Chapter 21: The Council Verdict

I took the ninth hook from Maud's palm.

It was heavier than I expected, and the barb at the point was bright.

Torin stared up at me from the rock with eight hooks in his shoulders and chest and the river drying on his face.

"Lena," he said.

It was the last trick he had.

He said it in the old voice, soft as a hand in the dark.

"My name is Hesper," I said.

I knelt at his head.

I set the hook over his heart, the one place on him that no other hook had touched.

The elders watched.

Bram stood at my shoulder and did not touch me, and I was glad of it.

This one was mine.

"This is for Aldane," I said, "and for every night you said nothing would hurt."

I pushed.

Torin screamed.

The nine hooks began to glow white from the points inward, and the light ran along them from the eighth to the first and into the ninth.

Something came out of his chest.

It was a grey shape, long-backed and lean.

For one moment it stood on the rock beside him, an old she-wolf with ragged ears.

She looked down at the man who had fed on borrowed dead for seven years.

Then she turned her head and trotted down the bank, into the black water, and went under.

Torin went limp.

The hooks fell loose and rang on the stone one after another.

He lay there with his eyes open, a grey-haired man of thirty-four who looked sixty.

For the first time since I had known him, he was silent.

Nobody on the riverbank said a word.

Then someone at the back began to weep, and then someone else.

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