The Cursed Blood novel · Chapter 9 of 32

Chapter 9: The Hunt

I read it twice and folded it small.

Twenty days.

The Trials ended in twenty-one.

Conall had come back across the rock. He read it over my shoulder and said nothing.

The kitchen boy shifted from foot to foot.

"Is there an answer?" he said. "She said if there was an answer I should carry it."

I thought about Alden's sleeve going up, slow, in the wind behind the stones.

I thought about the cider in his hand at the feast.

"Tell her thank you," I said. "Tell her I know."

"That's it?"

"That's it."

The Hunt round started at dawn three days later, in the deep pines below the Line.

Human form. Boots or bare feet, our choice. I chose bare.

"Each of you has a trail," the honey elder said. "One of our wardens walked it last night and left a bone at the end with your name cut on it. Bring it back by dark."

Margaux had her trail before I'd finished tying my braid.

She went off into the trees at a run, nose down, reading broken twigs with her eyes.

Hettie looked at me.

"I'm going to get lost," she said. "I'm going to die in a bush."

"Follow the smell of beans."

"That isn't funny."

It was a little funny. She laughed, and went.

My trail was the big bald warden's.

She walked like a bear and smelled like woodsmoke and garlic, and the ground remembered her well.

I followed her through the pines with my palms brushing every trunk, every rock, every patch of bare earth.

An hour in, I stopped.

There was another trail crossing hers.

Small. Light. Bare feet.

A pup's.

Not running. Stumbling.

I put both hands down.

The ground gave it to me in pieces.

A child. Six, maybe seven. Crying so hard he'd stopped making sound.

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