The Cursed Blood novel · Chapter 10 of 32

Chapter 10: Court

I knelt beside it and put both hands on the turned earth.

Nothing.

Not quiet. Nothing.

It was like putting my palms on a dead man's chest.

The rot I'd carried down the gully crept straight back up my wrists, because there was nowhere for it to go.

I yanked my hands away.

Footsteps came down the scree behind me. I knew them by now.

Conall crouched beside me and rubbed a pinch of the dirt between his fingers. There were gray flecks in it, and rust.

"Salted," he said. "Somebody dug here, and salted it behind them so a warden couldn't read what they took."

"Or what they left."

"Or that."

"It's where she died." My voice came out flat. "Isn't it."

He looked up at the rocks. Huge, gray, piled against the wall of the Gap.

"Yes," he said. "I carried her out from under them."

I looked at him.

He didn't look away.

"You were twenty-three," I said. "They told me nobody could get to her."

"They told me to go home. I didn't." His jaw worked. "I got her out. The Alpha's men took her off me at the marker. I never saw her again."

I put my hand on his wrist.

He let me.

We sat there in the dark beside the salted earth until the cold got into both of us.

The Court round was held at the east boundary four days later.

Every candidate. Every warden. And two packs.

The east-slope wolves were small and poor and wore patched coats. There were maybe thirty of them. Their alpha was a gray old woman with a cane and one good eye.

The Mardells sent the beta, with six men and a lawyer's folder.

Margaux stood with the candidates and kept her eyes on her father.

He still hadn't looked at her once.

"The candidate who draws the stone judges the dispute," the old man said, and held out a bag.

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