MasukSERAPHINAHe was standing in the long gallery in front of his great-grandfather when I found him.Just standing. Hands at his sides. Looking up at that big grey bearded face in its gilt frame as if he were waiting for it to say something. When he heard my footsteps he turned, and smiled at me, and the smile was perfectly ordinary.That was the first thing that frightened me."There you are," I said. "Hale's been looking for you. Rowan's awake.""I know. I sat with him." He came down the gallery towards me. "He's going to be all right. Wenna's been washing him in milk.""Milk?""She says it draws it out."I looked past him at the portrait. Aldric Draven, with his hand on his stone. The frame was hanging very slightly crooked, as if someone had lifted it and put it back and not quite got it straight. And on the floor beneath it, in the dust along the skirting, there was a long clean mark where something flat had lain."What were you doing?" I said."Looking at him." Kael glanced back ov
KAELRowan woke a little after noon.I was sitting beside him when he did. We'd put him in the small room off the great hall where the Alpha's guests used to sleep, and Wenna had spent the morning pouring warm broth into him a spoonful at a time and wiping the wolfsbane off his skin with a cloth soaked in milk. She said it drew it out. I don't know if she was right. But by noon he smelled of something again, faintly. Wet leaves. Woodsmoke. Rowan.He opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling for a long time. Then he turned his head and saw me."I'm sorry," he said."Don't.""I told them to take her." His voice was a cracked whisper. "I heard myself say it. I was standing a long way back inside my own head, watching my mouth move, and I couldn't stop it." He shut his eyes. "Kael, I told your pack to take her.""It's not my pack. It's yours. And you didn't." I put my hand on his shoulder. "Tell me what's down there."He told me. Slowly, with long gaps, the way men talk after a fever. The
RONANThey started coming three days before I expected them.I'd sent Hakon out with the letters thinking it would be a month before anyone reached Skarholt. A month of roads and rivers and farm carts. I'd forgotten that every girl in the North had woken at once on the night of the dark, and that their families had been lying awake ever since, waiting for someone to tell them why.They came on foot, on ponies, in carts piled with bedding. Whole families from the Teeth. Fishermen from the far coast. A shepherd from above Kettle Ford with his daughter riding on his shoulders, her eyes silver, holding on to his ears. By the fifth day there were three hundred people camped in the meadow below the castle, and more coming over the hill every hour.Sigrun dealt with them. I hadn't asked her to. She just did it. She stood in the gateway from dawn to dark with her bare wrist and her silver eyes, and found them places to sleep and food to eat and somebody to listen. When they asked to see the m
SERAPHINAThe dead were quiet at dawn.They always were, in daylight. Quieter, anyway. I woke with my head on Kael's knee and the strap still on my wrist and the grey light coming in through the high windows of the great hall, and for a moment I didn't know where I was. Then I heard the humming. Fifty women of Ironmoor, sitting among a hundred and twelve sleeping girls, still singing the fox song under their breath, the way you'd keep a fire going through the night.Kael wasn't asleep. I don't think he'd slept since Skarra."Where's Cassia?" I said.He looked round. I watched him look. Along the rows of sleeping girls, the women at the ends of the rows, the Lycans at the doors, Sorcha asleep sitting up against a pillar with her chin on her chest. My mother, awake, wrapped in her cloak by the dais, watching the panelling where Maren had gone.No Cassia.Hale found out. She went from woman to woman down the rows, asking, a
CASSIAI left my shawl hooked over the handle of the oven door, so that somebody would know.That was all. No note. If I'd written one, I'd have had to write why, and if I'd started on why I'd have stood there till morning arguing with myself. So I hung up my shawl, and took off my shoes so they wouldn't scrape, and crawled into Maren's bread oven with a candle in my hand.The stair went down steeply, cut into rock, worn hollow in the middle of every step. Somebody had gone up and down it a great many times. After the first turn I didn't need the candle. The mortar between the stones had begun to glow, faint and yellow, the way the floor of the hall had glowed when Kael stood on the stone, only weaker. Like the last of a fire.I counted the steps. I always count things when I'm frightened. A hundred and four.At the bottom there was a passage, low and long, and the smell of lamp oil was stronger. And on the walls of the passage were the n
CASSIAI was the only one who didn't move.Afterwards, people asked me what it was like, and I never knew how to tell them. It was like standing in a river and watching everyone else get swept away. A hundred and twelve girls stood up in the lane outside the great hall and started walking towards the doors. Inside, Sorcha let go of Seraphina and took one step towards the dais. Ilona Ashby turned her head towards the panelling where Maren had gone, as if someone had called her from the next room.And I stood there with my knife in my hand and heard nothing at all.I'd given it away. All of it. Every drop of whatever it was that made them what they were, I'd poured out on the night of the eclipse, and I'd never once been sorry. I wasn't sorry now. I was just alone. The only one in that whole glowing hall who couldn't hear the dead."Hold them!" Kael was shouting. He had Seraphina by both arms, the strap wound twice round his wrist, and she was leaning against his grip towards the stone







