All Chapters of MARKED BY THE ALPHA I WAS TOLD TO FEAR: Chapter 101 - Chapter 110

Ronan’s POVHe was sitting on the trough. Same as Tuesday, Cadoc said later. Coat buttoned, hands on his knees, ink to the second knuckle.Eight men in the yard and every one of them waiting on me.“Osgar.”“Ronan.” He didn’t get up. “You’ve a lot of dogs for a man with no sheep.”“Stand up.”“My hip’s bad.”“Stand up.”He stood up. Slowly, and with a hand on the trough, and I couldn’t tell you now whether the hip’s real.“You wrote as me,” I said.“I did.”“That’s it? You did?”“You’ve the letter, I’ve the hand, eight men are looking at us.” He brushed his coat down. “I’d rather spend the time on the useful part.”“Cadoc,” I said. “Take four and walk the north fence.”“Ronan.”“He’s seventy, and I’ve got a wolf. Go.”They went. Not happily.“You’re careful,” Osgar said. “You’ve gotten more careful since Ollan.”“What did you want out of the letter?”“For you to read it.”“And?”“For her to read it after you.” He nodded at the house. “She smelled the ink, didn’t she. Through a shut bo

Ronan’s POVShe didn’t say anything for a long time. Then she shut the book, handed it to Katrin, and walked out of the yard.“Wren.”“Don’t follow me.”“I’m following you.”“Ronan, I mean it.”“I know,” I said, and followed her.She went up past the long field and over the stile and into the dip, and she didn’t stop there; she kept going up onto the shoulder where the ground’s bare, and you can see the whole of the Ranneck road lying grey in the frost.Then she stopped and stood with her back to me.“She’s alive,” she said.“Might be.”“Don’t do that.”“Somebody’s writing in her hand. That’s all we know tonight. Osgar’s hand walked into my ledger last week, and he’s standing in my yard, so let’s not.”“You think somebody’s copying her.”“I think it’s two in the morning and everybody in this county can forge everybody else.”She laughed. It wasn’t a good laugh,h but it was one.“Chapter and verse of my whole life,” she said. “Nobody’s real, everything’s a copy, and the only thing that

Wren’s POVSix men: Ronan, me, Katrin walking, and Osgar up on the cart horse, looking like a sack somebody had tied on with string.Cadoc and two stayed at the house. I made Ronan say the numbers out loud at the gate so nobody could invent a different count later. Six out, three home, and that’s the whole pack now, which is what two men walking down a drove road on the sixth costs you.We did the first twelve miles on two feet because Katrin wouldn’t get on anything.“You’ll hold us up,” Teilo said.That was the tall fair one. I’d finally got his name out of Cadoc at the gate, the way you get a splinter out, and I’d been saying it in my head for an hour.“Then go on ahead,” Katrin said.“That’s the idea.”“Then I’ve solved your problem, and you can stop bringing it to me.”He looked at Ronan. Ronan didn’t look back at him, which was an answer.At dusk we came off the road at the Ollan turn and dropped into the bracken on the low side, and Ronan stopped and put his hand flat on the wa

Wren’s POVCandle stub, six men, a horse blanket, and four hundred and six pages of women.“Page nine,” Teilo said.“I’m doing it in order.”“Page nine.”“In order,” I said, “because if I skip to your sister I’ll be doing everyone’s in the wrong order all night and somebody’s will get lost, and the whole reason this book has worked for eighty-six years is that nobody reads it in order.”He shut up.I read from entry one.Fenna, of Ollan, nineteenth of March, seventy-nine. Two coach fares and a bond of eleven.Osgar didn’t make a sound. He’d got himself into the corner where the candle didn’t reach, which I let him have.Entry two, Alva of Ranneck, one coach fare, no bond.Then thirty-nine more, and I read every one, name and sum and date, and the barn got very quiet in a way that had weight to it.On page nine I said, “Sabe, of the low country, eleven years old,” and Teilo put his head back against the wall and looked at the roof and stayed like that.“There’s a sum,” I said.“Say it.

Wren’s POVYou can’t turn in Ollan. There’s a bylaw about it, which is funny, because there’s no bylaw about the other thing.So we came down Carrow Street on two feet in bad coats, five men and me, and Osgar on a horse that had done ninety miles and hated all of us.“Rose soap,” I said again.“You said.”“Cheap. Three cakes a penny. Off the market.”“Wren, it’s a market town. Half the women in Ollan wash in that.”“It was in the cart.”Ronan stopped walking.“On the eighth,” I said. “Four miles out on the Ranneck road with the lamps off. I smelled it before I smelled the horses, and we all decided it was Katrin, because Katrin was in the box, and Katrin was in the box so nobody ever went back and checked.”“And now?”“Now it’s coming out of a building at the end of this street,” I said, “and Katrin’s forty miles behind us on foot.”The old chamber sits at the bottom of Carrow Street behind railings, with eleven steps and a door that’s been painted so many times it doesn’t shut proper