They Made Me Hunt For My Own Wedding novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: By the Moon's Law

"I won't fight you," I said.

My father's lip curled. "Then you can't take it."

"Mother's letter says you held the seat for me. I'm twenty-four. It was mine at eighteen." I turned to the table. "Envoy, is there a trial for that?"

"There is only the water," she said.

She nodded to the wardens.

They came forward carrying two flasks of black water, drawn at dawn from the pool under the stones, and they poured it into my mother's silver bowl.

It rang as it filled.

The envoy set the bowl on the gravel at my feet.

"The seat of a pack goes to the one the pack will drink beside," she said. "The Chosen drinks first. Then every wolf of the Corwin pack comes forward and drinks or does not. Whoever refuses, refuses before everyone."

I knelt and lifted the bowl.

The water was cold and tasted of iron and stone.

I drank, and silver ran up my arms, and I stood and held the bowl out.

For a moment nobody moved.

Then Gray got up from the bench.

He walked across the gravel with his head down, took the bowl in both hands, and drank without looking at me.

"This isn't forgiveness," I told him.

"I know."

"Then drink."

He did, and gave it back, and I saw his shoulders shake as he stepped aside.

Emmett came next.

After that came the pack women with their faces wet, and the old healer who had named my mother's cancer, and the men who had hunted beside my father for thirty years.

They came one by one, and they drank, and each of them put two fingers to their brow when they gave the bowl back.

It took a long time.

It was the sweetest thing I had ever heard, forty-three small sounds of water.

The last wolf in the pit was my father.

He stood where he had risen, with the iron ring on his hand and his chin up.

"I will not drink from my daughter's hand," he said.

"Then you are no wolf of this pack," the envoy said.

"I built this pack."

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