Chapter 17: The Grave

Rodrick's POV

Tam's grave was a flat stone on the east shoulder of the mountain, with nothing written on it but his name.

I sat down in the snow beside it at dusk and told him everything.

I told him about the girl at the bonfire, and the cup, and the four years I'd wasted.

I told him she had put a bow through a man's sleeve at forty feet.

"She sings," I said. "Or she will. She hasn't yet."

The wind came down off the ridge and rattled the dry grass.

Tam would have laughed at me.

He had been twenty-six, loud, and sure that nothing could ever go wrong for a MacAlister with a good truck and a fast wolf.

I'd been twenty-two, and I'd thought he was the sun.

I stayed there all night.

I had told Tegan where I was, and that sat in my chest.

Term two.

Nobody had ever asked me to tell them where I was going, and I'd found I liked it.

Near dawn, I heard boots on the path.

One man, heavy, slow, stopping to breathe.

I knew the step before I smelled him.

I stood up and turned, and Edwin Haskins came over the lip of the hill with a rifle held out flat across both hands.

He had no hat.

His beard was uncombed, and his good suit was creased.

He stopped ten feet from me and looked at the stone.

"I've never been up here," he said.

"No."

"I told myself I'd come when it was time to pay."

He knelt in the snow.

It took him a while, with his bad knee, and I did not help him.

He laid the rifle down across the grave.

"It's loaded," he said. "Take it, if you want. I came up the hill alone so you could."

I looked at the rifle.

For nine years I had thought about this moment.

I'd thought about it in the dark, on the long drive to Elk Fork, with the heater off so I could feel my hands.

Keep reading free with an account. Start My Mate and Family's Choice from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.