"I don't accept you" — he shouted it in front of everyone novel · Chapter 18 of 24

Chapter 18: The Stain

Nobody stopped him.

My father walked up the aisle in the brown coat, and the wolves on either side of it leaned away from him.

The Seer did not rise.

"Say what you came to say," she told him.

He stopped in the middle of the floor and turned to face the hall.

For the first time in my life I saw him with nothing to stand on.

"Her mother was a stranger," my father said. "She came up the coast road when I was thirty-one, a widower with a two-year-old daughter. She was a Merrow, of the coast people. She had black hair and a face the elders had never seen in this territory, and I married her against their word."

The hall stirred.

"They told me what the pack would say. I stood up to them for one year." His jaw worked. "Then I stopped. I began to say it for them, so it would hurt less when they did."

"Say what," the Seer said.

"That her blood was thin. That her hair was a mark. When she died, and the girl came out looking just like her, I did not have to look at the dead woman. I only had to look at the child and call her a stain, and the pack believed me, and I was safe."

His voice cracked.

"I called her that for fifteen years. It was never about her. I could not stand the pack seeing what I'd done."

I had waited my whole life for those words.

I had expected them to feel like relief.

They did not.

They felt late.

"Is that all?" I said.

My father blinked.

"You came to explain yourself," I said. "You did. Now sit down."

"Imogen, I..."

"My mother," I said, loud enough for the back wall, "was a healer."

I turned to the hall.

"My mother walked into this territory with a bag of herbs and no money. She set Redwood's broken bones for four years, and you let her. And when she died, my father had her name struck from the pack book and the line written over with his own, so nobody would ask where I got my face."

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