Chapter 16: The Chair

Fern's POV

We reached the Harrow Ridge courtyard a little after midnight, and the whole pack was standing in it.

Nobody had called them out.

They had come on their own, in coats over pajamas, in the sleet.

They stood in a wide ring around the Moon Stone and said nothing.

Torin knelt in the middle of it with his shirt off.

Sleet melted on his bare back and ran down in lines.

His hands rested flat on the granite, bandaged where Dessa had wrapped them, and the white gauze was already soaked through.

He didn't look up when I came through the ring.

Kurt stopped at the edge of it, and I felt him stay behind me.

I walked up to the Stone and stood where I had knelt.

It was colder than I remembered.

"You came," Torin said to the granite.

"I came to see it."

"I'm not doing it for you."

"I know. You're doing it for them."

His head came up.

"Torin, I knelt here until dawn," I said. "I was fourteen weeks along, and I was alone, and no one stood in a ring around me."

"I know."

"You can stay until spring, and it still won't be the same thing."

"I'm not trying to make it the same."

"Then what are you trying to do?"

He looked past me at the faces in the sleet.

"Let them watch," he said. "Let them see it's not nothing, what I did."

The front door of the packhouse opened.

Margo came out onto the steps in my green robe with a quilt in her arms.

She picked her way down to the Stone in her slippers and held out the quilt.

"Torin, please," she said. "You'll catch your death. Come inside."

He didn't take it.

"Please," she said again, louder, so the ring could hear. "I can't lose you too."

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