Nobela ni Chisom Amah

The healer gave me something bitter to drink, and I poured half of it into the wash basin while her back was turned, because I had four hours until first light and I intended to be conscious for all of them.At the fourth bell I dressed with one hand and Amanda's help."You should be in bed," she said, for the ninth time, kneeling to lace my boots.She tied off the second boot and sat back on her heels and looked up at me. She had been crying at some point in the night, and she had not asked me a single question about the cells."My brother says the eastern terrace has a gate that isn't locked," she said. "The groundskeepers use it. The third row is under the yew."I looked at her for a moment."Thank you, Amanda.""Bring me back," she said. "Whatever it is. Bring it back and let me be the one who knew first."They were waiting for me on the terrace steps in the grey before dawn, and there were three of them, and none of them had slept either.Axel had two shovels over his shoulder.K

She came down the last four steps into the torchlight with her hands empty and held slightly away from her body, which is what you do when you know exactly how many armed men are looking at you.Two bands of gold at each cuff.Axel moved between her and me. "You will stop where you are.""I have stopped." Lena's eyes went past his shoulder and found mine. "Ask me. Don't let anyone ask it for you.""Did you give Maddison that ring?""Yes." No hesitation at all. "Which is why I came down here myself instead of sending a man and why I will surrender my sword to Alpha Axel before I leave this cellar and why I have already put my own people under watch by their own sergeants." She unbuckled the sword from her back one-handed and held it out flat. "Take it. Please take it now, because in about four minutes the Head Warrior of this pack is going to come through that door looking for someone to kill, and I would rather not be armed when he does."Axel took the sword."Forty two members of the

HaileyI got down four flights of stairs on a tremor and a locked jaw, and I do not remember any of it.Lucien had my good arm. Axel went ahead of us with two guards, and the healer came behind with her bag banging against her hip, cursing the stairs, cursing the pack, cursing me specifically for being out of bed.The cells under the east wing were older than the pack house above them. Stone laid by hands that had been dust for two hundred years; damp coming through the mortar; torches in iron brackets set too far apart so that you walked from light into dark into light again.I had been down here once, on the morning they took my father. I had got eleven steps before two warriors turned me around by the shoulders, and I had spent four years afterwards imagining the rest of it.Now I was going to see it, and it had nothing to do with him at all.Garrick, the warden, lay across the threshold of the guard room with his cheek in a puddle of spilled tea."Breathing," the healer said, knee

HaileyNobody spoke for a long time.The lamp on the table needed trimming. I remember that. I remember watching the flame gutter and lean while two of the most powerful men in the north stood four feet apart in a healer's room and decided whether to become enemies."Say his name," Axel said."Cassian." Lucien did not look away from him. "Alpha Cassian of Silverwood. My father's elder brother. He held the pack for thirty-one years before it came to me.""Held it or kept it?""Both, depending on the year."Axel's hands were still at his sides, and that was the frightening part. When Axel Thorne is angry his hands move. When he is calculating, they don't."Where is he?""Coldwater. A lodge on the north shore, four days' ride, longer in autumn." Lucien's jaw worked. "He retired the season I took the pack. I have written to him eleven times in three years. I have had two replies, both of them about fishing.""You expect me to accept that.""I expect nothing from you at all.""A woman was

HaileyI woke up angry.That was new. Every other time I had come back from the dark in this pack it had been to fear or grief or the flat grey of nothing left to lose. This time I opened my eyes in a room full of lamplight and the first thing I felt was rage, and it was clean, and it was mine, and I could have wept with relief.My wolf stirred. Faint. Distant, like someone humming in another wing of the house.Still there."Don't move the arm."The healer was a small round woman with grey plaits and forearms like a blacksmith. She had my wrist strapped to a padded board and a poultice packed along the inside of my elbow that smelled of tar and crushed mint."How long?" My voice came out ruined."Five hours. You'll have the tremor for a week." She peeled a corner of the poultice back, looked, grunted, pressed it down. "Wolfsbane draw, refined. Not the field kind you steep in a pot. Someone paid an apothecary a great deal of money.""Would it have killed me?""On a warrior your size? N

HaileyThey gave me nine minutes to prepare in a stone room under the western stand.It smelled of sand and old blood and lamp oil, and there was a bucket in the corner, and I understood now why the fighters used it, because my whole body had gone cold and loose and wrong."You are not doing this." Lucien filled the doorway. "I'll pull Silverwood out of the alliance tonight. I'll do it from the sand. Give me the word.""And then what?" I pulled the last of the pins out of my hair and dropped them in a row on the bench. "Three packs break with the capital, the Elders get exactly the crisis they want, and Fenrir has to choose sides in front of the whole south. Over me.""Yes. Over you."Something moved in my chest, painful and warm."You spent a year teaching me," I said. "Every morning. Rain, snow, the week I had fever and you made me stand anyway. Why did you do that if you were always going to stand in the doorway?"He shut his eyes."Corvain arranged this," he said."I know.""That