Chapter 13: The Name Under the Moss

Rowena stayed on her knees in the frost and read the name again.

HARTNELL.

It was her mother's name. It was the name Hester had given her, the one nobody ever asked about.

It was cut deeper than the Kerr crest, and the crest had been carved over the top of it.

Somebody had tried to bury a family under a stag.

Footsteps crunched behind her.

Hester came across the clearing as fast as her old legs would go, with her apron clutched to her chest.

She stopped three paces off and looked at the bare patch of stone.

"I never saw it myself," she said. "Forty years I kept that moss thick, and I never once looked."

"Hester, what is this?"

"I can't say it, child. You know why. I swore."

Hester pulled four sheets of paper out of her apron.

They were folded small and wrapped in oilcloth, and the corners had gone soft with handling.

She put them in Rowena's hands.

"I cut these out of the Founders' Book the week it happened," she said. "I wrote the ink myself. I've kept them under my floor ever since."

"Read them. Reading isn't saying."

Rowena unfolded the first page.

The ink was purple and faded. The hand was slanted and small, and she knew it from a thousand labels on a thousand jars.

It was Hester's, forty years younger.

The Hartnells held this valley before any of us came. They held it by an old right, and the whole mountain answered to them.

On the night of the first frost the Alpha of the Kerrs and the Crowe who stood with him came down with fifty wolves and put them to death.

Under that came a list of names.

Rowena read the list without breathing.

There were thirty-one names. The last four were children.

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