His Loyalty Test Became My Pack's Funeral novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The White Flag
Willa watches a white flag rise over Redcliff, hears the Alpha is dead, and boards the enemy's ceremonial boat to save Moonwatch. The enemy Alpha says he never sent the envoy.
On the seventh day, a white flag went up over our border fortress.
I saw it from the city wall, thirty miles of river and plain away.
It was a pale scrap against black smoke.
My fiance and I had promised each other a crimson banner or nothing.
Crimson meant the fortress held.
White meant every warrior inside was dead.
I gripped the wall stones until my nails split.
Seven days earlier I had led one hundred and thirty-seven elders, women and pups over the river.
I had counted them across the ford twice.
My fiance had stayed to hold the fortress with four hundred of our warriors, and my brother was one of them.
His name was Joss Hartigan, and he was our Alpha.
"Willa," my best friend said behind me.
She came up the stairs with a mug in each hand, her red curls half out of their pin.
Her name was Sabine, and we had been friends since we were nine years old.
She pressed the hot mug into my fingers and wrapped her arm around my shoulders.
"Drink. You haven't eaten since yesterday."
"There's a flag, Sabine."
"I know. I saw."
Her voice shook, and she held me tighter.
I looked at the flag until my eyes burned.
The night before Joss rode out, he had held my face in both hands and made me swear.
"If I send an order under my seal, you obey it, whoever carries it," he said.
I laughed and said yes.
He asked me again. I said yes again.
He asked a third time, and Sabine was standing in the doorway, watching us.
I told him he sounded like a man writing his will.
He kissed me and said every Alpha should.
Now a horn sounded at the gate below.
The fortress was called Redcliff, and its wounded staggered through the open arch, hauling each other along.
Their armor was stained black with blood.
They had been brought to the gates by Iron Hollow riders, who turned back as soon as the walls were in sight.
Joss's Beta, Tobin Merrick, was not among them.
Nobody had time to wonder why.
A man at the front fell to his knees in the dust.
Sabine had gone down to him with a water skin before I reached the stairs.
He drank, wiped his mouth and screamed it at the whole square.
"The Alpha is dead! Redcliff has fallen! The enemy is marching on us now!"
The square erupted.
Mothers grabbed pups. Old men pulled their sons toward the armory.
Someone was already sobbing my name.
Willa, Joss's Willa, what do we do?
I stood in the middle of it and could not feel my hands.
Joss was dead.
My brother was dead.
Four hundred wolves were ash on a hill.
"They'll come for the city tonight," the Warden said.
She had run Moonwatch's council for twenty years, and her face was grey.
"We have two hundred able fighters and no Alpha."
I said nothing.
An hour later a rider in Iron Hollow green stopped beneath our walls.
He carried an olive branch in one hand and a rolled parchment in the other.
He did not ask for the Warden.
He asked for me.
"My lord has long admired Willa Garnet," he called up. "If she boards the ceremonial boat at the Blackwater dock and speaks his mating oath, Moonwatch will be spared."
"And if she does not?" the Warden said.
"Then by dawn there is no Moonwatch."
Every face on the wall turned toward me.
I heard Maud Ferris, the old midwife, hissing from the stairs that nobody was selling the girl.
I heard a child crying somewhere inside the keep.
One hundred and thirty-seven people were sleeping behind these walls because I had walked them here.
Sabine took my hand.
"Joss would never want this," she said softly. "But he would want you alive. And he always said you were the strongest one of us."
She squeezed my fingers.
"Whatever you choose, I'll walk you to the dock."
It was kind.
It was so kind that I did not hear what it left out.
I looked once more at the white flag.
Joss had sworn to hold Redcliff to the last man, and he had.
I could not bury him tonight.
I could keep his city from burning with him.
"Write the terms," I told the Warden. "Moonwatch spared, in ink, under both seals. My people untouched."
"Willa, no," Maud said.
"I'm not asking, Maud."
I pulled the braid off my shoulder and walked down the stairs.
So I went to the river.
The ceremonial boat waited at the end of the dock, long and black, with a green lantern at its prow.
Six oarsmen in Iron Hollow colors held it steady.
The whole city had come down to the water to watch.
I stepped over the rail without taking anyone's hand.
On the far shore, an island with a stone shrine rose out of the fog.
A man stood waiting at its landing, bareheaded, with a burn scar crossing the back of his left hand.
He was tall and broad, and he did not smile.
I knew his face from a hundred battle reports.
Corvin Draycott, Alpha of Iron Hollow, the man who had been killing my pack for a year.
The boat touched the stones.
I climbed out with my chin up and my knees shaking.
He looked at me for a long time.
Then he looked past me at the dock, at the crowd, at the rider who had brought me.
His jaw went hard.
"I never sent an envoy," Corvin said.
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