Chapter 10: Bedtime

I remembered the smell of gardenia smoke.

That was the strange thing.

Eighteen years, and that was what came back first, kneeling in the ash with Mags's hand around my wrist.

The hall burning, my mother's voice in the dark, and a sweet white smell under the smoke.

"Breathe, kid," Mags said.

I breathed.

Aldric was standing behind me.

When I looked up at him, his face had gone strange.

Not angry.

Closed.

"Mossgrave," he said quietly. "You're sure."

"I've been sure eighteen years," Mags said. "I just couldn't prove it to anyone who mattered."

He didn't say anything else.

He turned away and started giving orders to his wolves.

By sunrise the Silver Moon remnant was riding down the north ridge in the back of three Langtry trucks.

All nine of us, and a cooler of the cook's stew, and Mags on a mattress in the truck bed swearing at every bump.

"I'm not going to his house," I'd said.

"Then your people sleep in the rain," Aldric had said. "And your guard dies of a fever. Your choice."

I went to his house.

His healer put Mags in the best guest room and a needle in her arm.

The cook took one look at the Langtry kitchen and declared war on it.

At noon, Aldric called his household into the great room.

All of them.

The cooks, the cleaners, the drivers, the boy who split the firewood, the old man who fixed the trucks.

Twenty-six people who had worked in that house for years.

I stood at the back by the stairs with the children.

Aldric stood in front of the fireplace in a clean shirt over his bandaged shoulder.

"I want to start again," he said.

People shifted on their feet.

He walked to the first woman in the line.

The kitchen woman, the one who'd texted Mags about Clover.

"What's your name?"

She stared at him.

Then she told him.

He repeated it back to her.

He asked how long she'd worked for him.

Eleven years.

He went down the whole line.

Every single one.

He got the boy's name wrong once and asked again and got it right.

It took forty minutes.

Nobody laughed.

By the end, the old mechanic was wiping his eyes with a grease rag and pretending he wasn't.

Keep reading free with an account. Start His Pups Called Me Mama. He Called Me Nobody. from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.