Chapter 14: What the Mother Smelled

I ran until the castle lights were gone, and then I stopped in the trees behind the stables and shifted back, shaking.

Someone had followed.

Edric came through the dark leading a saddled horse, with a cloak over his arm and a leather satchel on his shoulder.

He stopped a respectful distance away and looked at the sky.

"I'm looking at the moon," he said. "It's very nice. Put this on."

I took the cloak, and I wrapped it around myself, and my hands would not stop trembling.

"Is he..."

"In his office, with the door shut and your robe on the floor. He hasn't spoken since you left."

"Edric, I'm not lying."

"I know."

He said it so plainly that I almost cried.

"In three years I never once looked at the old king's hands," he said. "I looked at everyone's hands but his."

He opened the satchel and took out one of the stoppered glass vials he had used for the dungeon water.

It held a thumb's depth of dark tea.

"While the whole room stared at a white wolf, I took your cup off the tray," he said. "I'm a beta. We pick things up."

I laughed, and it came out wet.

"Go to the Mother," he said. "Whatever she says, bring it back to me, not to him."

He gave me a leg up onto the horse because my own legs were still not trustworthy, and I rode into the hills in the dark.

The rogue camp lay in a fold of rock where the wind could not carry a scent.

A boy with a bow stepped out of the pines and lowered it when he saw my face.