Chapter 18: Last Night

From the ridge, I could see every window of the Moonhall blazing.

Every gate had a double line of rifles, and four hundred guards stood under the torches with their faces turned to the hills.

Behind me, in the dark, the three Houses of the Test were camped on the slope.

Northmark's one-eyed Alpha had come with his wolves at noon.

The River Alpha had come, in his boat-shaped chair, carried by four sons, to kneel and say he had been a fool.

Iron had ridden in at dusk with the old Alpha and his grandsons on one horse.

Three thousand fires burned on the hill, and the border wolves had pitched the biggest tent in the middle of them for me.

I sat on a camp stool outside it, with my shoulder stitched and strapped by a healer.

Garrick sat on the ground beside me with his back against my knee.

I had not told him to sit there.

He had simply sat, and I had let him.

"Hold still," I said.

I was dabbing at his torn ear with a cloth and a flask of spirit.

He held still, and he did not flinch at the spirit.

"It's a clean cut," I said. "It'll scar."

"I have a scar."

"Now you'll have two. You'll be vain."

"I've always been vain. I hide it better than most."

He made me laugh.

My hand moved, and I touched the back of his neck, below the line of the cut, where his hair was cropped and warm.

I had not meant to.

I had never touched him there.

The skin was damp with sweat, and a pulse beat hard under my thumb.

He stopped breathing.

It lasted for only a moment.

His shoulders went tight, and I felt it all the way into my hand.

I told myself it was the sting of the spirit.

I took my hand away.

"Sorry," I said.

"Don't be."

He did not turn his head.

Keep reading free with an account. Start I Survived My Father's Test and Took His Throne from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.