Chapter 21: Home

The gate of the Thornwell pack house stood open, and the whole pack waited in the yard.

My father came through it first, on foot, with gray stubble and his hands empty.

I walked three paces behind him, in a plain gray dress, with Lysander at my shoulder.

Nobody in the yard spoke.

They knelt, one after another, the cooks and the stable hands and the old men who had carried my father's chair.

I had been carried out of this gate at eight, in a cart, and not one of them had asked where I was going.

"Get up," I said. "I'm not here for that."

They got up slowly.

I went past them into the hall, where the floor was worn pale by generations of boots.

My father had sat on this floor the night Corvin came home and told him what he had done.

I stood on it and felt nothing at all.

"Where is the box?" I said.

My father led me up the stairs to his room, and took a small iron coffer from under the bed.

It was heavy.

He lifted the lid with both hands shaking, and six silver coins lay in the bottom, dull and dark.

"I could never spend them," he said.

"I know."

I took the coffer from him.

"Now you'll come with me."

The graveyard lay behind the pack house, under three old oaks.

My mother's stone was at the end of the row, small and plain, with moss growing in the carved letters.

I knelt in front of it for a long time.

"Mama," I said. "I'm home."

The wind moved in the oak leaves.

I laid the six silver coins across the top of the stone, one at a time.

"This is what he sold me for," I said, to the stone, and to my father.

"You can have it back, Mama. I don't want it."

Then I stood up and faced him.

"This is your sentence, Father. The Court gave it to me, and I am giving it to you."

"Every morning at sunrise, for as long as you live, you will come to this grave."

"You will clean the stone with your own hands."

"You will say her name, and then mine. Elowen. You will say it out loud, each day, in front of anyone who is here."

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