Chapter 13: Pass the Salt

My father drove back to the shore before dark.

He took Sunniva and a handful of sentries in the dark truck, and he did not look at me again.

The rest of his two hundred stayed in the field, in rows, waiting for me to tell them something.

I told them nothing.

I went into the Long Hall and sat at the end of a bench with my hands pressed flat over my mouth.

Torin's sisters fed three hundred wolves out of two kitchens, and the hall filled up and went quiet around me.

It was the Saltclaw quiet, the kind I knew.

Nobody dared to scrape a spoon.

"Why is everyone whispering?" Bjorn bellowed from the head table.

"Because of me," I said through my fingers.

It was the first thing I had said since the road.

I said it at a whisper, and it was true.

Every wolf in that hall was watching my face to see what I would do to them next.

I had stopped sixty of them mid-bite, and I had felt them go still inside.

I could not shake the feeling.

I had done to them what my father's house had done to me.

Torin came and sat down on the bench beside me, close enough that his shoulder touched mine.

"You haven't eaten," he said.

"I can't be in here."

"Why not?"

"Because I make people small," I said.

"Hedda."

"Look at them. Look at my mother's pack. They stepped toward me and they don't even know why."

"I do that to a room just by opening my mouth, and I don't know how to stop."

"And you," I said, lower. "You'll end up like them. Quiet, and careful, watching my face."

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he stood up on the bench, and then on the table.

His boots landed between the bread and the butter, and his sisters shouted at him from the kitchen door.

"Everybody!" Torin roared.

Three hundred wolves flinched.

"Hedda Bostrom says you can be as loud as you like in my hall!"

Nobody moved.

"That's not an order!" he shouted. "I'm saying it's allowed! Somebody make a noise, for the love of God!"

A small boy at the far table, one of his nephews, banged a spoon on a pot.

The sound was thin and ridiculous.

A woman laughed, and then a man at the back whooped, and then the whole hall broke open.

They stamped and they shouted.

They slammed their fists on the tables until the plates jumped and the rafters shook.

My hands came down from my mouth.

I could hear all of it, three hundred hearts and every voice, and none of it hurt.

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