Chapter 10: The Hall

The Redfern hall was full again by sundown.

Saskia had called the council herself, in the name of the acting Luna, and every wolf in the valley had come to hear it.

I walked in through the side door with Hester at my shoulder and the black book under my arm.

My wolf walked with me, a step behind my ribs.

Nobody looked at me.

That was how I knew they'd been told what to think.

Saskia stood on the stone dais where I had stood the night I collapsed.

She had put on a plain dark dress, and she'd braided her honey hair low, and she looked small and sorry and sick with worry.

She was very good.

"My friends," she said softly. "I know how hard this week has been."

The hall hushed.

"Torin is dying."

A sound ran through the benches, a kind of low moan.

"Not slowly. Not in a year. By spring, the healers say."

"Hester says that?" someone called.

"Hester says she can't cure it." Saskia's voice trembled.

"Only one thing can, and it's an old mercy, written in our own founding law."

"A Luna can lend her strength to an Alpha."

I stood very still.

"Linnea Ashdown has a wolf the size of a mountain."

"I saw it."

"We all saw it."

"If she would lend a little of it to her husband at the Count, he could live and lead us for thirty years."

"She did it once before, without even knowing."

A hundred heads turned and looked at me.

For two years I had been a quiet woman at Torin's elbow.

Now I was a wolf they'd watched take a ridge.

I saw the hunger in their faces.

I saw something worse.

I saw how easily they could decide I owed it.

"She rejected him," a woman said bitterly, from the back.

"She cut him open on the stone for a stunt, and now she'll let him die?"

"It isn't a stunt," someone whispered.

"It's selfish!"

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