Chapter 21: The Sickness

The oath did not get finished.

By noon the great hall had become an infirmary.

The long tables were pushed against the walls, and the sick lay on blankets in rows.

Hunters who had been strong enough to carry a deer shook with fever.

The cousin from the loft lay on the table nearest the fire and did not wake.

The healer ran between them with her apprentice and a bucket of cold water, and she had stopped speaking to anyone.

I walked down the rows with a cloth in my hand.

Nobody pulled away from me.

A woman I had known for twenty years, who had once spat at my feet, caught my sleeve with a burning hand.

"My boy," she whispered. "He's the one by the window. Please."

I went to the window.

There were eleven cubs there, laid out side by side on a quilt.

The youngest was a few months old and could barely cry.

I picked up the one nearest me, a boy of five with sweat-stuck hair, and he held onto my collar with both fists.

"Alpha," he said, because that was what someone had told him to call the woman in the chair.

"I'm here."

He was so hot I could feel it through my shirt.

Elias came and stood behind me, and I felt his hand on my back.

He could not hear the cubs crying, but he could see their faces, and his mouth was grim.

"It's the stone," June said quietly.

She had come up beside me with ink on her fingers and a stack of papers under her arm.

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