All Chapters of Married to the Alpha Who Killed My Father: Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

They buried Osric at dusk, in the Voss memorial garden, a short walk from the grave he had never dared visit.Aria chose the place herself. Nobody argued with her, not even the Council elders Kade had sent for. She stood at the edge of the fresh earth with her hands folded and said only, "He was Elias Voss's brother's son. He goes in the Voss ground." Then she took a handful of soil from beside her father's stone and let it fall.Elara stood beside her and kept the little gold ring closed in her fist the whole time. She did not remember washing his blood from her hands. Someone had put a cloak around her, and she had not noticed that either.The rest of the day had gone the way such days go. Wren Sorrel lay in the healer's wing with her braid hacked short and a bowl of broth she was complaining about, which Ronan took as the best news he'd had in a month. Harwick sat in a cell, still reciting names. Fenna was under guard in the guest wing with her broken arm set in splints, and she ha

They came in through the eastern gate on foot, in a ragged line, and the great hall went so quiet that Elara could hear the road dust still ticking off their boots.The steward had not exaggerated. They were old, most of them, weathered the way people get who work land that fights back, in patched coats the color of turned earth. They carried no weapons. The white cloth they had walked under had been stitched to a hay-rake handle, and the woman at the head of the line held it in both fists as though it were the only thing keeping her upright. Behind her came ten more. Last of all came a boy of twelve or so, hugging a canvas bundle to his chest, his eyes wide at the hammerbeams and the banners and the sheer number of strangers looking at him.Elara had expected to be afraid. She was surprised to find she mostly felt tired, and under the tiredness something steadier.She came down from the dais and stopped on the floor of the hall, level with them. She did not take the high chair. Her m

Elara did not sleep that night.She sat at the narrow window of the Cairnwatch watch-house with a blanket around her shoulders and watched the snow fill the granary yard. Torches burned along the loading ramps. Men and women moved in a slow line toward the open doors, and they came out carrying grain sacks stamped with a crescent.Her mother's crescent. Her own, now, if the proclamation was to be believed."You haven't touched your tea," Tamsin Reeve said from the doorway."I keep counting them," Elara said. "Forty-one households since midnight. Every one of them stopped at the door and said thank you to the sky, as if I were standing up there."Tamsin came in and lowered herself onto the bench with the care of a woman whose knees had opinions. She was past seventy, with a face like creased leather and eyes that had missed nothing in forty years of keeping the Saltmarch accounts."Say it," Elara said. "What you were holding back downstairs."

Elara's letter reached the capital at midnight, carried by a rider whose horse had nearly foundered in the snow.Aria read it standing in the corridor outside the archive wing, one hand braced against the wall. Then she read it again, slower, and the second time the words Rurik witnessed it seemed to rise off the page and settle in her chest like a stone."Kade," she said.He was already beside her. He'd heard the rider come in, and he took the letter from her hand and read it in the lamplight. Two lines in, his jaw tightened."Nine years ago," he said."I remember signing it." Aria's voice was very low. "I remember the room. The old Moot hall, the cold, a ledger clerk waiting with the seal. It was seed-credit, Kade. Four hundred measures for the eastern farms after the double failure. I would have signed a hundred of them.""And Rurik was there.""He was always there."They found him where they'd left him that afterno

Harrowfen was a poor holding, and it looked it.Aria saw it from the ridge on the third morning of the ride: a scatter of low stone houses, a frozen millpond, a single chimney sending up smoke in the hard blue light. Beyond it the eastern marshes lay white and flat to the horizon, and somewhere beyond those, two days' ride away, a district was learning to say her daughter's name over a sack of grain."There," Kade said beside her. He had insisted on coming. She had not argued, though she had told him he was needed at the capital with Rurik, and he had said, simply, that the capital had survived without him for a night before. His horse shifted and blew steam. "Which house?""The one with the woodpile," Garrick said. "Pell's description of the road was exact."Aria nodded. Her hands, inside her gloves, had not stopped being cold since Dunmere.They rode down without a banner. Kade had insisted on that too. If Corin Vale was running, a Thorne standard on the ridge would have him in the