All Chapters of After the Alpha Rejected Me, I Came Back with His Twins: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

Mara had the document box open on the records-room table before the light was any good, and the first thing we did on the twenty-third of January was look at two seals and agree they were whole. Ames wrote the box open, the hour, the wax at both ends and the three of us who had looked."Read it here," I said, "with that door shut, and nowhere else today."Ames broke the seals. The three of us heard it again behind the shut door; then he folded it into his coat and we went down the yard.The lower cart stand is a long open-sided shed with a stone floor and a roof that leaks at the third truss, and it is no secret and never has been. Frames along the back, barrow wheels on pegs, four open-fronted storage bays under the stand end with sacking over two of them against the wet.Last night Mara had a line drawn at that end — the four bays and the six feet of floor in front of them — with two wolves on it from dusk, ordered to keep every wolf out and given no reason.There was a wolf waiting

"Then say who is entitled to be in the room," I said, "because I am not opening it twice."Mara had her hand flat on the table and had been building to it since I came in."A deposit lodged with this Council is opened in front of this Council. That one went in in 'ninety-eight, with four marks against the entry. I want this Council represented today.""How it went in is not the argument. What is on this table came up out of a grain measure in the lower cart stand into my chain, and this house did not hand it to me. Show me the line that says this Council opens what it did not give out, and I will sit down."She took her time over it."I cannot show you one this morning.""Then today it is three of us. The request under my mother's own condition has my name on it.""And how it left that room.""Is Sedge's account, not a history. He told us about a clerk and a maintenance bag while he was asking us for things.""Enter it as her decision and my objection," she said to Ames, "and then tha

Damien's POVI asked for the twenty-seventh at six, and I asked her and nobody else, and then I spent two days finding out what it is like to have spent a thing you only get one of.The answer came back on the twenty-sixth in her own hand, and it was four lines long, and three of them were conditions.Supper at Elder Mara's table. Six o'clock to seven. Not past the kitchen — no other room in that house, not for any reason, including a reason that looks good at the time. Rhys asked for it. Rowan said he would come to the table and might not stay, and if he goes, I stay where I am.I read it standing in the road and then read it again, and what went through me was not what I expected, and I am going to put it down plainly, because I have got into the habit.I have sat at that table before. The sixth of January, with potatoes and a wooden truck and a song I remembered the end of. There were lines around that evening as well — hers, and Mara's — and I kept every one of them. What there wa

Ames had ruled one sheet overnight and put two names at the head of it, and I took it off the table before I sat down."Two pages.""It is the same matter," he said, which is the only argument he made and he made it once."It is one afternoon in a meadow with two wolves in it, and everything before that is different work by different hands." I set the ruined sheet aside. "On one page, February spends the day deciding which of them is the real one. Whichever loses that argument carries the other's share, and whichever wins walks out lighter. Two pages. Neither gets to stand behind the other."Mara put her stick against the table leg."Then you will have to prove both of them twice," she said, "and I would rather you did."I took Sedge in the morning with the old material face down.The copied surveillance book came out first, the one that went round this valley for years with two hands in it. Ames laid his own pages beside the second hand and did not enjoy any part of it."The first fo

They took my sons first — the instruction I had written about them — before anybody was properly in a chair."The front sheet of the Blood Moon bundle." The Elder in the middle chair had it at arm's length. "No child of that family to be called, questioned, tested or produced. Is that a condition of your evidence.""It is their mother's condition, and this Pack's bundle was built to match it." I stood up to say it. "I am not writing a rule for anybody else's children. I am saying what I will consent to for mine. The adults answer for the adults.""And the healer's pages.""Are not in any bundle and will not be."They went out for a quarter of an hour and came back narrow.No child called. No page describing what a child can do admitted, because nothing alleged against either wolf turns on it. Adult accounts of what was done to the children, admitted and open to question like any other.And then the part I had to take with my face still."This sitting has not seen those pages," the mid