The Moon She Waited Under novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: The Gate

Dessa's POV

I had walked Kari home in the dusk, and I walked back alone in the dark.

Osric caught my sleeve at the south fence.

He told me that a Cold Ridge patrol crossing into Red Creek meant war.

Lucan would be the first to die of it.

"Then I won't bring a patrol," I said.

I took off my coat at the bottom of Haskell's road and left it on a fence post.

I had thought for three hours about how to do this.

I had asked my wolf to come in the ring and in the hall, and she hadn't come.

Osric had said she answered to need, and fear, and rage.

I stood in front of the chain and the sleeping dog, and I thought about a man on a slope saying you never turned your head.

I thought about a feed room with a bucket in it, and Haskell's pale eyes.

I didn't ask.

The cold didn't come in the way it used to.

Heat did.

It rolled up from my belly and out through my arms, and my bones began to move in the old, terrible, glorious way.

I dropped to the gravel on four white feet.

I lifted my head.

I howled.

The sound went out over the roofs, and every window in Red Creek lit.

The boy from the gate stumbled out of his hut with his shirt half on, saw me, and sat down hard in the road.

Then the dog beside him sighed, rolled over, and showed me its belly.

They came out of the houses one by one, because they could not stay in.

Men in nightshirts, women with children on their hips, wolves still half in skin.

I walked up the middle of the gravel with my head high.

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