Chapter 18: Wolf Against Wolf

"Steel only," said the old Alpha of the north. "That is silver."

"It is steel with a silver edge," Emmett said, and he still did not raise his eyes. "The law says steel. It does not say what is on it."

"The green on it is wolfsbane."

"Then your claimant should have brought a better blade."

A growl went round the arc.

Nobody stood.

The law was the law, and it had been cut into those walls by people who never imagined a man would use it this way.

I stepped forward.

"Let him," I said.

"Wynne," said Bram, behind me.

"Let him keep it. I want the whole hall to see him use it."

Emmett smiled thinly at my collarbone.

He came across the chalk with the knife held low and easy, a man who had practiced.

I did not run.

He drove it in at my ribs, and I threw myself sideways, and the silver edge opened my left forearm from wrist to elbow.

It was a clean cut.

For a second I felt nothing.

Then the wolfsbane hit my blood.

The taste came up the back of my throat, and the whole hall rocked.

My knees went.

I caught myself on one hand on the oak boards and heard Briar cry out inside me, high and frightened, just as she had every morning for ten years.

*Wynne. It is the green. It is the green.*

"There," Emmett said, quite gently, from somewhere above my head. "Can you feel her going quiet?"

I could.

It was the old dimming, the dull grey tide rising over my wolf.

My arm shook so badly I could not close my fingers.

I looked down at the red running over the boards and the faint green sheen on top of it.

And I thought of seven hundred and thirty scratches on a wall.

I thought of a spoon handle and a cold room and a girl of eighteen who had sat up with her dead grandmother.

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