My Mate Exiled Me for Being Weak, Then Couldn't Smell Me in His Dungeon novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: The Last Cup

He stopped at the tent flap with the camp's wolves standing three deep behind him.

His shirt was soaked through with sweat, and he held a stoppered clay jar against his chest in both hands.

There was a seal of old wax over the stopper.

"Ilsa," he said.

I didn't answer.

He looked past me at the Mother, and he bowed his head to her, which no king of his line had done to a rogue.

"I have been told you can tell what's in a cup," he said. "I would like you to tell me what's in this one."

"Where did you get it?"

"Her rooms. I sealed them the night she died and no one has been inside since."

His voice stayed level.

"This was on her table. She never finished it."

The Mother held out her hands, and he gave her the jar.

She cracked the wax with her thumbnail and pulled the stopper, and a thin brown skin of dried tea lay in the bottom.

I smelled it from where I stood.

Bitter green, and under it, the sour thread of juniper.

She dropped a pinch of grey root into the jar.

The skin went black.

Roan watched it.

He did not make a sound, and he did not move, and the camp wolves, who hated him, shifted their feet.

"Three years," the Mother said quietly. "It kept."

"Leave us," Roan said.

Then he heard himself, and he turned his head to me.

"Please," he said. "If she'll permit it."

I looked at the Mother.

"Go," I said.

She took her mortar and her candle, and she herded the watching wolves out of the tent, and the flap fell shut.

For a long moment he stood with his arms hanging.

"You were at her grave," he said.

"Yes."

"You smelled this at her grave."

"I smelled something bitter on your father's gloves, and I thought it was the wreaths. I was eighteen. I'd followed your scent for an hour."

"You never told me."

"You didn't ask my name."

He flinched.

Then something in his face gave way, and the rage came up through it all at once.

He swept the folding table off its legs with one arm, and the pots went rolling across the ground.

"Every night!" he shouted.

"I sat in that chair and said thank you. I let him put his hand on my shoulder. He looked at me while I drank it."

His chest heaved.

"I threw you out for being weak. I called you weak. I kept a file of the girl I'd driven away because my mate was weak, and the whole time it was in my cup."

"It was in your cup, Roan."

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