Chapter 15: Burning the Law

Caspian's POV

I called the Council to the long hall at Highcrest on the third morning, and forty Alphas came.

They sat in the oak chairs along both walls in their pack jackets.

They watched me carry a tin box to the fire.

I had not slept.

I had stood outside the cabin gate on the second night, two hundred yards back in the pines, and watched her lamp go out.

I had not gone in.

Term four said I could not ask her for anything.

I had no right to give her an order either.

I stood in the cold until the light went out, and then I drove home.

That was the whole of my courage that week.

I put the box on the hearthstone.

"The old law," I said. "The original, in my father's hand, and the copy the Stonefall Alpha had made."

The Alpha of Stonefall was in the second chair on the left.

He looked at the box and his face did not move.

"Majesty, the law is the law," he said.

"It is."

"You can't burn it. A Crown statute needs two thirds of this Council to repeal."

"I know."

"Then what are you doing?"

"I'm declining to enforce it."

A murmur went round the chairs.

I opened the lid and took out both sheets.

My father's page was yellow and brittle, with his signature at the foot in black ink gone brown.

I had looked at it every month for six years.

"Twenty-two women were bound under this page," I said. "Most were girls. I have the register. I have their names, and the names of the ones who ran."

I let that sit.

"I have the name of one who got to a valley in Idaho and hid for thirty-five years."

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