The Cursed Blood novel · Chapter 29 of 32

Chapter 29: Accountability

I didn't answer him at the door.

"Say it at the hall," I said. "In front of them. Not up here, where it's easy."

He looked at the full table behind me. The wardens. Hettie. Margaux with the baby.

"Tomorrow," he said. "At breakfast."

"At breakfast."

He went back down the mountain in the dark.

Conall didn't say anything. He just put another dumpling on my plate.

I went down the ridge road the next morning with Conall on one side and Hettie on the other.

Past the marker, the ground went dead under my feet.

I waited for the hook under my ribs.

It didn't come.

My arms stayed pale. My nose didn't bleed.

The salt still made the valley quiet under me.

But nothing was eating me anymore.

I walked into the valley clean for the first time in a month.

The Mardell hall was lit for breakfast.

The doors were open this time. Somebody had propped them with a chair.

I knew which board creaked.

I stepped on it anyway.

Three hundred wolves looked up.

Nobody laughed.

The high table was set the way it always was.

Alden wasn't sitting at it.

He was standing in the middle of the floor, in the exact spot where I'd dropped the venison.

He had the rolled map in one hand and a small wooden box in the other.

"Isla Fenner," he said, loud enough for the back of the hall. "Warden of Cinder Gap. Will you come here?"

I walked out to him.

Hettie and Conall stayed at the door.

He unrolled the map on the nearest table.

The north slope below the Gap. Every acre of it, inked in red.

"This slope was hers before it was ever timber," he said, to me and to the room.

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