The Luna He Failed to Protect novel · Chapter 24 of 32

Chapter 24: The Luna's Chair

I didn't answer right away.

I'd come home for that chair.

I'd walked up the drive in a coat with no elbows for that chair.

Now it was there, and I didn't want to walk to it alone.

I turned around.

The squad was standing together on the left side of the floor.

Edda and the cook.

The twins, one with a yellow cheek.

The half-eared woman with her knife on her belt, the tracker, the schoolteacher, the brothers.

The youngest, crying without any noise.

"I'll sit it," I said to the elder. "If they walk me up."

The elder blinked.

"That's not in the law."

"It's not against it either."

He thought about it.

Then something moved under his white beard that might have been a smile.

"Walk her up, then," he said.

So they did.

Ten garrison wolves in their worn coats walked me through the moonlight to the dais.

Edda on my right, a half step back.

The cook on my left, carrying my father's field book.

At the foot of the steps they stopped.

I went up alone.

I passed Alder in the Alpha's chair.

He didn't look at me.

I turned and sat down in the Luna's chair.

It was still warm from Morwenna.

It was smaller than I'd thought it would be.

From up there I could see every face in the round hall.

The baker. The honey seller. The mother who'd pulled her boy inside when we walked up the drive.

Morwenna, standing on the floor with her hands folded, looking at the seven boxes and not at me.

Cale, with the lumber father on one side of him and the last girl's mother on the other.

He was looking at me.

"The Luna sits," said the elder. "Speak, if you've got something to say."

I had something to say.

I'd had it since the gorge.

"Paper," I said. "Somebody get me paper."

The elder went to the iron chest and came back with a sheaf of the pale blue.

Morwenna's paper.

The Luna's moon pressed into every corner.

I almost laughed.

He handed me a pen.

I wrote it on my knee, in front of all of them.

My hand didn't shake this time.

Then I stood up and read it out.

"By the Luna of Greyhollow. From tonight there's no such thing as a no-return posting. Every wolf on the Ash Line serves one season and comes home. Every wolf already past a season is recalled tonight."

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