Chapter 19: The Grave at the Gate

Elowen's POV

Dashiell came back at noon with Aldous walking beside him and a bound man slung over his shoulder.

He dropped the captain on the cold flags of the cell stairs and told two of his own men to guard the door.

Then he looked at me, and I saw it in his face before he said a word.

"What did he tell you?" I said.

"A lie," said Aldous, before Dashiell could answer. "A very good one. Sit down, girl."

I did not sit.

"He says my mother is alive."

"She's not."

"How do you know?"

Aldous lowered himself into the chair by the kitchen stove and laid his hands on his knees.

"Because I buried her," he said.

The kitchen went quiet.

Fenn had stopped chopping, and the herbwife looked up from her kettle.

"It was the second week of March," Aldous said. "The snow was still deep.

"A traveler's body was found at the east gate under a drift.

"A woman about fifty, in a thin coat, with a scar on her left arm."

I put my hand over my own scar.

"The Council didn't want her.

"The pack wouldn't touch her, because she'd been put out by law.

"So I took the cart and dug the hole myself, below the gate pines."

His voice roughened.

"I cut a stone. I put a name on it, because I'd heard it said at the gate, once, in the winter. Maren."

"You never told me."

"Nobody knew you were hers." He looked at me with wet old eyes.

"I've been to that stone every March for six years, and I never knew who I was visiting."

I did not remember walking out of the kitchen.

I only remember the cold, and the gate, and the pines black against a white sky.

Dashiell walked beside me and said nothing.

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