Out of the Shadow at Last novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: The Seal Remembers

The court was already full when we came out at noon.

Nobody had gone home.

They stood in the cold in their furs, eight packs deep, and they went quiet as I walked to the pillar.

Ivar walked on my left and Anders on my right.

Father stood at the front with Mother beside him, her hand tucked in his arm.

She did not look at me, and I did not look at her.

I took the cord off my neck and set the Seal in the dish.

"Read it," said the oldest Alpha.

"I don't know how," I said.

"You don't have to. Give it the blood and ask it one thing."

I pricked my ring finger on the rune pen, over the seven pale scars, and let a drop fall.

The disc woke warm under my hand.

"Show me Hollow Night," I said. "Show me every door you opened."

The light came up out of the pillar and spread over the sand in a thin silver sheet.

It showed a room I knew.

It was my room at the Tower, years ago, and it was small and neat with a lamp turned low.

A girl lay asleep on the bed with one hand hanging off the edge.

She was seventeen, and she was me.

A man's hand took her fingers and held them over a silver disc.

A rune pen pricked the ring finger, and a bead of blood fell.

The man's face stayed out of the light, but his signet ring did not.

It was the iron ring of the Rooke Alpha, with the moon cut in its face.

The sheet went dark and lit again.

The same room, the same girl asleep, and the same ring.

It lit seven times, and each time the girl was a year older and the ring was the same.

By the fifth, a low sound had started in the packs and nobody was stopping it.

The light went out.

I stood there with my finger bleeding into my sleeve.

I had not slept through a mistake or a freak failure.

I had slept through seven times that my father held my hand and cut it.

"That's a forgery," Father said, loudly. "A Seal can be coaxed to show anything."

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