One Girl, A Pack Of Beasts novel · Chapter 31 of 32

Chapter 31: Under the Moon

"Yes," I said.

He looked at me like he hadn't heard.

"I said yes. You don't get to make me say it twice, I'm not you."

"You made me say it twice in the cave."

"That was different. You were slow."

He laughed and pulled me down against his shoulder, and we sat by the fire until it went out.

It took six days to get ready, and the whole street helped.

Tobiah's mother took over the lodge kitchen and wouldn't give it back.

The baker sent up a cake the size of a cartwheel and refused to take a single core for it.

The fox tanner made me a coat.

She wouldn't let me see it until the last day.

When she held it up, it was gray felt, soft and close-cut.

It was lined with white fox from the pelt that had bought our place in the Hunt.

"Gray," she said. "So it matches the hood. Don't cry on it, it'll spot."

I didn't cry on it.

I cried on her, and she let me, and told me I was ruining her collar.

Kell spent the six days learning to walk on a crutch the bull had carved him out of a pine bough.

Every morning I scraped a sliver off the heartstone and he swallowed it.

Every morning his hands were warmer.

On the fourth day I found him sitting in the yard in the snow with his sleeves pushed up, just because he could.

"You'll catch cold," I said.

"I'd like to see it try."

The full moon came up over the river on the sixth night, round and white and enormous.

We built the fire high in the yard.

Everyone was there.

The old hunter at the head of the table, in his chair, which nobody moved.

The bear, his jaw unbound now, eating carefully and grinning.

Tobiah's mother. The bull and his team. The baker. The jeweler and his wife.

The girl with the bow, on the woodpile again.

And the chief's old aunt, who had walked down from the Ridge through the snow.

She said she wouldn't miss it for the chief's own funeral.

There was no speaking stone. No chief.

Just Kell and me, in front of the fire, with everyone we loved standing round it in the snow.

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