Chapter 10: The Hearing

At noon I stood in the middle of the great room with two hundred wolves around me and one hand on my belly.

Seven elders sat at the table.

Lydia sat in a chair beside it with her cast propped on a stool, and Godfrey stood at her shoulder.

Cade sat alone on the bench along the wall.

He had asked to be a witness and not a judge, and he looked twenty years older than he had a week ago.

"Carys Harriman is charged with casting moon-madness on Lydia Langford," the old woman at the middle table read from a page.

She looked up at me.

"How does she answer?"

"I answer with a jar," I said.

Hattie stepped forward and set the honey on the table.

She laid the metal plate beside it, grey stain up.

"That is silverroot," Hattie said clearly, to the whole room.

"Every jar Lydia gave her tests the same.

"Silverroot silences a wolf's inner voice. It silenced Carys's in March."

A hum went through the crowd.

"That is a charge of poisoning," Godfrey said mildly. "It is not an answer to the one we are hearing."

"It is the answer," I said.

"Lydia has been drugging my wolf for six months. That is why mine never warned me about her."

"What coming?" Lydia said, and her voice broke. "I was in a coma."

"Her eyes went black on the tower," Hattie said.

She turned and looked at the elders.

"Forty people saw it. I read her blood on the night they carried her in. It was full of moonbane tincture."

Godfrey's head turned.

"It is a common sedative," he said. "It is in every clinic cabinet."