Chapter 28: Stay

He got up without answering and began to dress.

I lay in the iron bed with the sheet pulled to my collarbone and watched him do it.

He put on the torn shirt, then the jacket, and then he shouldered his pack.

I did not beg.

I had begged my father for twenty years, and it had never once worked.

"Go, then," I said. "But you'll walk past the whole pack to do it. I'm coming to see you off."

His eyes snapped to my mouth.

I pulled on my shirt and my boots and went out ahead of him, down the stairs and through the great hall.

The pack house was awake, and nobody was sleeping off the night.

The hall was full of people carrying blankets and trays, and the healer was in the middle of them with a cup in her hand and her mouth open.

"Alpha," she said. "Alpha, come and see."

I stopped.

It was the first time anyone had used the word to my face without a twist in it.

"What is it?"

"The cubs."

She led me to the infirmary, a long room off the kitchen where we had laid the sick children in rows.

I had walked through it twice the night before, and each time the air had stunk of fever.

Now the windows were open.

A girl of six was sitting up on a cot, eating bread.

The boy beside her was arguing with his mother about whether he could go outside.

"The fever broke at four," the healer said. "All of them, within the hour. The old cousin is awake. She asked for her tea and called me a thief."

I put my marked hand over my mouth.

The stone was holding, and it had started the minute I took the mark.

It was not a rumor or a hope, and it had happened in a room full of children I could see.

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