Chapter 15: Every Mark Was Mine

Bram was behind me on the stairs before I had finished the sentence.

"The river," I said. "She'd go to the river."

"Why?"

"It's where it happened. She told us in the hall."

He pulled on his boots and called for Tobin through the link, and I felt the call go out through the mark.

Tobin met us at the gate, hair on end, running.

"Father left a note on the infirmary door," he said. "It says: Don't follow."

"Then we follow," I said.

We took the deer path down the north ridge with six fighters behind us.

The river was brown and fast with the snowmelt.

Father stood on the gravel bar with his back to us.

Mother sat on a flat rock at the edge of the water, with her bandaged shoulder and a gray blanket round her.

She had walked a mile on a wound that should have kept her in bed for a week.

"Odette," Father said, without turning his head. "They've come."

"I know."

"I told them not to."

"I know. You never could stop our children from doing what they chose."

I stopped three steps away.

Mother looked up.

"You shouldn't be here," she said. "He'll be here by noon."

"Then tell me now," I said. "Everything. In front of Tobin, in front of Father, in front of the people I brought. Not a plea. The truth."

She held my eyes for a long time.

"I was twenty-nine," she said. "I walked down to the river for water at dusk. He came out of the reeds."

Tobin made a sound behind me.

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