Chapter 32 · Blood on Ancestral Stone

The bell hits me in the teeth.

Three slow strokes. A pause. Three more. Execution bell. I know it the way you know your own name when someone says it wrong.

I'm already running.

My shoulder is on fire where Torren's blade opened me up, and every step up the switchback sends the heat down to my fingertips. I've got blood in my mouth. I bit my cheek raw somewhere near the chasm and didn't notice. I spit red into the snow and keep climbing.

Stupid, I tell myself. South is right there. Forty minutes and I'm over the line and nobody ever looks at me again.

Then I see that decree. Black ink. Brown blood. *Half the heart.*

He cut himself open to keep me off the gallows, and I stood on that ridge for two years hating him for it.

"You son of a bitch," I say out loud. "You could've *told* me."

The wind eats it.

The postern behind the Pack Hall of Claws is frozen shut. I know this door. I used to sneak out through it at twenty, with my boots in my hand, to meet a boy who laughed too loud.