Chapter 22: The Judgment

Cora told them everything.

She stood in the silver light on the broken stones, and she said it all to Redfern guards and Ashmoor wolves alike.

She said it in a flat, tired voice with her bandaged hands hanging.

She said Gareth had come to her cottage the night before I went up the mountain.

She said he told her the seat would be hers.

She said he gave her the wolfsbane himself, in a stoppered bottle, with the dose written on a slip of paper.

She said he stood in the cellar doorway the night Tilda died and did not come in.

She said she had loved him.

"I thought if I did it right, he'd say it out loud," she said. "He'd call me his."

"He never did."

Gareth knelt in his own light with his hands over his face.

"Goddess," Cora said, and lifted her head. "You were offered a wolf. Take mine."

The light turned.

It found her, and it was not cruel.

It went through her slowly, and she shut her eyes and stood still for it.

Her hair went gray along the temples, then to the ends.

Her pale eyes went plain.

Behind her, a great pale wolf stood up out of her back, looked at me once, and was gone.

Cora sank down on the stones, human and small, with her bandaged hands in her lap.

Gareth's wolf went a breath later.

It was the dark one, and it fought.

It tore at the light and roared.

Then it dissolved into the silver and was gone.

He lay on his face on the stones.

When he rolled over, he was an old man.

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