All Chapters of MARKED BY THE ALPHA I WAS TOLD TO FEAR: Chapter 121 - Chapter 130

Wren’s POVI left at two, which was four hours before we’d agreed, and I left without waking him, and I’d argue about that later and lose on every count.I wrote it on the wash house door in the old hand because it was what I had to hand, and because apparently that’s how the women in my family say goodbye.Gone at two. Noon still stands. Don’t come early. Come exactly.Thirty miles over the top with the moon behind cloud.I stayed north of the beck to keep out of the wet, and I went hard for the first ten because I wanted the moss behind me before whatever was out there formed a second opinion. Six miles in,n I stopped worrying about it, because I found her.Not a smell first. A line.Four days old, going my way, one set of prints and not a pack. A woman on two feet. Old boots worn down on the outside edge, and a stride about two thirds of mine.I put my nose in a rut by a stone wall and got lye and wool and wet stone, and under that something faintly sweet that I’d have called rot i

Wren’s POV“You took your time,” Nell said.“How long have you been on that step?”“Since half five. I heard the lad drop his fork.”My legs weren’t interested in anything, so I stayed where I was with my back against a wall of scratched names.“Fifteen days.”“Fourteen and a bit.”“On foot. Over the moss. At your age.”“I’d had a very long rest,” she said.Then she laughed, and it went on slightly too long, and turned into something else, and she put the heel of her hand against her mouth until it stopped.“Don’t come and put your arms round me. I’ll not stand it.”“All right.”“Sit down before you fall.”I sat on the stone floor.“Your name’s Fenna.”“It was. It’s been Nell for forty-seven years, and I expect I’ll die Nell, and I find I don’t mind that. Nell’s got no price on her.”“He’s alive.”She didn’t move at all.“Osgar’s alive,” I said. “He’s been looking for you the whole time. He faked his death in the spring. He walked ninety miles to Ollan with me and read your entry out

Ronan’s POVI’d got the door off its hinges with my shoulder, and I came through it on two feet, because you cannot go down nine stone steps into a room you’ve never seen on four.The old woman was standing in the doorway with nothing in her hands.“Mind,” she said, perfectly steady, and stepped aside like a woman letting a man past in a corridor.Wren was at the bottom with a stone in her fist and blood on the back of her hand, and Rhys’s man was up on his feet between us.He had a knife out by then. Nobody had mentioned a knife.“Don’t,” Wren said. To me, not to him.“Wren.”“He’s the only man in this county who knows where the boat is.”That stopped me on the third step, and it’s the single hardest thing anybody has ever asked of me, and I’ve thought about it a great deal since.“Put it down,” I said to him.“No.”“There’s eleven wolves in that yard, and you’ve got a knife and a cellar.”“And you’ve got a woman you won’t risk,” he said.Which was true, and he was quick enough to ha

Ronan’s POVEleven miles out of Ranneck on the Ollan Road, she pulled up.“I have to say a thing out loud,d and you’re not going to like it.”“You’ve been quiet since the cellar. I assumed something was coming.”She got the day book out and turned it to the back and held it across, and I looked at a page of copied scratches that meant nothing to me whatsoever.“That’s the top of the wall. The boat marks.”“Right.”“That group there. It’s on the wall three times, and it’s in Ade’s handwriting on my tally sheets.”I stopped the horse.“Say the rest.”“I don’t know the rest. I’ve got one mark and a girl and about sixty miles to think about it, and I’ve done the thinkin', and I don’t like any of the answers.” She shut the book. “Option one, she’s been in that cellar at Ranneck. She’s fourteen, en and she came off the third boat up the river in the spring with the rest of them, and I never once asked her how she got on it.”“And she’s never said.”“She’s never said, and I never asked, beca

Ronan’s POV“The chair,” I said.“The chair,” Katrin said.“There’s no chair. The office hasn’t had a chair since seventy-nine. That’s the whole point of the last eleven weeks.”“There is now, and they’ve put a seventy-year-old man in it, and they’ve been very careful to have him seen in it by as many houses as they can get through the door.”We were in the back room of a chandler’s two streets up, with Nell sat by the window and Pell on the floor by the door and Teilo standing where he could see the street.“Explain it to me like I’m a farmer,” I said. “Because I am one.”“Thirty-one houses went home from that chamber on the eleventh knowing they’re on a list,” Katrin said. “Every one of them has spent a fortnight terrified that somebody’s going to read that list out again somewhere it counts. They don’t want the trade back. They want the trade over, tidily, with somebody else’s name on the end of it.”“And Osgar’s the somebody else.”“Osgar read the standing order out loud in front