The Cursed Blood novel · Chapter 32 of 32

Chapter 32: The Stones Remember

We ran the Line in the snow, both of us barefoot, both of us in blankets.

It was the stupidest thing I've ever done in my life, and I'd walked out of a feast in the first snow of the year.

Every stone we passed was humming.

I put my palm on each one as I went. I didn't decide to. My hand just went.

The warden house door was open when we got there.

All of them were outside in their nightclothes, staring west.

The old man stood in the snow with his stick, in a nightshirt and his blanket, with tears running into his beard.

"Look," he said.

I looked.

At the far end of the Line, past the last stone, the high pass went up into the white.

The pass the Mardell Alpha had walked over a month ago, and never come back.

Somebody was coming down it.

A line of small dark figures, single file, in the snow.

One. Four. Seven.

Eleven.

The stones knew them before we did.

The hum got louder with every step they took onto the Line.

"Get dressed," the honey elder said, wiping her face with her blanket. "All of you. We're not meeting them in our nightshirts."

We didn't get dressed.

We ran.

They were a family. Two families, maybe, by the look of them.

An old woman at the front, leaning on a staff. Grown sons and daughters in patched coats. Children on their backs and at their hems.

All of them had ward lines on their knuckles. Old ones. Faded thin from years of gloves.

The old woman stopped at the last stone.

She looked at us, running at her through the snow in blankets.

Then she looked past us, down the whole length of the Line, at the stones humming one after another all the way to the Gap.

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