Chapter 19: Not Today

Nobody on the ridge made a sound.

Then my father, who had been carried up to the Stone in a chair by two sentries, said, "Why?"

It was the first thing he'd said all night. His voice shook.

Sydney turned her head toward him and stopped pretending.

"You wrote to her every month," she said. "You told her to come home. Two years ago you started saying you'd name her heir."

"I carried those letters to the post. Every one."

"I burned them in the bakery oven, one at a time, and I watched the corners curl."

My father shut his eyes.

"The tea came after that," Sydney said. "You were going to give the pack back to her. I wasn't going to let you."

"I was the Luna. I'd been the Luna since I was nineteen, and I did the work, and nobody thanked me."

Dane spoke from the granite, in a scrape of a voice. "You said you loved me."

Sydney looked at him.

"I did," she said. "And you never once looked at me as if I was real. I was just the thing you'd picked."

For a moment, I almost pitied her.

Then I remembered the daisy she had pinned behind my ear.

"Council," said the old woman with the black cane. "You have heard it."

The elders huddled. It took them a very short time.

She stepped forward and spoke into the torchlight.

"Sydney Tibbetts, you are stripped of the name of Luna, which you never held."

"You are banished from the land of Stonebrook, and from the lands of the three packs who stand here."