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Chapter 108
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Carrying His Claim Chapter 117
I have gone over the next few minutes so many times since that I could recite every word. I could not do anything about them then. I could only watch.The fighting in the clearing had stopped. Two of Orsik's men stood in the churned snow with drawn swords, and at their feet, a rider in Ashwood gray lay curled on his side, one hand clutching his thigh. Marguerite knelt beside him, a fresh gash across her shoulder staining her cloak dark, a blade at her throat. The other rider had been disarmed and forced to his knees. It had taken, perhaps, a dozen heartbeats.In the middle of it all, Selene stood with her hands open and her chin lifted, perfectly still."Lady Thorne." Orsik stepped out from behind the cottage porch, pulling off his gloves one finger at a time, as though he'd merely stepped out for a walk. "This is unexpected. I'd understood you were riding to your father's house. With banners, I believe.""You understood correctly." Her voice carried clearly across the snow. "I wanted
Carrying His Claim Chapter 116
He did not break down the door.That's what I remember most clearly afterward. I had braced for it all through the long cold dawn, crouched by the shuttered window with my grandmother's knife in one fist and the hatchet at my feet, listening for the splintering crash of a boot. Instead, a quarter hour after I first saw him at the edge of the trees, I heard the soft, unhurried crunch of footsteps across the snow, and then, so politely that I almost laughed, a knock.Three raps. Even, patient, entirely courteous."Ms. Vance," said a voice through the oak. It was pale and mild, a voice that might have belonged to a physician or a schoolmaster. "I do apologize for the hour. I wonder whether we might speak."I did not answer. My heart was slamming so hard I thought the whole cottage must hear it."I'm told you're a sensible woman." The voice continued, without any hurry at all. "I'm sure you've worked out by now who I am, and that you've no wish to make this unpleasant. Neither have I. I'm
Carrying His Claim Chapter 115
By the third week, I had begun to believe I was safe.It was a dangerous belief, and I knew it, even as I let it settle over me like a warm blanket. The cottage had become, by then, almost a home. I had learned the rhythm of its drafts and the moods of its chimney. I knew which floorboards creaked and which stair tread had gone soft. Wren had begun to smile, an astonished, lopsided thing that arrived without warning whenever I leaned over her cradle, and every morning I woke to the sight of her small face turned toward the window and thought, *we've done it.*I had not heard hoofbeats on the path in sixteen days. I had counted.Hobb came on the seventeenth, in the late afternoon, with snow melting on his hat and his weathered face set in lines I had not seen before."Lass," he said, stopping at the gate. He did not come in. "I've done a daft thing."My hands went cold. I set down the washing basin. "What have you done?""Went down to Millbrook market, Tuesday. Bought a bolt of linen a
Carrying His Claim Chapter 114
She rode into the Ashwood courtyard at dusk on the sixth day, so stiff from the saddle that Marguerite had to help her down, and she asked to see Kieran before she asked for water.Gideon told me afterward that she walked into the study like a woman carrying something heavy across a river. She did not sit. She stood in front of the desk with her cloak still frosted at the hem, and she told them everything, from the Hollow Ash to the black firs to the pale, mild voice saying a matter of tidiness. She told them about Orsik, and the forged letter, and the threat against Aldric's garrison. She told them about the old man at the crossroads who had asked, in a child's voice, who Pell was.When she finished, nobody spoke for a long moment."I'll kill him," Kieran said at last. He said it quietly, and I think that was the frightening part. "Lucan. I'll find him and I'll kill him.""You'll want to," Selene said. "I did, for about an hour. But he is the only reason we know what Orsik plans next
Carrying His Claim Chapter 113
What happened at the crossroads that night, I know only in pieces.One of Gideon's riders watched the first part from a ridge half a mile off, and described it afterward in a flat, careful voice. Selene told me the rest, repeating what Lucan had told her at dawn, and she stopped twice while telling it to steady her breathing. I have put the pieces together the way I think they fit. I have tried not to make Lucan better than he was, or worse.He rode north for an hour before he stopped.The old drovers' track ran pale beneath the moon, and at its meeting with the northern road stood a shattered milestone and a stand of black firs. It was an unremarkable place. In two years of twice-yearly meetings, Lucan had never once thought of it as sinister. He had thought of it as the place where a good thing was quietly being done.He dismounted, and tied his horse, and waited with his hands folded in his cloak. He told Selene later that he had never felt so old.The man came at midnight on foot,
Carrying His Claim Chapter 112
The Hollow Ash looked, Selene told me, exactly like a place designed to be forgotten.It squatted at the crossroads under a bare, split oak, a long low building of weathered gray timber with a sagging roof and shutters that had not been painted in a generation. Smoke curled thinly from one chimney. A single lantern hung beside the door. She and Marguerite had reached it at dusk after two days in the saddle, and from the edge of the trees she studied it for a long time, her pulse beating in her throat.She had sent word ahead by an ordinary rider, a single line in her own hand. *I'm ready to talk. Meet me at the Hollow Ash. Come alone, as always. S.* It was the kind of note she would have written to him in any other season of her life. She had not signed any promise in it. She had not lied. She had only left him to read what he wanted."You're certain," Marguerite murmured beside her."No." Selene dismounted. "But I'm going in anyway."Marguerite slipped into the loft above the common
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