Chapter 16: Torin's POV: The Chair

Torin's POV

I left at midnight and I did not wake her.

The chair had written come yourself, and I had told Hedda in the yard that I would go, and she had told me to take a coat.

That was all she said.

She did not ask me what I meant to say, and I did not tell her the other thing.

The other thing was that I meant to ask her to stay.

Not for thirty days under a law, and not only until her father called.

Stay, with no end on it.

I had never asked anyone for anything in my life.

I rode the old grey mare down the south road with a lantern, and I practiced on the dark.

"Stay," I said.

It sounded like an order.

"Would you stay?"

That sounded too small.

"I'd like you to stay," I said, and the mare flicked an ear.

"If you want to."

I could hear how it would go.

She would look at me with those grey eyes and hear every false note in my heart, and I would have none to give her.

The truth was too plain for any practice.

I wanted her in my house for the rest of my life, and I was afraid.

The old chair of the Council lived in a stone farmhouse at the end of a lane, forty miles south.

She was ninety-one years old, and she had been Alpha of the Orchard pack for sixty of them.

She received me in the kitchen at dawn in a quilted dressing gown, with a pot of coffee and a shotgun on the table.

"Sit down, Torin Hask," she said. "You look like you rode all night."

"I did."

"Good. Nobody asks an old woman for anything honestly after a night's sleep."

I put my hat on my knee.

"I wrote to you about the Voice."

"You did. I read it four times."

"Did you find the page?"

"I know the page. I've known it since I was a girl."

She poured the coffee herself.

"The Voice sits with one Bostrom at a time, and nobody can take it or give it away, only wake it."

"But a pack has to know who holds it, or it kills itself fighting."

"So the old holder names the new one, before the Council, in front of three Alphas."

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