Chapter 18: Silver Night

The first tables went over before anyone had finished screaming.

Thirty hunters in the Concord's colors came down the hall with swords out, and the envoys' real guards were nowhere to be seen.

Ronan was over the dais rail and had shifted before his coat hit the floor.

The black wolf took the first hunter by the arm, and I heard the bone go.

"Shields up!" Jory roared. "Greyfell, to the envoys!"

Three hundred wolves of Greyfell moved at once.

They were not trained for this, and half of them were bakers and weavers.

They went for the hunters anyway.

I put my palm flat on the nearest ward post, the one beside the dais, and found the thread.

It still answered, and it still thought the Concord's grey was a friend.

"Not the cloth," I told it. "The wolf."

I felt the lattice turn over and take my meaning.

Silver light ran down the post and out along the rafters, and every man in a borrowed coat began to smoke.

The hunters howled.

Their swords clanged to the floor, and they beat at their sleeves and shoulders.

A line of Highwater wolves poured through the south door, forty of them, snarling.

For a moment I thought we had won.

Then I saw the bearded captain on the dais steps with his hand on the senior envoy's collar.

"Back!" he shouted. "Everyone back, or the old man dies!"

The hall froze.

The captain dragged the envoy to the rear door with a knife at his throat, and six more hunters hauled six more envoys behind him.

Two of the envoys screamed for their escorts.

The escorts they screamed for were the hunters holding them.

Corvin followed them out, laughing, with his bottle held high.

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Signed the Exile Order, So I Took the Wards North from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.