Chapter 14: Silver

Torin killed the last of them on the ledge and came down without a word.

Together we dragged Aldric into a cave off the gorge, where the pines hid the mouth.

I laid Linnet in her sling on a folded cloak by the wall.

She slept through all of it.

"I'll take the mouth," Torin said. "Keep him alive. I want to hit him myself later."

He went out into the dark.

I knelt over Aldric and cut his shirt open with my knife.

The blade was still in him, and the skin around it had gone black in a ring.

Silver does that to a wolf.

"Morven." His eyes were open and his lips were gray. "Leave it. Take the baby and go."

"Shut up."

"The silver will go to my heart if it stays."

"Then I'll take it out. Shut up and hold still."

I gripped the hilt and drew it out in one pull.

He arched off the stone, and the sound he made went through the cave.

And it went through me.

I had not expected that.

The bond had been dead for eight days. I had cut it on the pack-house steps myself, in front of everyone.

It was not dead.

His pain came through it into my own ribs, hot and sour and silver-bright, and I gasped and fell forward onto my hands.

Under the pain was something else.

I saw it the way you see a room when a lamp is carried in.

I saw a man sitting outside a bedroom door at night, with his back against the wall and his head in his hands.

I saw it again, and again, a hundred nights, always after he had left me and always before dawn.

I saw him in a stable the night Rowan was born, on his knees in the straw, sick with himself.

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