All Chapters of SILVERBORN: THE ALPHA'S REJECTED MATE: Chapter 81 - Chapter 87

Ashwood fell apart in the spring and I want to record that it was nobody's fault, because the version being told in three other territories is that my father lost control of his pack and it is considerably more interesting than that.It started with the mason.There are four hundred and eleven names going onto the stone at the western edge of the treaty grounds, and my father put Ashwood's mason on it on the morning after the muster and has paid for the whole of it out of Ashwood's accounts ever since without ever putting it to a vote, and by March the cost of it had become the single most discussed subject in our territory.That is how these things actually happen. Not a betrayal or a coup. A stonecutter's invoice.Because once people are arguing about the invoice they are arguing about the names, and once they are arguing about the names they are arguing about the ledgers, and Ashwood is the pack whose own archivist resigned by letter and was found at his sister's house in the easte

The Council of the Four Packs sat for the last time in the old hall in October, and then it did not sit again, and what replaced it is still being argued about and will be for thirty years.The building itself was the problem and it took a year for anybody to say so out loud.A round table built without a head, seating four, in a hall that holds about sixty. That is what a hundred and six years of governance in the Northern Territory had been conducted around, and by the autumn there were, at every session, four Alphas, four Betas, a joint command of four, a standing investigative office, two rotating keepers from each archive, and an average of nineteen observers from families with names on the stone, and all of them were standing against the walls.Isabel Sterling put it in a bulletin in August in one line and it is the most quoted thing her office has ever published.*The Council cannot see who is in the room because the room was built for four people.*The last session ran two day

Marcus resigned in the fourth year and it was the only genuine crisis of my adult life that had nothing whatsoever to do with anything under the ground.He did it properly, which made it worse. A letter, four lines, in his handwriting, on my desk at seven in the morning with no preamble, and then he went and stood in the yard for two hours until I came and found him because he knew perfectly well that I would."Six years and eleven months," he said."Marcus.""I want you to hear the reason before you start, because you are going to construct four counter-arguments on the walk over and three of them will be good." He had his hands in his pockets. "I have been your Beta since you were twenty-one and I was the best available and I am not the best available anymore. Bex Toula is.""Bex Toula is Draven's.""Bex Toula was Draven's until eleven weeks ago and she is currently nobody's, because Reyes has stood down and the new Alpha of Draven wants his own people, and she is forty-one years ol

The fourth panel was finished in the nineteenth year and there was no ceremony, because Marcus Bell had made it extremely clear over two decades that there would not be one.Four hundred and eleven names. Three hundred and ninety-seven of them confirmed and cut. Fourteen of them recorded on the final panel as a single line, in the wording Isabel Sterling drafted in the third year and which four Alphas approved without amendment and which has not been improved on since:And fourteen more, from the Sterling record, whose names are not recoverable.That is the end of it. A hundred and twenty-nine years of taking, and sixty-one years of one woman's ledger, and nineteen years of a mason and four packs paying by proportion, and at the end of all of it there are fourteen people who went into the ground under the treaty grounds and came out of it on a night in spring and looked at the moon for four seconds, and nobody will ever know who they were.The office has not closed the file. Its fourt