A Hatred Most Pure novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: The Mouth

Dietrich asked for guest-right at the front gate, with two Moot heralds in gray cloaks beside him.

Under the old law Ansel couldn't refuse it.

So the whole hold stood in the great hall at noon and watched the man who burned their granary eat their bread.

I stood at the foot of the dais, where Ansel had put me, in a borrowed dress.

My bandaged hands were folded in front of me.

Dietrich looked at my hands and smiled.

"Cora," he said warmly. "You look well. Prison suits you."

"It isn't a prison," I said.

"No?" He turned to the heralds. "Then she can ride down to my camp with us tonight, and be questioned in comfort."

"No," Ansel said.

It was the first word he had spoken since the gate.

"She is held under my roof until the Moot sits. That is the law, and you know it, because your father wrote half of it."

The nearer herald, a heavy woman with a brass staff, looked from one of them to the other.

"The Alpha of the host hold may keep the accused," she said. "If the hold agrees."

Nobody spoke.

Then the cook put down her ladle at the kitchen door.

She walked across the whole hall, flour to the elbows, and stood at my back.

The scald woman came next, with her little boy by the hand.

He didn't say anything. He took hold of my bandaged fingers, very gently, and stood beside me.

After that they all came, a few at a time.

Urekai women and old men came, and Bram with his nine-year-old daughter on his hip.

Soon I could not see the walls for them.

"The hold agrees," the herald said dryly.

Dietrich's smile stayed where it was, but his eyes went over every face in the room, one by one.

That night I couldn't eat.

Ansel stood at the window of our room with his back to me, his glove off, flexing his left hand.

He opened and closed it over and over.

"Tomorrow they'll read it out," I said. "Whatever he's bought."

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