Claiming the Spare Twin novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: Her Mother's Letter

Hester adjourned the Moot with three raps of her cane and a hard face.

"The ledger will be tested," she told the hall. "We sit again at the third bell tomorrow."

My father started to speak, and she looked at him, and he shut his mouth.

She took me by the elbow and walked me out of the hall herself.

Dorran came behind us. Nobody stopped him.

Her rooms were on the ground floor of the lodge, a small warm place full of books and dried herbs and a cat that did not like me.

She shut the door and put her back against it.

"Sit down, both of you."

"Hester," Dorran said. "What was wrong with the crescents?"

"They were drawn the wrong way round." She crossed to a cabinet and took down a flat tin box. "Your mother's mark, girl. The one she drew above every birth she ever recorded as a healer."

"My mother was a healer?" I said.

"A good one, before she married that man. She wrote a little crescent above every name, to show the order. A first child, the mark faces left. A second child, it faces right."

She set the tin on the table between us and opened it.

"The crescents in that ledger faced the wrong way. Someone copied her hand, and copied it badly, and forgot she was left-handed."

I couldn't speak.

"Fourteen years ago, six days before she died, your mother came here," Hester said. "She was very sick. She was frightened. She gave me this."

She lifted out a folded sheet of blue paper, soft with age.

"She made me swear to hold it until your wolf woke. I thought that day would never come. Osmund told the whole hills you were born without one, and I believed it, God help me." Her voice cracked. "I held a promise to a dead woman for fourteen years, for a wolf I thought was never coming."

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