Todos os capítulos de SILVERBORN: THE ALPHA'S REJECTED MATE: Capítulo 71 - Capítulo 80

I brought the restitution proposal to the Council on the twenty-first day, eight days before the moon, and it was the worst morning of my life as an Alpha, and I want to set down exactly how badly it went rather than the version that will end up in the record.I had it assessed properly first. That was Marcus's insistence and it was right. Petra Vane and two clerks from Ashwood spent eleven days putting a number on a hundred and twenty-nine years, working from the three ledgers and sixty years of my mother's research, and what they produced was not a moral document. It was an accounting.Three hundred and eighty-three names, of which Blackthorn's share is thirty-one.If the takings had fallen evenly across four packs by size and border length, Blackthorn's share would have been a hundred and nine.Seventy-eight people.That is the number. That is what a hundred and twenty-nine years of an arrangement bought my pack, expressed in the only currency that means anything: seventy-eight wol

She came to my door at eight o'clock in the evening, four days before the moon, and she did not sit down and she did not build up to it, and I have thanked her for that since."Wren is alive," said Kira Voss.I did not faint and I did not shout. I went and sat down in the chair nearest me, which happened to be the wrong chair, the one nobody uses, and I said, "No, she isn't.""Selene…"She is not alive. I have had twenty-six years of people arriving at my door with a face like yours and I have learned exactly what that face precedes, and it has never once been that." My voice came out of me perfectly level and perfectly reasonable. "She died in a clearing eleven miles from a stone circle in the September I was twenty-three. I have the file. I have the notation. I have replaced moonflowers at the base of that stone a dozen times a year for a quarter of a century. Do not do this to me four days before you go onto that ground.""I know," said Kira. "I'm going to do it anyway."And then s

They were on the ground by four in the afternoon, which was five hours earlier than anybody needed to be, and every account of that day agrees that the waiting was worse than anything that came after it.Nine hundred and forty wolves. That was the count the joint command took at six: Blackthorn two hundred and forty, Draven three hundred and eighty, Sterling three hundred and ten, Ashwood a hundred and ninety, and forty-one Wilders on the western arc who appear in no pack's return and who Bex Toula insisted be counted separately and by name.Nine hundred and forty on a field that had held six hundred a month earlier.They had come without being summoned again. There was no Council session, no vote, no treaty and no muster order; there was an assessment published by a new standing office eleven days before, three ledgers containing four hundred and eleven names, and a great many wolves in four territories who read a page with their own family on it and got into a vehicle.Draven brough

He asked me at eleven forty-four and I have the time from Isabel, who was three hundred yards away with a watch and who wrote down everything all night including the things she has since refused to publish."Turn the door," said the last of my own bloodline, "and let them out."That was the whole of it. No argument, no inducement, no description of what was down there, and I understood within about a second that this was itself the most sophisticated thing he had ever done to anybody, because I had spent nine days preparing to withstand persuasion and he had simply declined to attempt any."And you come out with them.""Last. Behind a hundred and forty-four people, onto a field with nine hundred wolves on it, with nothing left outside and no hand and no archive and no patience remaining." He stood four feet away with his hands open. "I am not going to tell you that I will be harmless. I do not know what I will be. I was not a good man at twenty-six and I have had a hundred and twenty-

The field did not clear until eleven the next morning, and I have thought a great deal since about why.There was no reason to stay. It was over by half past midnight. Forty dead, a hundred and nineteen wounded, four packs on a field with vehicles in the lanes and six hours of dark left, and every practical consideration in the world argued for moving the wounded and going home.Nobody went home.They lit fires instead. Somebody from Sterling started the first one at about two and by three there were a dozen of them spread across the treaty grounds, and nine hundred wolves from four packs sat on that field until the sun came up, and I walked the whole of it twice because I could not think of anything else to do with myself.Garrick's pots came back out at four in the morning. He had cooked for two hundred at five in the afternoon for an evening nobody expected to survive, and at four he cooked again, for whoever was still upright, and I watched a Draven warrior with his arm strapped a