Chapter 20: Paper Boats

Astrid's POV

He held the knife out to me by the blade.

"Take it," Alaric said. "He gave me an order. I heard it, and I'm giving you the weapon before it can use me."

His hand was white around the steel and his arm was trembling.

I took the hilt gently out of his fingers.

"Did it want you to?" I said.

"Every inch of me."

"And you didn't."

"I didn't," he said. "I want you to know that was my doing. It wasn't the pull."

I put the knife in my belt.

Then I put my palm flat against his chest, over the hammering.

"I know," I said.

Beryl's guards bound the old king in a wagon bed that night and sent him down the mountain under ten swords.

The chancellor went with him in a second wagon.

Nine days later, Riverbend held its midsummer festival.

I had not stood on the river square in thirteen years.

The pack had built a wooden platform at the water's edge, as the old law asked for the trial of an Alpha.

Four hundred wolves stood on the stones around it with their children on their shoulders.

The Crown's trial of Edmund Molyneux began at noon.

Alaric stood at the edge of the platform, a pace behind me.

He had come as my witness and not as my king, and I had asked it that way.

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