Shattered Sanctuary: The First Luna's Severance novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: The Council Table
Rosalind lays down her keys and agrees to everything at council while Jessamy sits beside Dalton. Hamish Wescott arrives and tells her she smells like someone who has already left.
Rosalind set both rings of keys on the council table at nine o'clock sharp.
The brass one opened the Luna's office. The iron one opened the winter stores.
She laid them side by side, the way she had laid out every treaty folder for twenty years.
The council room went quiet.
Eleven elders sat along the long table, and Edmund stood behind Dalton's chair with his arms folded.
Dalton sat at the head, gray under the eyes, and he had not slept either.
Jessamy sat at his right hand.
That chair had been Rosalind's since she was nineteen.
Jessamy wore a cream sweater and no jewelry at all, and she looked like someone's kind niece.
"Thank you, Rosalind," she said softly. "I know this isn't easy."
"It's no trouble," Rosalind said.
She meant to say it flat, and it came out almost pleasant.
One of the elders frowned at her, puzzled.
Jessamy smoothed a sheet of paper on the table.
"I thought we could start with a few practical things, so nobody has to wonder who handles what."
She read them aloud in a gentle voice.
The office would be hers by the end of the day.
The treaty ledgers would move to her desk.
Rosalind would take the east guest room, because the Alpha wing needed to be settled for the new bond.
Nobody breathed.
Rosalind had laid her mother's quilt over her shoulder before she came in, and now she pulled it a little tighter.
"The ledgers are in the second cabinet," she said. "I'll mark which ones are due before the Blood Moon."
The old she-wolf at the end of the table made a small, hurt sound.
Jessamy blinked.
She had expected a fight, and Rosalind could see her recount her plan behind her eyes.
"That's very generous," Jessamy said.
"I'll have the east room aired by noon," Rosalind said.
At the head of the table, Dalton lifted his head.
"Rose." His voice broke on it. "You don't have to do this."
"You told me nothing changes," she said. "I'm only helping it not change."
Nobody at the table could find a place to look.
Edmund's jaw tightened.
Dalton cleared his throat and straightened in his chair.
"Then let's take the next matter," he said. "The border patrols."
He stopped.
His right hand had started to tremble on the tabletop, hard enough to knock his pen against the wood.
Then he did what he always did.
He reached sideways, past Jessamy's elbow, and held his palm open to Rosalind.
Rosalind looked at it.
Twenty years of mornings were in that gesture.
She stood, walked around the corner of the table and put her hand in his.
His fingers closed hard.
The trembling stopped at once.
He drew a breath that was nearly a sigh.
"Thank you," he said, low enough for her alone.
Jessamy's smile didn't move, but her eyes did.
They went from the joined hands to Rosalind's face and stayed there, sharp as a pin.
Rosalind slid her hand free as soon as he began to speak.
She noticed something she had never let herself notice.
Her hand was a little colder when she took it back.
She went back to her seat at the foot of the table, where the clerk usually sat.
Edmund watched her the whole way.
When she passed him, he bent as if to fix a paper and said, almost silently, "Luna."
He used her title, not her name, and no one had told him he could.
The door at the end of the hall opened before the border patrols were done.
A guard leaned in, looking uneasy.
"Alpha. Ironridge's party is at the gate. A day early."
Dalton's face tightened.
"Hamish Wescott doesn't arrive early."
"He says he wants to see the autumn lines before the leaves drop."
Jessamy turned to Dalton with a bright, quick smile.
"Then let's welcome him," she said. "Together."
The doors swung wide.
A broad man in a worn canvas coat filled the doorway.
He had sandy hair, a short beard and gray eyes that took in the whole room in one sweep.
He looked at the head of the table, then at the chair beside it, then at the foot of the table.
He crossed the floor without being invited and stopped in front of Rosalind.
Close up he smelled of woodsmoke and river water.
"Luna Loxley," Hamish Wescott said, too quietly for the others.
"Alpha Wescott."
His gray eyes held hers.
"You smell like someone who's already left."
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