All Chapters of MARKED BY THE ALPHA I WAS TOLD TO FEAR: Chapter 131 - Chapter 140

Wren’s POVThe child on my back weighed nothing until I saw the boat, and then she weighed about four hundred pounds.“Sabe.”“I see it.”“You said tomorrow afternoon.”“He said tomorrow afternoon.” She came up the rise beside me with her coat over one arm. “Neap’s not an hour; it’s a stretch of days. I knew that, and I didn’t say it, so that’s mine.”“It’s mine. I’m the one who took a man’s word in a cellar.”“Then we’ll fight about it at the bridge.”Forty-one women strung out down the kiln road behind us, three on the cart horse, two being carried, and a girl of nine asleep on my shoulders with her fists in my collar.“How long till she’s alongside?” I said.“Half an hour to the jetty. They’re rowing her in, so somebody’s in a hurry.”“Nine men in the village.”“Nine and a crew.”“Then we keep walking.”“Wren.” Sabe put her hand out, not on me, just up. “Eleven miles with these people is nine hours. They’ll be up that road behind us inside two, and there’s no cover between here and

Wren’s POV“Give me what?” I said.“He didn’t say give. He said, ' Hand it to her and wait.” The master bent down, slowly, with his hands in sight, and took something out of the top of his boot. “Which I’ve done, and I’m waiting.”“Put it on the stone.”He put it on the stone by the lamp and stepped back three paces without being asked, and I want that noted, because it’s the only piece of good manners anybody showed me between Ranneck and the bridge.It was a strip of sailcloth, folded twice, about the size of my hand.I picked it up and took it to the lamp and unfolded it, and it was writing, in ink, on cloth, because paper doesn’t survive a pocket at sea.Two lines in the small upright hand. Perfect, patient, even.Not Ade’s. The forgery of Ade’s, which I’d learned to tell apart in a yard at Thornhollow by the way the r sat down.“My mother wrote this,” I said.“I wouldn’t know.”“Four days ago. In a harbour that isn’t in this country.”“That’s where I had it.”“Then my mother is n

Wren’s POVWe came into Ollan on the morning of the thirty-first with forty-one women, eleven wolves, an old woman on a cart horse, a stable lad, a fourteen-year-old holder, three books and a manifest, and we did not come in by the fish market.“Sheep road,” Katrin said. “Round the back of the lime works and in past the chapel. It’s four miles longer, and nobody’s ever watched it in my lifetime.”“Because?”“Because it smells.”It did smell. We went that way.You want to know what the hardest part of the whole thing was, and it wasn’t the chamber. It was finding somewhere in Ollan for forty-one women to sleep on the night of the thirty-first without a single person noticing.Katrin did it in two hours with a hat on.“Chandler’s cellar, nine. Sailmaker’s loft, eleven. Woman I’ll not name in the fish market, fourteen. And seven in the chapel, because the curate’s eighty and he thinks it’s a temperance meeting.”“Is it?”“It’s forty-one women off a boat trade and a man who’s been asleep

Wren’s POVNobody in that room breathed for about four seconds, and I have never needed four seconds so badly in my life.“Sit her down,” the chairman said.“Try,” Nell said.“Madam, you have no standing in this chamber.”“I’ve forty-seven years in a cellar under a corn store eleven miles from where you’re standing, and I’ve an entry in that book closed in a child’s handwriting on the eighth of this month, and if you want to know what standing is, come down this aisle and take it off me.”Ade stood up on the third bench.She did it slowly, and she did it with her hands at her sides, and she was the smallest person in the room by a foot.“Chair,” she said. “Ninth line of the standing order.”“Sit down.”“I’m the holder of the register, and I’ve been the holder since I was nine, and I’ll be heard on the ninth line, or you’ll have no reading at all.” Her voice didn’t wobble. I have thought about that voice for forty years. “The ninth line says the register may be held only by a person wh

Wren’s POVHe walked up that aisle like a man coming into work.Nobody stopped him. Eleven wolves on the street, two of Sabe’s on the side door, forty-one women in the benches, and Dunn came through the middle of all of it with his coat dripping on the flags because not one person in that room could think of a single thing he had ever done that you could put a hand on him for.He stopped four feet from me and held out the pencil.“What’s that for?” I said.“You’ll want it.”“I want an answer first.”“You’ll get eleven.” He said it without any weight at all, the flattest voice I’ve ever heard on a man. “Ask.”“Nineteen years you’ve taken pages off a woman who can’t read them.”“Yes.”“You never gave her your name.”“No.”“You never signed.”“No.”“Why not?”“Because a carrier who signs is a carrier who’s done it,” Dunn said, “and a carrier who’s never signed is weather. You can’t take weather to a chamber. I’ve carried for this county since I was twenty-two and I’ve put my hand to noth