The Cursed Blood novel · Chapter 18 of 32

Chapter 18: Stone

Margaux read it over my shoulder.

I heard her breath stop.

She didn't say anything. She took the page out of my hand, read her father's name twice, and gave it back.

Then she went to the window and stood with her back to us.

I came back up the ridge road before noon with the page inside my dress, next to Hettie's squashed loaf.

Conall was on the marker, exactly where I'd left him.

He waited until the ground had drunk the black out of me before I showed him the page.

He read it once.

"Delane to see to it," he said, very quietly.

"I'm going to make him say it," I said. "In front of every pack in the Greywater."

"Good."

The beta's camp was gone when we got back to the Gap.

Cold fires and trampled snow.

"Called down," the old man said. "Mid-morning. A rider came up from the hall at a gallop."

"Something's missing from the Alpha's study," I said.

The old man laughed, short and dry.

"Round five," he said. "Tomorrow at sundown. Get some sleep, girl."

There were eight of us left by then.

Eight candidates, eight stones, the oldest and biggest on the Line.

The elders' rule was simple.

Stand on the stone from sundown to sundown. A night and a day. No food, no fire, no coat.

Come down, or fall, and you're out.

"And the stones?" the boy with the hole in his heel asked.

"The stones will do what they like," the honey elder said. "They always have."

Conall boosted me up onto the biggest one, the same as before.

He didn't let go of my foot straight away.

"Don't fall," he said.

Hettie was two stones down, wobbling, with the lanky warden steadying her ankles.

Margaux was three stones down from her, in her ruined white coat.

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