The Cursed Blood novel · Chapter 16 of 32

Chapter 16: Siege

Conall reached us at a dead run and didn't stop.

He went straight past me, put himself in the road between us and the valley, and looked down at what was coming.

"How many?"

"Thirty," Hettie said. "Maybe more. I stopped counting when I got scared."

"When was that?"

"Two."

He turned and looked at me. At the black up my neck. At my bloody lip.

He just picked me up.

"I can walk."

"On the Line," he said. "Not here."

He carried me the last fifty yards to the marker, and set me down past it, on the bare ground beyond the stone.

The rot ran out of me so fast I gasped.

"He's not coming for two omegas with thirty men," the old man said.

"No," I said. "He's coming for the Gap."

All three elders looked at me.

"I told him I saw his lantern," I said. "He wants the rockfall dug out and salted to the bottom before anyone else can read it."

The honey elder sighed and stood up with her tea.

"Then we'd best go and sit at the Gap," she said. "My knees will be furious."

We held the Gap for two nights.

Nine wardens, three of them on folding stools, and two candidates.

The post sits under one shoulder of the Gap, the rockfall under the other, and the timber road runs between.

Conall cut the first ward across the road himself, on a slab of bare rock, with his own blood.

Three lines and a hook, as long as a man.

Then every warden knelt behind it, palms flat on the ground, and the Gap started to hum.

The beta's men came up the road at dusk with torches and picks.

The beta walked in the middle of them, in his fur collar.

"We've come for two runaway omegas," he called up. "Mardell born. Send them down and nobody's hurt."

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Cursed Blood from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.