His Loyalty Test Became My Pack's Funeral novel · Chapter 24 of 24
Chapter 24: Crimson Over Redcliff
The old women had dyed the banner overnight in three vats.
It came out crimson, uneven at the edges and wet when they carried it up the hill.
I stood in the yard of Redcliff at dawn with my hair braided and a clean grey coat on my shoulders, and watched them lay it out on the stones.
It was twelve feet long.
Along the bottom, in white thread, were four hundred names.
Nobody had asked the seamstresses to stitch them.
They had simply done it, one name to a woman, working through the night by lantern light.
"It's crooked," Maud said, inspecting it.
"It's perfect."
"It's crooked. But it'll do." She poked me with her stick. "Stand up straight, Alpha. They're all looking."
They were.
Dawn Watch had come up the road at sunrise, all of it, the soldiers with their hooks on their shoulders and the families and the old men.
The hundred and thirty-seven came last, with the pups running ahead of them through the ash and nobody calling them back.
Iron Hollow stood on the other side of the yard, the forty-one's families at the front, in green.
The Warden stood between them with her hands folded.
For the first time since the white flag, nobody in the yard was afraid.
I walked to the middle.
I had thought about what to say all night, and in the end I said very little.
"Four hundred people held this gate because they were told it was an honor," I said. "They were told it was a test. It was not. They were a pack, and they were murdered, and I will say that every year at this gate for as long as I live."
Nobody made a sound.
"Dawn Watch has voted," I said. "I hold its name for as long as it wants me. There will be no seal that makes a wolf obey a stranger. I am ending his."
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