Chapter 113

Abby

“Seven of them are home,” Cassandra said. “The last two went back to the river packs on Tuesday. Their mother drove up herself to fetch them.”

She turned a page in the folder on her knee. Around the council table, the elders listened without interrupting, which was rarer than it should have been.

Two weeks. That was how long it had been since the border and the truck going up into the mountains. Two weeks of meetings twice a week in this long, low room under the packhouse, and of letters on the desk upstairs, and of learning, slowly and badly, what all of it meant.

I sat at the head of the table in a dress the color of wet slate. It had come up from the seamstress in town four days ago, the first of three, with a note from Cassandra pinned to the collar: Yours this time. Wear it like you meant to. It fit me. Nothing had fit me like that before. The sleeves were long and narrow, the neck high enough to cover the place where Kade’s mark sat,