Chapter 23: Silver Moon

Aldric looked at the little pine box in his hand.

Then at his son.

Then at me, sitting up in his bed with a sheet held to my chest and a fresh bite on my neck.

"Now?" he said.

"Now," said Arlo. "Before Clover wakes up. She'll want to do it."

Aldric got out of bed.

He went down on one knee on the rug, in the gray morning light, and held up a wooden ring with a moon carved into it.

"You have to say her whole name," Arlo whispered. "That's the main part."

"I know the main part."

"You didn't for five years."

"Thank you, Arlo."

Aldric looked up at me.

His eyes were amber in the morning, warm and steady, and a little scared.

"Elspeth Fairholt," he said. "Will you marry me?"

I looked at the ring.

It was lopsided.

It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever been given.

"Yes," I said.

Arlo's small shoulders dropped with relief.

"Good," he said. "I was worried."

Then, from down the hall, a furious howl.

"DID SOMEBODY DO IT WITHOUT ME?"

The word went out over the mountains faster than any Council rider.

The Silver Moon had a Queen.

The Silver Moon had a hall.

And they started coming home.

They came up the old north road in trucks and on foot, one or two a day, then more.

A man who'd been a boy in the Silver Moon village, now gray, with three grown sons.

Two sisters who'd been hiding in a town on the coast for eighteen years and wept on the blue step.

A whole family from somewhere in the north, with a baby who'd never smelled another Silver Moon wolf in its life.

By the first week of November there were sixty of us.

The twins built cabins in the ash meadow.

The fireweed came out by the roots and the gray came out of the grass.

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