The Alpha's Birthday Wish Came True No More Noise and No More Daughter novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Long Hall

Dinner in Torin's hall makes Hedda laugh aloud for the first time in ten years, until she overhears him say he would give her back.

Torin met the four sentries at the gate with his hands in his pockets.

I stood behind him, because I wanted to hear what they said.

"Names," he said.

They gave them.

"Why did you leave your post?"

"We don't know," said the one who had taught me to swim.

He was a heavy, grey-bearded man with a scar through his eyebrow.

"The Alpha gave the order to stay at the door."

"I heard it, and I put my hand on the door."

"I could not make my feet stay."

His pulse was steady.

The other three were steady too.

I listened to all four hearts, one after another, and none of them lied.

"They're telling the truth," I said.

Torin turned his head.

"How do you know?"

"I can hear it."

He looked at me for a moment, then nodded.

"Three nights' sanctuary," he told the sentries. "Ridge Law."

"You sleep in the barn and eat in my hall, and you tell me everything you remember."

"We don't remember anything," the swimming teacher said.

"We were standing there, and then Hedda spoke, and then we were walking."

Torin glanced at me again.

I did not understand why, so I said nothing.

By evening the Long Hall was full.

It was a timber hall the size of a barn, with a fire at each end.

Four long tables ran down it, under a ceiling blackened by a century of smoke.

One of Torin's sisters ran the kitchen.

The other ran the children.

Between them there were eleven nieces and nephews, and every one of them was shouting.

I stood in the doorway with my hands in my coat pockets.

The noise came at me from every side, plates and boots and laughter and a baby howling.

It was the best thing I had ever heard.

"Sit," Torin said, behind me.

He put his hand on the small of my back to move me through the crowd.

It was a light touch, over my coat, only meant to steer me past a boy with a tray.

I felt it for the whole length of the room.

He took it away when I reached the bench, and my back stayed warm.

It's the heat of the fires, I told myself.

I sat between Bjorn and a girl of about nine.

She wanted to know if I could really hear a mouse in the wall.

"I can hear three," I said.

"Which wall?"

"That one. The one by your cousin's elbow."

She screamed with delight, and her cousin leapt off the bench.

The sister from the kitchen put down a pot and roared at the whole table.

"If one of you brings a mouse to my dinner I will feed you to it!"

Bjorn pounded the table, and the plates jumped.

"Sing, Torin!" he shouted. "Hedda needs a song!"

"Nobody needs me to sing," Torin said.

"Nobody has ever needed it," the sister with the children said, "and he does it anyway."

He sang.

He was worse than my grandfather.

He sang a drinking song about a sailor and a goat.

The children joined in on the chorus, off the beat, at the top of their lungs.

I was holding a piece of bread, and I felt something come up in my chest.

I had not felt it since I was seventeen.

It came out of my mouth before I could stop it.

I laughed.

It was a real laugh, loud and cracked and too big for me, and it rang off the smoke-black rafters.

For a moment I was afraid.

I waited for a hand to come over my mouth.

Nobody moved to stop me.

The little girl laughed with me, and then her cousin did, and then the whole bench.

Across the table, Torin stopped singing in the middle of the goat.

He was looking at me with his mouth a little open.

"That's the one," he said, to nobody. "That's a good one."

Then he started the chorus again, louder, and I laughed until my ribs hurt.

I stayed late.

Around the third round of pie I went looking for the water jug.

The hall's back corridor ran past the pantry, and the pantry door was shut.

I was reaching for the latch when I heard Torin's voice on the other side of the wall.

He had dropped it low, but I hear everything.

"She's afraid of her father," he said. "She'll want to hear I can keep her here."

"Can you?" Bjorn asked.

"I can keep her under my roof for thirty days, and Ridge Law is Ridge Law."

A pause.

"If Arne asks," Torin said, "Ridge Law says I give her back."

I stood in the corridor with my hand on the cold latch.

Through the wall my grandfather said something very loud and rude about the law.

I went back to the table and sat down.

I laughed at the next joke so that nobody would see.

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