Chapter 6: The Cup

We sat on the porch at dawn with one blanket over the two of us and a pot of coffee going cold.

The rogues were stirring in the yard, and Bede was teaching a boy the harmonica.

"Tell me," I said. "All of it. Start with the cup."

Torquil took a long breath and looked at the ridge.

"I was twenty," he said. "My father had fallen off a ledge on a hunt.

He was mending in the still room, and your mother was nursing him."

"I know the room."

"He sent for me at four in the afternoon. I came, and the room was silent."

His voice stayed level.

"He lay on the cot. His eyes were open, and he was already gone."

"How?"

"There was a cup on the floor by the cot, and it had spilled. I picked it up to smell it."

I knew what he was going to say.

"Nightshade," he said. "In the honey tea your mother used to make him."

I did not breathe.

"I was standing there with the cup in my hand when the door opened.

Josiah Scrope was in it, our Beta then.

He looked at the cot and at me, and he said very quietly, 'Torquil.'"

"Just that."

"Just my name, as if he was grieving."

His mouth twisted.

"He had six wolves behind him. They saw a son with poison in his hand."

"What was the argument about?"

"My father wanted to make me Alpha early, and the whole hall had heard it by noon."

He rubbed his scarred neck.

"By dark I was a murderer. By morning I was gone."

"Nobody spoke for you?"

"Bede did, and they threw him in a cell for a month."

I stared at my coffee.

At fourteen I had been asleep upstairs in our cottage that night, or so I had always been told.

I remembered waking to my mother crying in the kitchen, and I remembered her face when I came down.

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