Chapter 17: The Council

Garrick's POV

I walked into the Council hall at noon alone.

Tilda had said she would come, so I had locked the cabin door from the outside.

She would be angry about that for a week, and I had decided I could live with it.

Five elders sat at the long table under the iron lamps, with Enid in the carved chair at the center.

The benches behind me were full.

Half the pack had come to see the Alpha answer, and I knew most of their faces.

Delphine sat in the second row with her hands in her lap, and she didn't look up.

"Alpha Lindholm," Enid said. "You are charged with trespass on a foreign border and with taking a prisoner out of this hall by force."

"You are also charged with lying in a cabin with a ward before her twenty-first year."

A murmur ran down the benches.

"How do you answer?"

I thought of Tilda on the stones, with her chin up.

You'll give me a bill, she had said, and I'm supposed to say thank you.

She had been right.

I had spent seven months deciding what she could afford.

"I answer in my own order," I said. "I'll start with the cane."

Enid's fingers closed on it.

"At the Naming Moon you lifted that cane one inch and tapped it," I said.

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