Chapter 23: The Right Ground

We buried my mother on the ridge, above the river, in the ground where Greywater's Lunas lay.

Nine of the pack's old men dug up the corner behind the wall with their own spades, and none of them were told to.

They found her where Nan said she would be.

There was no stone.

There was a rotted plank, a scrap of grey wool, and a narrow wooden box that my father had paid a stranger to nail shut.

I knelt at the edge of the hole and watched them lift it.

It weighed almost nothing.

Tobin stood on one side of me, and Nan on the other, and behind us, two paces back, Daphne stood with her bandaged hand folded under her arm.

She did not say a word, and I did not ask her to.

Half of Greywater came up the ridge in the grey morning, in their dark coats.

Tobin read the words I had cut into the new stone with a borrowed chisel the night before.

ISABEAU HARTWELL. LUNA OF GREYWATER. MOTHER OF LINNEA AND TOBIN.

He read it in his cracked voice, haltingly, and when he finished he turned and put his face in my shoulder.

I held him.

I took the little brass key off its blue thread, and I knelt, and I laid it on the lid of the box.

My mother had hidden it for me.

I did not need to be locked out of anything again.

"There," I whispered. "Now you're home."

I stayed on the ridge until the sun was high.

When I came down, I did not go into my father's house.

I put a bag in the truck, kissed Nan on the cheek, and told Tobin I was going north.

"Took you long enough," said Nan.

I reached Blackmere at dusk.

The gate sentinel, the boy from the cabin door, stood up so fast that he knocked over his stool.

I drove straight in and left the truck in the yard.

The great hall was lit.

Conrad sat alone at the long table with a ledger of his own spread in front of him, and a cold cup of tea at his elbow.

His coat was hung on the chair behind him, and a pale line of bandage showed through his shirt.

He looked up.

I walked the whole length of the room, with the pack's eyes on my back, and stopped across the table from him.

He did not stand.

He did not seem to trust himself to.

"You said the road was mine," I said.

"I did."

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