They Made Me Hunt For My Own Wedding novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: My Mother's Bowl

I walked to the altar.

My father moved to block me, and Gray caught his arm.

"Let her," Gray said.

"Gray."

"Let her, Dad."

My father stared at his eldest son, and then he stepped back.

The bowl was old silver, dented on one side where I had dropped it at six.

I put my face over it and breathed in.

Under the polish and the candle smoke I smelled juniper and pencil lead and the warm wool of a cardigan, and I stopped breathing.

My mother had written with a pencil, and she had kept one behind her ear.

"She touched this," I said. "She touched the bottom of it."

I turned the bowl over.

The base was a flat silver disc, and the rim had been resoldered by someone who had not done it well.

I got my thumbnail under the seam and pried.

It came up with a small, cracked sound.

A folded paper lay in the hollow, sealed with grey wax pressed with a crescent.

I heard a sob somewhere in the crowd, and I did not look for it.

"Envoy," I said. "I think this is for the Council."

She took it from me with both hands and broke the seal.

She read it to herself first.

Her face changed slowly, and when she looked up she was no longer a stranger.

"I will read it aloud," she said. "It was written to be."

She cleared her throat.

"'To my daughter, on the day she is eighteen. I am the Moon-Chosen of the Corwin pack, and I am leaving you the seat. I have given it to your father to hold until you are grown. He holds it for you, and not from you. When you are eighteen, put your wrist to the black stone on Weeping Ridge, and the Moon will wake what I could not leave you in time. Do not let anyone lay your trail. Your mother.'"

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