Chapter 16: Testimony

Margo's POV

Heath's second offer was two lines on cream paper in his best handwriting.

Come home, Mags. Wear the crown, and I will tell the Moot the Moon showed me wrong.

I read it twice, standing at Torben's stove.

Then I opened the firebox and put it in.

"That's it?" Maisy asked.

"That's the answer."

"He'd have given you everything back."

"He would have given me the cuff back," I said.

The paper curled and went black, and I shut the iron door.

The Moot met at the Stone on the seventh night, at moonrise.

The meadow above the Great Hall was full to the fence line.

Four hundred Ridgemoor wolves stood on the grass.

Blackfern's hundred and fifty waited behind a rope on the east side, and the three visiting packs stood on the west.

The Stone was a long granite slab, waist-high, worn smooth at one end by a hundred years of hands.

The old woman from the river pack sat on a folding chair beside it with her boots planted and a notebook on her knee.

"I am the keeper of this Moot," she said. "I was asked, and I came."

She looked at Heath.

"Alpha Castelnaud, you charge the Luna of Ridgemoor with leaving her seat without the release."

"I do," Heath said.

He stood in his black coat with his Beta at his shoulder.

His right hand was in his pocket.

"Luna?" the old woman said.

"I'm here," I said, and walked out of Blackfern's rope and into the open grass.

I stopped at the Stone with Torben behind me on the line, where the rope ended.

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