The Thirteenth Moon novel · Chapter 9 of 24
Chapter 9: The Ledger
Edda didn't look up when we came in.
"Shut the door," she said. "Sit down, both of you. There's tea."
I sat across from her at the table, and Torin stood behind my chair with his hands on the back of it.
The book between us was the size of a church Bible, with a cracked brown cover and a ribbon marker gone black with age.
Edda kept both hands flat on it.
"I'm the keeper of the moon ledger," she said. "I have been since I was twenty. Every Luna, every vow, every oath this pack has spoken for two hundred years is written in here."
"I know that," I said.
"You know what everyone knows." She opened it to the ribbon. "This isn't what everyone knows."
She turned the book around and pushed it across.
The page was written in old brown ink, in a hand I did not recognize.
Along the top margin someone had drawn a small crescent, the same crescent I had on my wrist.
"Read it," Edda said.
I read.
It took me a while, because the words were old.
When I finished I read it again out loud, slowly, so I would believe it.
"The Moon's daughter holds the crescent from her mother's line."
I swallowed.
"No Alpha may stand in the seat of this pack except by her consent. As long as the vine stands upon her arm, her consent is given, and the Alpha's seat is his."
I turned the page toward the lamp.
"Should the vine be unmade without her word, the seat shall hold only until the next full moon. If she has not given her consent anew before the pack by then, the seat is empty."
I stopped.
Nobody said a word.
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