All Chapters of Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy: Chapter 101 - Chapter 105

RellI gave them one day.One day to be back in the world, to eat Bram's porridge and sit in the yard and look at the sky and do all the things people do when they've been somewhere they weren't supposed to survive and have survived it anyway. One day because I'm not a monster and because they'd earned it and because Seraphine told me, with the flat certainty she uses when she means it, that if I walked in there with my list before they'd had a morning she would personally put me through the wall.I gave them the day.On the second morning I called the meeting."Barath first," I said, when we were all seated... the three of them, Wren on the end with the cord in her fist as always, Sela beside Bram, Seraphine across from me, Corin in the corner with his journal. "He gave us thirty days. We're on day twenty-three. He's been south of the river every evening, counting.""He said thirty days thinking we'd fail," Amara said. She looked different in the morning light. All white hair and ste

Zane On the fifth day back I went to find Davan myself, because Seraphine wasn't going to and somebody had to, and because I am constitutionally incapable of leaving a thing that needs doing undone when I know about it. Seraphine had mentioned him once, quietly, to Bram, thinking I wasn't in the room. I was in the room. I'm always in the room. Being the one people underestimate has its uses. The waystation was a half-day north, on the road that used to be Corvus's supply line and was now just a road again, and I rode it on a horse that Bram had declared fit for short trips and a side that Bram had declared fit for moderate activity, which I was interpreting generously. Davan was exactly where Barath said... running the waystation the way someone runs a thing they've decided is their job whether or not anyone's officially told them it's their job. He was mid-forties, compact, with the look of a man who'd spent twenty years in someone else's service and had recently had to figure out w

BramSela asked me to marry her on a Tuesday, which I only know because she'd been keeping a tally on the wall and she told me afterward it was a Tuesday, like the day mattered, like she'd been waiting for the right day and Tuesday had finally come around looking acceptable.She did it the way she does everything... sideways, fast, not giving me time to prepare a response that was anything other than honest.We were in the long shed. I was checking the cold-bitten leg she never lets me check properly, the one she'd been walking on for months without complaint because complaining about the leg was, in her words, admitting the leg had won. She was sitting on the table eating an apple that was definitely mine, talking about the northern territory and what it would need come spring, and then in the middle of a sentence about drainage she said, "We should get married," and took another bite of the apple.I stopped what I was doing."You're serious," I said."I'm always serious. I'm also of