridge went quiet.

"The Wycliffe lodge burned three years ago," I said. "It stays burned. I want the stones standing again before the first snow. Greyhollow and Stormreach both, and every Wycliffe who can lift a rock."

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