Alle Kapitel von The New Moon Mate: Kapitel 71 – Kapitel 80

I did not sleep that night. I sat in the room with the bars on the window and looked out at the square and the snow and the lantern on the pack house porch, and I went over the night of the twenty-second of June the way I had gone over it a thousand times since.Owen had come home at six o'clock. He had eaten two bowls of stew. He had said he was going out to the north fence and he had asked June if she wanted to come and she had said no because she had homework. He had put on his coat and his hat and he had gone out the door and I had heard the door shut and that was the last thing I had heard of my brother in my life.I had not walked him out. I had not asked him why he was going out so late. I had not asked him what was wrong, because something had been wrong for a week and I had seen it and I had not asked.And then at six in the morning Harold's boy had come up the road on his bicycle and said there was a body in the field and the sheriff was there and the body was Owen's.I had

I ran out of the house with Harlan behind me and the snow coming down and the mill at the end of the road was not a mill anymore. It was a white shape in the dark with the roof gone and the walls coming apart and the light of it was white and it was not like any fire I have ever seen.It was the stones. The stones in the circle were burning.I got to the yard and the heat came at me like a wall and I put my arm up over my face and I stopped.The mill was gone. The roof had fallen in and the walls were standing but the inside of it was a furnace and the furnace was white. There was white light coming out of the windows and the door and the cracks in the boards, and it was not flickering the way a fire flickers. It was steady. It was like looking at the moon.And in the middle of the yard there was a man.It was Erik Renn. He was standing in the snow with the box of stones in his arms and my mother's ring on his finger and the white light on his face, and he was not looking at the mill.

I got as far as the porch.Clara Renn's house was dark and the door was shut and the snow was up to the step, and I stood there with my hand on the rail and did not knock.I had been up for two days. My hands were burned and my throat was raw and there was a bruise on my back from the courthouse wall that had gone stiff. I had a mate in a bed up the ridge with his hands wrapped and a curse gone out of him and a trial in the morning, and I had a question that I had been carrying since the night my brother died, and I stood on that porch in the snow and could not lift my hand to the door.Because if I knocked, I would get an answer. And I was not sure I could hold the answer.I turned around and went back up the ridge.Maeve was in the kitchen with the kettle on and June was at the table with the ledger and Arthur Renn was asleep in the chair by the fire. I went past them into the back room and shut the door.Elias was sitting up in the bed with a blanket around his shoulders and his ha

Mrs. Pike came back in twenty minutes with a shoebox under her arm and put it on the table.There were two hundred tickets in it. They were small and yellow and they had the co-op stamp on them and the date and the weight and the price, and Mrs. Pike had kept every one of them in order and wrapped in string.Ada took the box and turned it out on the table."Read them," she said.I read them. I read every ticket from 1973 to 1979 and I put them in a row on the table by date and by price. And the pattern was there the way Mrs. Pike said it was there.The price of feed went up on the twelfth of June every year. It went up by the same amount every year. Two dollars a ton in 1973 and two dollars a ton in 1974 and two dollars a ton in 1975 and the same in 1976 and 1977 and 1978. And on every ticket the twelfth of June was a Wednesday or a Thursday or a Friday, and the price never went up on a Monday or a Tuesday."It is not the market," I said. "The market does not go up on the same day of

I stood in the circle and did not say anything.The ground was cold under my boots and the trees were dead around it and the stone with the Luna's mark was broken in two, and the whole of the pack was standing at the edge of the trees watching me and the seven Alphas were standing behind them."Not now," I said. "Not in the daylight. The circle is claimed at the new moon and the new moon is in two days."Ada put her stick on the ground."Then we have two days," she said. "And in two days the Council will have the stone in Boise and the register in a fire and a story that the circle was never here." She looked at the broken stone. "What do we do with two days?"I looked at Clara Renn."Mrs. Renn," I said. "You have been in this territory for seventy-nine years and you have been watching this field since you were a girl. The stone that Erik took is the stone the curse was tied to. Is there another one?"Clara Renn was quiet."There is a thing my mother told me," she said. "She told me t