Her Brothers Scented Me at the Gate, Now All Three Claim Me novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: The Honey Tin

The cord sank into the black swamp water, and the scout stepped back off the trail with his hands up.

"The cord's the course," he said. "No cord, no finish."

I didn't know how to talk with a wolf's mouth.

I put my nose to the ground instead.

Under the rot and the pine oil lay the smell of every runner who had crossed that hill in a hundred years, and under that, a single thread of wet rag.

Wet rag, and cold iron from the nails that held the knots.

Torsten bumped my shoulder, and Beck wheeled left toward the swamp edge.

I went the other way.

The cord had been strung on the high side. I found the next knot in the dark, forty yards up, and the next after that.

We ran the last two miles by smell and by the pull of three threads, and nobody on that ridge made a sound.

The Longhouse lights came up through the pines.

I came out of the trees into the yard with my sides heaving, and a hundred wolves stood waiting around the steps.

The Elder stood on the porch with his cane.

He looked at the cord's last knot, which I had carried in my teeth.

"The second trial is hers," he said quietly.

"She runs like Mara did," a woman said in the crowd, and nobody told her to hush.

I shifted back on the step, shaking, and Stellan wrapped me in a blanket he had stashed under the porch.

"Don't look at the Elder," he whispered. "Don't give him a thing."

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