Chapter 20: The Offer

I asked the elders for until morning, and they gave it to me.

I did not sleep.

I lay on the cottage couch, because Savannah's empty bed in Hattie's room felt wrong, and I listened to the creek.

Lucan had not said a word on the steps.

He had stood with his hands behind his back and looked straight ahead.

When I turned to him he had only said, "It's yours to answer."

I knew why he was silent.

He thought I'd say yes.

He thought a pack that had spent six years taking my work would finally offer me the chair.

He thought I would sit in it, and he would ride home alone with the seal in his coat.

I could see it in the set of his shoulders.

At dawn I got up, put on my own grey coat, and took the silk scarf from the hook by the door.

I held it a moment and hung it up again.

Hattie sat up on the couch behind me, her red curls flat on one side.

"You're going to say no," she said.

"How do you know?"

"You've been writing the speech since midnight. You do the pen-tapping thing."

"I don't tap."

"You tap your whole right hand."

I laughed, and my eyes stung.

"I'll miss you," I said.

"Then don't go. Or go and come back every autumn. The treaty talks take a week, and I'll be here with a pot of coffee."

"For two hundred years?"

"I'll be dead in thirty. You can visit the grave." She rubbed her eyes. "I'm not good at this part. Go give your speech."

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