جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 370

POV: KADE ASHBORN“Kade, they are not attacking us. They are herding us. Look how every rider turns at the same bend, as if someone told them where our archers stand, and told them you would come running the moment the horn blew.”Cody said it with his bow still drawn and his voice shaking. Below the east gate the night was full of fire. Grey riders swept along the pass with lantern poles held high, and the light shivered across the snow like spilled gold. The wind smelled of horse sweat and hot iron. My claws were half out. I had started to change without meaning to, and the ache of it sang along my spine.“I see it,” I said. “Tell Brannic to hold the line and not to chase.”“He will want to chase.”“Then tell him I said it twice.”Cody ran. I stood on the wall with both hands on the freezing stone and watched the riders turn exactly where he had said they would. One volley from our archers. One howl from Dorn’s wolves on the south road. Then the whole grey tide wheeled away into the

POV: KADE ASHBORN“Tell me why the notes smell of your cloves, Tobren, before I forget that you taught me to read my own name.”I had him against the cold wall of the east stair with my forearm across his chest. Cody held a lantern with a hand that would not stay steady. It was the middle of the night, twenty seven nights before the blood moon, and the hall above us was silent. Only the old stone hand carved into the wall watched us, with its open palm full of shadow.Two nights ago I had written a false message and laid it in that palm. Wren will open the iron door at the next dark of the moon. Send no more than twenty. Then Cody and I had hidden behind the stair and waited, hour after hour, while the wind sighed through the arrow slits. The cold crept into my boots. Cody whispered jokes to stay awake, and I let him. Once a rat ran across my foot, and neither of us breathed. At the fourth hour, an old man in a plain brown cloak had crept down the stairs with a clove in his mouth.Now

POV: KADE ASHBORN“Alpha, a boy just tore his own mother’s arm open, and he is only six. Tell me again that we are holding still.”Hask’s thin voice cracked on the last word. He stood in the mouth of the lower yard with blood on his sleeves, and behind him a crowd of wolves and Vane stood frozen in the pale light of noon. Noon. There was no moon in the sky. There was only a faint white shadow of it, ghostly behind the clouds, like a coin pressed into wet paper.I pushed through the crowd. It was the twenty fifth night before the blood moon, and the whole yard smelled of fear. Wolves were pacing in tight circles. A woman knelt in the dust holding her bleeding arm, and a few paces away a small boy crouched with his hands in the dirt, his eyes silver, his shoulders shuddering. His claws were out. His teeth were far too long for his face.“His name is Wick,” Orsin said behind me, and his horned hands were clenched. “He is my sister’s grandson. He has never changed in his life. Alpha, ther

POV: KADE ASHBORN“Kade, I have been afraid for nine nights and told nobody. If we go down there and find a face we know, I do not think I can lift my sword.”Cody whispered it with his shoulder against the damp stone and his lantern shaking in his fist. It was the twenty third night before the blood moon. Above us, the castle kitchens slept in the dark, and a ladder of old iron led down into a hole I had never known was there.We had found it behind the flour barrels. It was a trapdoor no wider than a coffin, hidden under a rug, with a bolt that had been oiled so recently it still gleamed. Whoever was using it had been careful. They had not been careful enough.“Look at me,” I said.He did. His face was young and tired and terribly honest. For nine nights he had held the border with his teeth set, and I had not once asked how he was.“I am afraid too,” I told him. “I have been afraid since the horn. I think the only brave thing a person can do is keep walking when he is afraid. So we

POV: KADE ASHBORN“Cody, take the door. If anyone is still hiding in this room, I want them breathing when we find them, and I want them to answer every single question.”I whispered it with my back against the nursery wall and a knife in my hand. Cody wrenched the bolt, threw the door wide, and swept the corridor with his lantern. Nothing. Only dust motes and the soft grey light of dawn at the end of the hall.But the room had not been empty. I knew it in my teeth. A cold draft kept brushing my ankles, steady and thin, and when I lifted the little rug beside the bed, I found a square hatch hidden under it, no wider than a bread board. Beneath it a narrow stair spiraled down inside the wall.“A second stair,” Cody said hoarsely. “Leading where?”I already knew. I followed it with my heart in my throat and came out through a false panel, into the one room in the castle that nobody entered without my leave. My own study. My father’s desk. The drawer where he had kept his signet ring was