Chapter 38 — The Same Stones
They came for her at dawn on the north road, and she was carrying the token in her fist.
That was the whole case, in the end. Not the perfume. Not the vial. Not five years of forged ink. Orin's men had been watching the north road for eleven weeks the way a cat watches a hole, and Vanessa Pierce walked up it at first light with a Crimson Fang muster-token in her hand and a bag over her shoulder, and there was nothing anyone could say about it afterward.
"She didn't run," the sergeant reported. "She saw us and stopped and put her hands out."
"Did she say anything?"
"One thing, Majesty. She said, finally."
The Reckoning rite convened at moonrise on the gathering ground, and every wolf in Ironridge came, because they all knew what ground it was.
The dais. T
