Chapter 15: The Council

The last time I walked through the carved door of the council hall, I was seven years old and holding a stranger's hand.

I knew it by the smell before I saw it.

It was old cedar and woodsmoke and floor wax, and it hit me in the chest.

I stopped on the threshold, and Torin stopped beside me without being asked.

He did not touch me.

We had not touched since the kitchen, and he had waited at the foot of the stairs that morning.

"You don't have to go in," he said quietly.

"I came to watch you hold your seat."

"It may not hold," he said.

"Then I'll watch that."

I went in.

Eleven chairs stood in a half circle at the far end of the hall, and a twelfth, taller and carved, at the middle.

Aldric sat in it with his cane across his knees.

He was silver-haired and straight-backed and smiling, and he watched me come up the aisle.

The hall was full.

Behind the chairs stood the guards who had walked out of the meadow, row on row of them in pack black, with their arms folded.

They had turned their backs on their Alpha four days ago, and now they were standing in his council.

"The council will come to order," the grey-bearded elder said from the third chair.

His voice was dry, and I noticed his hands lay flat on his knees and did not move.

"Elder Wolcott has brought a motion."

"I have," Aldric said.

He stood slowly.

"My son cut the Luna's band in front of two hundred wolves, on the word of a wolfless woman.

"She is a charity student who vanished seven years ago with a payment, and she came back with two children and a story.

"I say the Alpha acted on a stranger's tale.

"I say he is unfit, and I move that this council strip him."

The Sterne captains rumbled behind the chairs.

Aldric turned and looked directly at me.

"Wolfless," he said gently, for the room.

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