The Cursed Blood novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Vouched

Isla vouches for herself by reading the ground in front of the elders, Hettie arrives, and Alden enters Margaux in the Trials.

"You walked me up a mountain to tell me no?"

"I walked you up a mountain so you'd stop bleeding." Conall sat down at the end of the table and took a heel of bread. "The no is a separate thing."

The old women looked at each other.

"Then she goes back down," he said.

"She doesn't."

"Captain, the law..."

"The law says a warden-blooded wolf vouches." Conall tore the bread in half. "It doesn't say a different one."

It took me a second.

It took the old man less.

He looked at me over his tea, and for the first time something in his face wasn't flour-sack.

"Can she?"

"Ask her at dawn."

I slept on a bench by the fire with my hands flat on the stone floor.

Every time they lifted, the rot climbed back up my wrists and woke me.

Conall didn't sleep at all, as far as I could tell.

He sat by the door with a knife and a stick and whittled something that never turned into anything.

At first gray, somebody hammered on the door.

Conall was up with the knife before I had my eyes open.

He opened it, and Hettie Tolan fell in.

She had my coat over one arm, my boots in her fist, her own face scratched raw from branches, and flour still on her apron from last night.

"You absolute idiot," she said to me. "You walked out barefoot. In snow. Who does that?"

"My mother, apparently."

"Well, your mother's not here to get frostbite, is she." She threw the boots at my feet. "I ran all night. I fell in a creek. There's a beetle in my hair, I can feel it."

Conall reached over, picked a beetle out of her curls, and put it outside.

Hettie stared at him.

"Who's that?"

"The warden captain."

"Oh." She looked him up and down. "Well. Thank you for the beetle."

"Any time."

I hugged her so hard she squeaked.

"They'll come for you," she whispered. "The Alpha had men at the cellar door by midnight."

"Then I'd better not go back."

The stones looked different at dawn.

Ten wolves were already standing among them in a loose ring.

Candidates, from every corner of the Greywater. Some in good coats, some in rags. All of them human, all of them in boots, all of them staring at me.

I took my boots off.

Then my socks.

The three elders sat on folding stools at the head of the ring with blankets on their knees.

"Isla Fenner," the old man said. "Packless since last night. The law needs a warden-blooded wolf to vouch for you, and the captain declines."

A murmur went round the ring.

"So vouch for yourself," he said. "Read this ground. Tell us who walked here and what was spilled."

I knelt.

I put both hands flat on the frozen dirt between the two biggest stones.

The black drained out of my wrists at once.

Then the ground started to talk.

"Boots," I said. "Lots of boots this morning. Ten pairs. One of them has a hole in the left heel."

A boy at the end of the ring looked down at his feet.

"Before that, last night. Someone small came out here alone and knelt where I am." I frowned. "She spilled something hot. And sweet. And swore about it."

The old woman on the left went very still.

"Honey in my tea," she said. "Go on."

I went deeper.

Under the tea, under last winter's snow and the summer before, there was something older.

It came up through my palms and into my teeth.

"Blood," I said. "A lot of it. Forty, fifty years ago. A woman lay here and it ran out of her into the dirt."

"There were wolves standing over her. Big ones. They smelled like the valley." I swallowed. "She didn't fight them. She put her hands flat on the ground, like I am, and she..."

I stopped, because my eyes were full.

"She made the ground remember them," I said.

The old man reached out and laid his inked hand on the nearest stone.

"My sister," he said. "That was the year the Mardells came up the mountain."

Then the old woman with the honey said, "Entered."

"Entered," said the other.

"Entered," said the old man.

Hettie made a noise like a kettle.

"Can she vouch for others now?" she said. "Because I'm packless too. As of last night. I'd like it noted I ran through a creek."

The old man looked at me.

"Hettie Tolan," I said. "Vouched."

"Entered," said the old man, and he almost smiled.

That was when the horses came up the ridge.

Alden Mardell rode the first one in his fur collar, with a handkerchief pressed under his nose and the cloth already soaked red.

Margaux Delane rode the second in her white wool coat, like she was arriving at a wedding.

Alden swung down and nearly fell.

His eyes found my wrists.

Clean. Pale. Not a line on them.

Then he looked at his own hand.

The black ran from his knuckles up under his sleeve.

"What did you do?" he said.

"She stood on warden ground, boy," the old man said. "The rot goes out of her into the earth. Yours has nowhere to go."

Alden's face went white under the blood.

"So I die first."

"You die first."

Then he took Margaux by the hand and walked her into the ring.

"The Mardell seat on the territory council names one candidate every Trials," he said. "It's in the treaty. I name Margaux Delane."

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