Chapter 17: The Oath

Joran's POV

I walked up the hill to my own Claiming Hall at sunset, alone, in a shirt with a bloody hole in the shoulder.

The doors were open.

Rogues lined both walls with silver cords at their wrists, and every one of them watched me come.

I had walked this floor as Alpha six years running.

Nobody had ever looked at me like this.

Osric sat in the elder's chair beside the dais, with his stick across his knees.

Verity stood on the Alpha's step in the green dress from the night she was chosen.

She had put it on for me.

"You came," she said, smiling. "I told Father you would."

"Where are the children?"

"Safe. Where the pack can hear you."

A door at the back of the hall opened, and thirty-one children filed out of the cellar in a line, white-faced and silent.

Their mothers and fathers pressed against the cellar bars behind them, unable to move.

I made myself look at each small face.

"Let the parents out, too," I said.

"The children go first," Osric said. "Then the swearing."

"Swear what?"

"Say it plainly, boy. Say it so the whole pack hears you."

I had shifted once, that noon, and my wolf was still the size of a pup.

I could not command a single wolf in that hall.

I could not do one useful thing.

All I had left was the seat, and I had never understood until that moment that it was the only thing I had ever been proud of.

I stepped onto the black stone in the middle of the floor, the Moon Stone, where Ilse's mother had stood.

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