Chapter 19: Every Cup

Agnes stitched my shoulder on the hall floor while the pack filled the benches.

Nobody went home.

Both packs sat shoulder to shoulder, Ridgeback and Cold Spur, and Joss stood behind me with his hand on the back of my chair.

They set Hester at the elders' table with a guard on each side.

She had her cardigan buttoned wrong, and she kept smoothing her hair.

The eldest stood.

"Hester Ellington spoke on the hill," he said. "Everyone heard her. This moot will hear the rest, and then the pack will say what it thinks."

He looked at Agnes.

She put her stores book on the table and opened it.

"You heard me swear to it at the moot," she said. "Now read it for yourselves. Any of you who ever carried a cup, find your own name."

She turned the pages and passed the book down the benches.

Page after page, fourteen years of full moons, every line in the same neat hand.

"These were cups," Agnes said. "Every one of them went into Valerie Wray. She drank them in this hall, in front of you, and you called it kindness."

A woman in the third row put her face in her hands.

"I carried her tea to the cottage myself, some nights," a man said from the back. "She told me it was a tonic."

"She told us all," said another.

The eldest turned to Hester.

"And the night of the Wray killing?"

Hester lifted her chin.

"My husband did what he had to. Ansel Wray meant to give the pack to Ridgeback. His own mother's people."

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