Chapter 20: The Vote

The Ridgeline lodge hall was full again by noon.

It was the same long room with the same chairs and the same podium at the front.

I walked in through the same double doors.

The last time I had left by them, four hundred phones had followed me out.

This time every head turned and stayed turned.

Rafe walked beside me in a clean shirt, with no pin on his lapel.

The thin elder stood at the lectern.

She gripped the edges of it with both hands.

She did not look at the empty chair where Ward Standish had always sat.

"The council has one matter before the three packs," she said.

"We have no authority left to ask it. So we put it to you."

She paused.

"Do you hold that Linnet Averill is the Warden of the moon?"

For a moment the hall was silent.

Then the heavy elder stood up on the council bench.

"I hold it," he said, and raised his hand.

A woman in the third row rose, the one whose husband's name had been on the list.

"I hold it."

A man at the back, then ten, then fifty.

Dorian Falkner stood in the south aisle with Northfang's black coats behind him.

"Northfang holds it," he said, and the whole south side of the hall went up like a wave.

A small pack had come up from the southern border for the Gathering, forty wolves in patched coats.

Their oldest woman stood up, bent over a cane.