All Chapters of Carrying His Claim: Chapter 111 - Chapter 120

Selene told me this part herself, much later, sitting across from me with a cup of tea going cold between her hands. She did not dress any of it up. She had spent too long learning what that costs.I have set it down in her words as best I can, because nothing I could have invented would be as honest."I didn't sleep for six days," she said. "Not properly. I'd lie down, and the minute I closed my eyes I'd see the pages nailed to that door, and I'd count them. Garrick. Tam. Alder. Finn. Corin. Isolde. And then Pell. And then your name, over and over, because by then I knew you were gone and I knew why."The hall had emptied by noon on the morning of the pages, she said. Kieran had spoken, and the worst of the shouting had died, but nothing had been settled. People drifted away in clusters, avoiding her eyes. Ilse had walked her back to her room and stood at the door like a sentry. Marguerite had come at dusk and sat on the edge of the bed without speaking, her hands knotted together in

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,

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

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

Hobb's farmhouse stood at the bottom of a hidden valley, a long low building of gray fieldstone with a turf roof and a barn leaning against its north wall like a tired friend. I had never seen it before the day my grandmother's cottage burned. I have never forgotten a single corner of it since.He met us at his gate that afternoon without a word of question. He took one look at Marguerite, gray-faced and swaying in the saddle, at the wounded rider slumped against his friend's back, at the blackened sky behind us and the smear of ash on my cheek, and he opened the gate wider. By dusk the injured rider, whose name was Edrin, was lying on a pallet in the kitchen with a clean bandage around his thigh, and Marguerite was drinking something scalding and vile out of a tin cup, and I was sitting on the floor beside the hearth with Wren asleep in my lap and no idea at all what to do next."She said to run," I said, to nobody. "She said, ' Don't go to Ashwood.""She was right." Marguerite wiped