They Thought My Mate Chose Her novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: Luna

In the morning I carried the gown into the shop in my arms.

The widows were at the long table by eight.

Tressa was at the pressing board in her too-big sweater, holding the iron like an egg, the way Kitto had shown her.

I laid the red gown down in the middle of the table and turned the hem to the light.

Nobody said anything for a while.

"Well," the oldest widow said at last. "That's a mess."

"Can it be hemmed?" the youngest asked.

"No," I said. "The back of the skirt has to come off. All of it. And there's no more silk. That was a year of saving, and I haven't got another year."

I heard the iron stop behind me.

I didn't look around.

The widow from behind the church picked up the hem and rubbed it between her fingers.

"What've you got instead?"

I'd been thinking about it since midnight.

I went into the storeroom and came back with what was left of the twelve bolts from Duluth.

Charcoal wool. The same wool as three hundred robes.

I laid it beside the red silk on the table.

"Red to the knee," I said. "And this below it. Cut on the curve, so it swings."

They looked at the two cloths side by side for a long moment.

"Like the robes," the youngest said slowly.

"Like the whole pack's standing at the bottom of your skirt," said the oldest. "I like it. It's bossy."

We took the skirt apart that afternoon.

I cut the wool. Nobody touched the cutting but me.

The widows ran the long seams inside, where nobody would ever see them.

Merryn sewed one inch of the lining herself, and it went uphill, and she wouldn't let me pick it out.

Tressa pressed every seam open as it came off the machines.

On the fourth day she brought me a finished panel without being asked.

"Did I shine it?" she asked.

I turned it to the window.

"No."

She went back to the board without saying anything else, but I saw her shoulders come down.

We'd set the reopening for the morning after the moon. Kitto said it was good marketing.

On the tenth night, I put it on the dress form by my bed and walked around it twice.

Red silk to the knee. Charcoal wool below, falling in a long curve to the floor.

My initials were still inside the left bodice seam, in red thread.

Under them, I'd stitched one more line in charcoal.

Nine sets of initials and Merryn's, and Kitto's, and a T.H. I'd thought about for an hour before I sewed it.

The moon came up out of the lake on the eleventh night like it had the night of the Rite.

The whole pack stood on the Point in the robes I'd made.

I didn't wear mine.

I walked down the path from the bluff in my gown, with the wool swinging around my ankles.

Three hundred hoods turned to watch me come.

Nobody had to be told who I was.

Cador was waiting in the middle of the circle in his robe.

He let it fall, and shifted, and the dark wolf stood up on the sand.

He didn't lift his nose.

He didn't walk the circle.

He came straight across it to me, with his head up.

He stopped in front of me and pushed his great head against my hands.

Then he shifted back, there at my feet, and Kitto threw the robe, and he caught it without looking.

He stood up in front of me.

"I'm asking you," he said. "I've asked you every day."

"I know. You were very annoying about it."

The pack laughed, all around the circle, and then went quiet again.

I put my hand flat on his chest, over his heart.

"I, Lowenna Treloar," I said, "choose you, Cador Penhale."

He bent his head.

His mouth found the base of my neck, on the left, where it had gone on the cutting table.

He bit.

It was quick, and it hurt like a needle all the way through the finger, and then it didn't hurt at all.

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