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Chapter 94

last update Date de publication: 2026-11-07 13:42:18

Emeric POV

She lit the porch lamp every evening at the same hour, a little after the kitchen bell, and had done so since the afternoon Damian rode out from the yard in his father's coat. Damian had been home twelve days, sleeping upstairs with a hole in his chest and Marta's willow bark in his tea, and the lamp still got trimmed and filled and lit, and I stopped pretending I walked past it by accident.

Tonight she'd been at it a quarter of an hour. I stood at the foot of the steps and watched h
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  • A Crown Buried In Silence    Chapter 94

    Emeric POVShe lit the porch lamp every evening at the same hour, a little after the kitchen bell, and had done so since the afternoon Damian rode out from the yard in his father's coat. Damian had been home twelve days, sleeping upstairs with a hole in his chest and Marta's willow bark in his tea, and the lamp still got trimmed and filled and lit, and I stopped pretending I walked past it by accident.Tonight she'd been at it a quarter of an hour. I stood at the foot of the steps and watched her take the chimney off a lamp that was already burning steadily, turn the wick down a small notch, and turn it up again to exactly the same height."It's lit," I said."I know it's lit.""Then that's the third time you've trimmed it.""Fourth." She set the chimney back with a small click and didn't turn round. "I'm stalling, if you want to know. Sit down, Emeric. You make the steps look nervous."I sat on the second step, which put my head about level with her elbow, and for a while we listened

  • A Crown Buried In Silence     Chapter 93

    Wren POVEmeric told it standing in the shed doorway with his good shoulder against the frame, the way he told me everything since the pump, in order and without softening. I kept grinding. Willow bark for Damian's tea, a spoonful to the cup, and the pestle went round while he gave me Merrick's figures and Corwin's three frightened Alphas and the green wash climbing the map like damp up a wall."He didn't refuse it," Emeric said at the end. "I watched it. He asked who Pryce was, and said Malvern would have his answer on the night of the confirmation, in front of the packs, and that nobody was to speak to you of figures before he did.""And what did Duskmoor put on the table?" I asked.He looked at his sling. "Two hundred swords and my word. Merrick said the Crown can only weigh what's laid on the table, and that I hold no pledge from you and no claim on paper." The corner of his mouth moved. "Then I looked at the map. Duskmoor's about the size of my thumbnail."I put the pestle down.

  • A Crown Buried In Silence    Chapter 92

    Emeric POVThe house woke up arguing. I heard it before I was dressed, a low, many-voiced murmur coming up through the guest corridor floor like water behind a wall, and by the time I reached the yard it had taken a shape. Margery stood in the kitchen doorway with a cleaver in one fist and a plucked goose in the other, holding court. Two grooms leaned on the pump with their caps pushed back, Dorrie sat on an upturned bucket by the dairy with her apron over her face, and three of Dunmore's retainers, let out of the barn that morning on Alaric's word, stood a little apart from everyone and studied their boots."Nine thousand," one of the grooms was saying. "That's what my brother-in-law hears from the border post. Nine thousand under the heron, and half of ours lying in beds.""They'll not march on a wedding," said the other."They'll march on a refusal." The first spat into the dust. "One girl, against all of us and the children and the winter comi

  • A Crown Buried In Silence    Chapter 91

    Wren POVThe Treaty of the Marches says an envoy of a house at peace with the Crown is a guest under any roof he enters, and may not be searched, disarmed, or refused salt, so by dusk the Malvern delegation had been given the whole east guest wing and Margery had been told to feed them. She took it the way she took most royal instructions, as a personal insult to be answered with excellent cooking. Their own wine came in on a mule, six small casks branded with a heron, and she had two of them opened in the yard in front of witnesses and tasted each herself, pronouncing it vinegar, before she let them past the kitchen door.The delegation itself kept the manners of a house at its best. Ten men in grey-green hung heron banners from the guest-wing windows, bowed to the servants, and tipped the stable boys a silver apiece for walking their horses. By noon Dorrie had carried up the tea and come down pink to the ears, reporting that the youngest of them had asked after h

  • A Crown Buried In Silence    Chapter 90

    Alaric POVThe Lord Justice arrived at dusk the day before with sixty of the guard and a clerk's wagon, and by morning he had turned the Voss great hall into a court without once raising his voice. He had the pack banners taken down and the Crown's hung in their place, and a plain wooden chair put at the head of the tables for himself. Hallam Merrick was seventy, lean and grey as a winter hedge, and he paused before every noun as if choosing it from a drawer. I had known him since I was ten, and I had never seen him hurry."Your Majesty will sit at my right," he said, "as a witness, not as the Crown. A King who judges a matter touching his own blood is a King the next generation must forgive."I sat.The hall was full, the household crowded into the gallery and the pack's elders along the wall. Rosalind sat in black in the front row with a hand flat on her breastbone, and beside her Damian had been carried in a chair and wrapped to the chin like something precious going to market. Wre

  • A Crown Buried In Silence    Chapter 89

    Damian POVWren told me in the order it happened, which was the only way she told anything, and she was gone from the room before I found a single word to put against it. She sat on the edge of the bed with her hands in her lap and her eyes on the quilt, and she said the dead man's name, once at the start and once at the end, as if she wanted to be sure I kept it. When she stood, she turned the lamp wick down a quarter inch, the way she used to for me when I was ill as a boy, and she drew the door behind her without a sound.The wound beat slowly and steadily under the bandage, like someone knocking in the next room, and I found I couldn't lie flat with it. I tried the pillows, then the left side, then the right, and in the end I sat up against the headboard with my knees drawn up under the blanket and counted the ceiling beams. There were eleven. I counted them in a fever at nine years old, and I counted them now, and the number did no more good than it had then.

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