All Chapters of Carrying His Claim: Chapter 101 - Chapter 110

I found her at dawn, sitting on the floor of her room with her back against the bed and the cold grate of the hearth in front of her, as though she'd meant to light a fire and forgotten how.We had put her to bed hours earlier, Dessa and I, after Ottilie had pressed a warm cup of something into her hands and she had swallowed it without seeming to taste. She'd said little. She'd let me tuck the blankets around her shoulders like a child's, and when I'd whispered that I would be just down the hall, she had nodded without looking at me. Now the blankets lay in a heap on the mattress, and the bundle of Lucan's letters was spread across the floor around her in a ragged fan, each page smoothed flat, each one read and read again."You haven't slept," I said quietly, closing the door behind me."I couldn't." Her voice was hoarse, scraped raw. "I tried to write to him. Did you know that? About an hour after you left. I sat down with a pen and I wrote, *Tell me who you gave it to.*" A thin, bi

Selene asked me to walk with her to the burial ground at dusk, three days after Gideon had pinned his long paper to the armory wall.She said very little as we left the compound by the east gate. She wore a plain gray cloak and carried a canvas bag over one shoulder, and she walked with the slow, careful stride she'd never entirely lost since the raid, as though every step had to be agreed with in advance. Dessa had taken Wren, and I had not asked what the bag held. I had learned, by now, when to let Selene lead.The pack's burial ground lay beyond a stand of old oaks half a mile from the walls, a long, gentle slope facing east, where the rising sun touched the graves first. I had been there only once, at the funeral for those lost in the battle, standing in the cold with Wren bundled in my arms while Kieran spoke their names in a voice stripped of everything but grief. I hadn't been able to look at the faces then. I looked at them now, in memory, as we climbed the hill.Six new grave

Pell's horse came home alone on the fourth morning.I was in the courtyard with Wren, walking her slowly in the thin early light, when I heard Dessa's voice crack across the yard. I turned and saw a chestnut gelding stumbling through the main gate with its reins dragging, its flanks lathered, a dark smear across the pommel of the saddle that I knew, before I let myself know, was not mud.Nobody spoke for a moment. Then the whole yard moved at once.Gideon was there before the horse had stopped. He took the bridle in both hands and ran his palm down the animal's neck, murmuring low in its ear, and I watched his face change as he turned the saddle toward the light. The satchel was gone. The leather was torn where a strap had been slashed through."He didn't fall," Gideon said, very quietly. "He was cut away."By noon he had ridden out with twelve of his best, and the compound waited. I carried Wren to the nursery, where Dessa had already begun moving the cradle away from the window with

By noon the household had turned itself inside out.Gideon's riders were scouring the eastern road for any sign of Edda or the man with the bitten arm. Marguerite had locked herself in the quartermaster's office with every ledger from the past two years, pulling every name she'd ever signed, her face stiff with a shame no one could talk her out of. The captain of the guard had stripped the nursery wing to the walls, and men with lanterns were poking at every plank in the ceiling. Kieran had not stopped moving since dawn.I sat in the rocking chair by the window with Wren asleep against my shoulder, and I did not move at all.Ottilie came at midday to look at my cheek. She turned my face to the light with her cool, dry fingers and clucked her tongue at the swelling along the bone. "It will color beautifully," she said. "Nothing's broken. Keep a cold cloth on it." She lifted Wren from my arms and examined her from head to toe, murmuring, testing the soft spot, listening to the small hea

I walked through the whole of that first night without stopping.The drovers' track ran west from the compound's old garden wall, a pale thread through the pines, and I followed it with Wren bound against my chest and my grandmother's satchel across my back, setting each foot down in the frozen ruts as softly as I could. The cold was clean and bitter. Wren slept, warm as bread against my heart, and I told myself that was all that mattered. By dawn I had put eleven miles between myself and Ashwood. By the second night, I had put thirty miles between us.I did not know, then, what was happening behind me.What I know of it I pieced together afterward, in fragments, over many weeks. Gideon told me his part in a low, level voice, staring at the floor. Dessa told me hers in tears. Selene told me hers last, haltingly, with her hands folded in her lap, and it was a long time before I could listen to all of it without stopping. I have put it together here in the order it happened, because I o