Chapter 10: Trial at Dawn

They did not give us time to dress properly.

I walked into the Great Hall in the grey thrall dress with my hair still loose and a torn hem.

King Evander walked beside me with his coat buttoned to the throat over the bandage.

Neither of us said a word.

The room was full.

Every Greyhollow wolf had come.

All four kings sat in a row on the dais with my father among them.

The chopping block stood in the middle of the floor again.

Someone had scrubbed it.

My mother was already there, on a bench by the wall, with a guard at each shoulder.

She looked small.

Her bruised face was turned toward me, and she looked at me, and then at the King, and she knew.

She knew everything, and I could not tell what she thought of it.

Osric stood at the foot of the dais with his split lip swollen and one arm in a sling.

My cousin sat behind him, pale, her own arm bound.

"Linnea Storrow," my father said.

He was looking at the roof beams again.

"You are charged with striking your own blood in this Hall's yard, and breaking the arm of a Beta's daughter."

"She was throwing knives at my mother," I said.

"Thralls have no mother," Osric said, with a sneer I could hear through his split lip. "They have owners."

The Hall muttered.

"Alpha," I said. "He sold my mother to Fenmark last night for twenty bars of gold."

"The King saw it," I said. "Go down to the cellar and count them."

My father did not move.

"The gold was a gift," Osric said smoothly. "From Fenmark, in thanks for the Gathering."

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