The King's Second Heart のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 11 - チャプター 13

Elowen did not know what was happening to her. She would not know for many days yet. She felt only that something inside her — something that had been with her for four years, riding her shoulders, pressing on her ribs, drinking her warmth, eating her sleep — let go all at once and left. It went out of her like a long held breath. It went out of her so fast and so completely that for one terrible second she thought she was going to fall through the floor of the world.She did not know that she had been carrying four years of his sin for him.She did not know that the small dark cord of the marriage bond had been a leash, and that the leash had been used by his own sickness to bleed off into her body every cruel and faithless thing he had done in the four years he had been her husband, so that he could keep his strength and his Alpha-shine and his easy laugh while she got the bruises and the fevers and the nightmares.She did not know that the binding word he had just spoken had cut th

His witches had begun to feel the dark thing in the kingdom's western packs two years ago. The two women in the blue robes riding behind the king right now had been quietly walking the pattern of the dark thing for those two years, the way you walk the pattern of a snake-track in long grass, and six months ago they had told their king that the pattern came back, every time, to the Alpha of Ironbough, and the king had asked them very calmly whether they were sure, and they had said sure enough that the king might want to ride out himself, and the king had said fine then, and he had begun to make the small careful preparations for a personal ride into the western packs that nobody but the king and his Beta and his witches had been told about.The king had ridden out of the capital five days ago with his small careful escort and no banner. He had ridden the western road. He had timed his arrival for the morning of the autumn festival because the morning of the autumn festival was the one