Chapter 29: The Last Visit

June's howl rolled out over the territory and did not stop for a full minute.

When it ended, two hundred wolves lay on the flagstones with their hands over their ears, and nobody dared to speak.

My sister stood in the middle of them, a long-legged grey-brown wolf shaking out her coat.

She looked at me with enormous dark eyes.

"Bryn," she said, in her own voice, out of a wolf's mouth. "Did I do that?"

"You did."

"Is it bad?"

"It's the best sound I ever heard."

The courtyard laughed, and the hunters got up one at a time.

Elias, who had felt every note of it through the stones, was grinning.

I stood in the sun with the mark on my palm and thought: this is what a seat is supposed to feel like.

Then the guard from the Moon Hall came running across the yard.

"Alpha," he said. "Your father's asking for you."

I did not need to ask who.

"Tell him no."

"He says it's the last time."

"He has said that before."

"Not like this," the guard said.

Elias read it off the guard's lips and looked at me.

I let out a breath.

"I'll go," I said. "You come too. Stay at the door where he can see you."

We went down to the Moon Hall together.

The oak door at the end of the corridor stood open, with the iron key turned and left in the lock, and I did not look at it.

Declan sat on the cot in the end cell.

His wrist was splinted, and he had been given a clean shirt.

He looked older than he had at the ring, by a decade.

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