Novels by Faith girl

KADE'S POVI could not answer him. I could not see the spire. I could see only a hall full of lamps, and a door that shut.I had been on the floor of the great hall with four men on me.That is the thing I have never told anyone, and shall not, and I tell it now only because it came back whole. Four of my own wolves had hold of me, two at the arms and two at the shoulders, and two of them were boys I had trained, who had put their weight on me because Maren had told them that I would otherwise do something that could not be undone. They were not wrong. I had already broken one man's wrist. I had my teeth in the sleeve of another. I had been shouting for so long that my voice had gone, and the sound that was coming out of me now was not a word.Bram was on the other side of the hall, face down, with an arm wrenched up behind him, shouting her name. Silas stood at the foot of the dais with his hands at his sides and his mouth shut, and he was the only one in the room who was not moving.

KADE'S POVI could not answer him. I could not see the spire. I could see only a hall full of lamps, and a door that shut.I had been on the floor of the great hall with four men on me.That is the thing I have never told anyone, and shall not, and I tell it now only because it came back whole. Four of my own wolves had hold of me, two at the arms and two at the shoulders, and two of them were boys I had trained, who had put their weight on me because Maren had told them that I would otherwise do something that could not be undone. They were not wrong. I had already broken one man's wrist. I had my teeth in the sleeve of another. I had been shouting for so long that my voice had gone, and the sound that was coming out of me now was not a word.Bram was on the other side of the hall, face down, with an arm wrenched up behind him, shouting her name. Silas stood at the foot of the dais with his hands at his sides and his mouth shut, and he was the only one in the room who was not moving.

KADE'S POVThe north slope was kinder than the cleft, and more dangerous, because it was open.Below the shelf the ridge fell away in long ledges of broken rock, each one a drop of six or eight feet onto the next, with dwarf juniper rooted in the cracks and the whole of it silvered by the moon. In the cleft we had been a single held breath. Here we were eleven shapes on a bare hillside in plain light, and every step rang in my head like a dropped plate.Behind us the drums went on. Bram's noise rolled over the crest and down the slope after us, thinned by the rock between us and the Greywater road, and I tried not to listen for the moment it would stop.Silas went first, as he had since the foot of the mountain. At the first ledge he lowered himself over the edge without a sound, hung a moment, and dropped, and I heard his boots land on lichen as softly as a cat's. Perrin paid out the rope behind him. Doran came next, with his bad knee, and Edda caught him at the bottom without being

WREN'S POV "I wanted you to be alone when you did." He said it quietly. "And you are. Look at yourself. Your pack has voted you away. Your friends are in the ground or in hiding. The old man is a hunter with a shotgun and eighteen years of silence. There is no wolf alive who can stand between us." "Kade will." The words were out before I could stop them. Something moved behind his eyes, brief and pleased. "Yes," he said. "He will try. That is the only part of this I could not arrange, and I confess I have been looking forward to it." "He won't come here." "Do not insult us both." He rose. "He will come on foot, I think, by a road he believes no one else knows. A man in his position always does. I have prepared a welcome." A cold line went down my spine. I thought of Silas at the cabin door with the shotgun at his shoulder, and the one rule he had drilled into me before any other: never tell anyone the way you came in. I did not know what my father meant. I knew only that he wa

WREN'S POVI woke counting.Forty-one hearts lived in that spire. I had learned them over two days without wanting to: the slow one on the stair, the quick one in the kitchens below, the pair that always walked together at the change of the watch. They never stopped. They came through the stone as a low, constant murmur, and when I closed my eyes they were all I could hear, a whole house of drums beating out of time with one another and none of them in time with mine.None of them were his.That was the thing I could not get used to. At Kade's keep I had fallen asleep to one heartbeat I knew better than my own. Here there were forty-one strangers and the silence where he should have been.The room was round and clean and kind, which was the cruelest thing about it. A real bed, with linen that smelled of lavender. A fire laid and lit. A table with two chairs. One slit of a window, too narrow for my shoulders, with a gray dawn standing in it. The door had no handle on my side. Nobody ha

KADE'S POVHe was dressed in plain gray, like all of them. His hood was down. His hair was cropped close to his skull, and his hands, which I could see because he had turned them palm up in his lap, were folded one over the other, perfectly still, in the posture of a guest waiting at the end of a long dinner. He was not watching the road. He was not watching anything. He was facing the mouth of the cleft with his back to it, as a man faces a door he is certain will open, and he was waiting.I felt Silas's breath stop beside me."Alpha," he whispered, so quietly it was scarcely sound at all. "He knows we're here.""I know.""Then why isn't he...""Because he is not afraid of us," I said.I stood. There was no point in crawling now. I got to my feet in the slot of rock with my father's blade already in my hand, the long narrow one with the black steel and the silver wash along the edge, and I stepped out onto the shelf into the red light of the dying fire.The man on the boulder did not