All Chapters of MARKED BY THE ALPHA I WAS TOLD TO FEAR: Chapter 161 - Chapter 170

Ronan’s POVIt took nine minutes, and nobody in that chamber sat down.Thirty-five houses and forty-one released women and eleven wolves and a lawyer, and a girl of fourteen writing one woman’s name into a book that has no standing, and when she finished she blew on it and turned it round so the man could see it, and he looked at it for a long time, and then he put his hand flat on the page beside the ink without touching it.“That’s her,” he said.“Read it back,” Enid said. “Make him read it back. She’ll want it word for word when you get home,e and if you’ve not read it back you’ll get it wrong.”He read it back. He had to stop twice.Then Sennen said, from the middle of the floor where he had been standing the whole time with his hands behind his back, “Sixty-one.”Everybody had forgotten him. I’d not forgotten him, because I had been between him and Wren for nine minutes, but the room had.“Say it,” Wren said.“Sixty-one names in that book and mine on the day the last one lands. T

Ronan’s POVWe were married in my own yard on the twenty-second, at eleven in the morning, with a hundred and forty people in it and the harness store door propped open because there was nowhere else to put the food.I’ll not make much of the day. It belongs to us, and I’ve never talked about it much.What I’ll put down is who was there.Cadoc, in a coat that had been his father’s, with the damp page from under the third board in his breast pocket because he had refused to let go of it for a fortnight and nobody had the heart to make him.Talia, who did the whole of the food with the wash house women and who had a pencil in her apron all day out of habit and did not know she’d put it there.Katrin, who counted everybody in at the gate with her hat off, because she said she’d counted thirty-five houses into a chamber three weeks before and she’d rather count something she liked.Osgar Penhale, who had come sixty miles with Teilo on the cart and who stood at the back and cried without a

Ronan’s POV“Sit down,” Wren said.“I’d rather stand, mistress.”“Sit down on your own bench in your own yard, because I’ve been in that cellar an hour, and I’m going to ask you eleven questions, and the first nine are easy.”Thornhollow’s man sat down.Sixty years old, tidy coat, and he had put thirty years of fair copies out on a table in his own yard before we were off the horses, which I have thought about a great deal since.“Name,” Wren said.“Jowan Rescorla.”“How long have you held this house?”“Nine years. I came in when my uncle died.”“And him?”“Thirty-one years before that.”“Who lime-washed that cellar?”“I did. Myself. Eleven days ago, with a brush and a bucket, and I did the lower three feet, and I stopped, and I have not slept properly since.”Enid sat down at the table and started untying the bundles of four without asking. Nobody stopped her.“Say why,” Wren said.“Because there was a girl in Ollan on the first of this monthwho stood up in front of thirty-five hous

Ronan POVI went for her myself because Wren couldn’t, and Enid can’t ride nine miles, and because somebody had to knock on that door who could stand in the lane afterwards if she shut it.Third house down from the chapel at Nance, one room and a lean-to. She had a hen in the lean-to and split wood stacked higher than the door, and I have been told since that this is what a woman does with her first year out, and I believe it, because I have never in my life seen wood stacked like that by anyone who wasn’t afraid of running out of something.She opened before I knocked.“You’re the Ravencross man,” she said.“Ronan.”“I know what you are. There are three hens gone quiet.” She looked past me at the lane. “You’ve come from Thornhollow.”“How do you know that?”“Because you’ve got lime on your boot,” Rhoswen of Thornhollow said, “and there’s only one wall in this county that gets washed.”I have thought about that a great deal since as well.She would not have me in. We stood in the door

Ronan POVThe long room over the corn store at Ollan holds sixty if nobody sits, and on the ninth there were a hundred and forty in it and men on the stairs, and that is because word had gone out that Thornhollow was going to stand up.Thirty-five houses had a seat. Thirty-one of them kept a receiving house with nine steps under it. Twenty-nine of those had a man in that room who had been lying awake since the first of last month.Hedrek called it at eleven and gave the floor straight to Jowan Rescorla, and Jowan stood up in his tidy coat with his hat in his hand and did the thing he had promised in his own yard.“Jowan Rescorla of Thornhollow. Nine years in the house, my uncle thirty-one before me.” He did not look at his notes, and he did not have any. “Eleven days after the first of last month I took a brush and a bucket of lime-wash down nine steps under my own corn store,e and I washed the lower three feet of a stone wall that has a hundred and forty-one women cut into it, and I