Chapter 9: Nine

Torben's POV

I didn't sleep.

At first light I left the lodge and climbed the hill behind it, where the grass gives way to a shelf of flat gray rock.

There are nine stones on that shelf.

Each is about the size of a loaf of bread, set in a ring, and none of them has ever been moved.

I carried the last one up myself three winters ago.

I was on my knees in the snow when I set it down, with my beta holding my coat.

I sat on the cold rock beside the ring and put my hands between my knees.

The second stone from the left was my brother's.

He was nineteen, and he ate standing at the counter and left the milk out, and he thought a man should get lost at least once to learn a road.

He had gone up the ridge with the others because I said, in my own kitchen, that we would find another way.

I had said it with my own mouth.

For three years I had known exactly whose name was on the paper that sent him up there.

I had a face for it, and a hundred cold nights of practice at hating it.

Then the face walked into a doorway in the moonlight with a bare wrist.

She was a woman who laughed too fast when she was hurt.

She had a freckled hand that shook on a teacup and she said sorry to a man she'd never met.

I had wanted to blame her so badly, and I'd had the right to.

I looked at the nine stones and felt it go out of me, and what was left was worse.

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