Chapter 15: The Funeral

Stonecrown buries its dead on a hill of pines above the river.

From the top of it you can see every face at the grave.

I lay on my stomach in the frozen needles with Caleb's grey cloak over my head.

It was the first time I had been to a funeral where I could not feel my own cheeks.

Below us the pack stood in black, three hundred wolves, and the coffin sat on its trestles at the open grave.

It was closed, and it was light. Four men had carried it up the slope, and I had watched their shoulders.

The healer had filled it with stones and wet sand.

She had signed that the body was too ruined by silver to be viewed.

"Can you see them?" I whispered.

"All of them," Caleb said, beside me.

His eyes carry farther than mine do, and I had asked him to be my eyes today.

"My mother," I said.

"Front row. She's in the grey veil. Your father has her arm."

My father's jaw was locked. My mother's shoulders were moving, small and regular, and I put my fist against my mouth.

I'll tell her, Caleb said inside my head. The night it's over. I'll carry you there myself.

I nodded into the needles.

Hortense stepped up to the head of the grave in her high-collared black and spoke for a long time.

She called me devoted. She said I had given my health to the northern line, and the line would remember.

It was a very good speech.

I had written a dozen like it for her, and I could hear the places where she was pausing for effect.

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