Chapter 14: The Front Comes Home

They came into the great hall in a long, ragged line.

There were more than eighty of them, in torn leathers, with their ribs showing through their shirts.

Every one of them carried a strip of dried bark tied around one wrist.

The captain of the lines walked at their head.

He was a gaunt, grey-bearded wolf with a cough, and he stopped in the middle of the floor and looked at the board at the head table.

"So that's where he is," the captain said.

"Captain," Joss said, and went to him and gripped his arm. "You're alive."

"Barely. Forty wagons came up the north road two days ago, Joss."

"They had the Luna's seal burned into the sideboards."

He turned and looked straight at me.

Eighty wolves went down on one knee at the same time.

The thud of eighty knees on stone went through the floor into my feet.

"Luna," the captain said. "We ate because of you."

My throat closed.

I looked at Soren, standing at my shoulder with his hands behind his back.

He looked at the floor and said nothing.

"Get up," I said, and my voice broke. "All of you, please. Get up."

"We came to ask one thing," the captain said, rising slowly. "We've sat in the snow for three months and been told our Alpha was beside us."

"We buried eleven. Then we chewed this bark to keep from eating our belts, and every man here tied a strip on his wrist to remember it."

He held up his arm.

"Alpha Rathburn," he said, louder, to the board. "Where were you?"

Cade lifted his head.

For a moment he looked like a man looking for a door.

"I was at the lines," he said. "I fought beside you. This is a plot, a lie of the Luna's..."

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