Chapter 10: Moonrise

I held the cup under my nose, and the smell filled my head.

It was bitter and green, the smell of every morning for ten years.

Sorrel snarled low in my chest, and for the first time she was not alone in it.

I looked at Ruby.

"Thank you," I said.

Her smile went a little softer.

I turned the cup over on the table and poured it across the transfer.

The tea ran over the red seal and the typed lines, and it ate into the ink.

The black letters swam and bled down the page and off the edge of the table.

"Guards!" the Chair shouted.

Nobody moved for a moment.

Forty Alphas had just watched a ward destroy the Chair's own document with the Chair's own draught.

"That was a physician's courtesy," Ruby said, and her voice cracked in the middle.

"Then it's a physician's mess," I said. "Smell the page, anyone who wants to."

A few of them did.

An Alpha in the front row, a gray woman with a tight braid, leaned forward and sniffed.

She sat back slowly and said nothing.

Ramsay's hand closed over my upper arm.

"Moonrise," he said into my ear. "You'll wish you'd drunk it."

The stone circle stood on the ridge above the hall, a ring of tall gray rocks with a flat altar in the middle.

By the time the moon came up, every Alpha in the Alliance was standing around it with a torch.

I was led to the altar between two enforcers.

My hands were bare, and the wind went straight through Trudy's gray dress.

At the edge of the ring, between two Betas, I saw Rowan.

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