Chapter 13: Barred

The vestibule went quiet around me.

Three hundred coats stopped buttoning.

Everybody read the notice, and then everybody looked at me.

Cador came through the crowd with his shirt still in his hand and his eyes still streaming from the cedar.

He read it once.

He reached up for the top pin.

"Don't," I said.

His hand stopped.

"You tear it down, and it's the Alpha saving the seamstress again. In front of everybody."

"It's a lie, Wenna. There's no such custom."

"Then somebody can prove there isn't."

Merryn pushed in beside him, buttoning her cardigan wrong.

She put her reading glasses on and read the notice, all the way down.

"Leave it up," she said. "Paper's paper."

"Gran."

"Leave it up, I said. I want it there when he has to take it down himself."

She took my arm.

Her grip was like a clamp.

"Come home," she said. "Bring the boy with the pencils. We're going in the attic."

The Alpha house attic ran the whole length of the roof.

It smelled of mouse and cedar shingles and a hundred years of pack business.

Merryn sat on an old trunk in her coat and pointed.

"The Rite books," she said. "Every moon since the mine opened. They'll be in the tin boxes. Don't sneeze on them, Kitto."

"I make no promises in an attic."

We found the boxes under the eaves.

Kitto's hands were healed pink now, and he turned the pages like they were made of ash.

Names of the dead. Who stood. Who was fined for fighting on the shore.

I went straight to 1969.

Merryn's own Rite, the night she took the bite.

Half a page in a careful old hand, gone brown.

The robes cut and sewn by the robe-maker, three hundred and four.

And under it, one line.

The robe-maker stood at the hem of the circle to dress the pack, by the old custom.

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