The Alpha Hunts the Exiles, So I Let Him Catch Me novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: The Mothers

Unai's POV

By the first week of December I had said eleven names at eleven doors, with my beret in my hand.

I said each name before I sat, and before I ate, and before anyone told me I might.

Larrondo. Camou. Elissalde. The others, one house after another, down the whole bowl of the Hollow.

Some women gave me soup and did not look at me.

One man put me out into the snow and shut the door, and I stood in the yard until he opened it again.

At the last house an old woman who had not spoken to me in three visits spoke.

"They said my husband killed two lambs," she said. "The third Monday in March. Write it down."

I wrote it down in the tally book I keep for ewes, because I had no other book to put it in.

A dozen houses had given me a dozen dates, and I laid them in a row on the kitchen table that night under the lamp.

Every one was a Monday.

I did not know what that meant.

I knew that I could count, and that nobody had counted it for five years, because the Bell-keeper kept the book and I had been content to be told.

I closed the tally and went looking for the only person in the tower I wanted to tell.

She was in the dairy.

It was the cold stone room off the kitchen, with slate shelves for the milk pans and one small window with an iron bar.

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