All Chapters of MARKED BY THE ALPHA I WAS TOLD TO FEAR: Chapter 171 - Chapter 178

Wren POVTrethewey is nine miles from Thornhollow by the road, and six across the fields, and the carter’s name was Peder, and he drove us over on the eleventh and would not take anything for it.“I’ve not told her,” he said, on the way. “I’ve had two days to, and I’ve not. I got in that night, and she was in the chair, and I stood in the door, and I couldn’t get it out, and she said, you’ve been at Ollan, and I said I had, and she said, there’s tea in the pot.” He looked at the road. “Seventy-two years and I’ve never lied to my mother, and I’ve been doing it two days,s and I’m no good at it.”“Then don’t. I’ll say it.”“That’s why you’re in the cart, mistress.”We took Enid because Enid should have been there, and Rhoswen because Rhoswen would not be left, and Ronan drove behind on his own because he had worked out on his own that four in a small room is three too many and waited in the lane for two hours in the rain, which I did not know until after.Bryluen was in the chair by the

Wren POVKellow’s paper came to Ravencross on the second of June, and it was the worst thing I have read in a year, and I have read manifests.It was one sheet. It did not accuse anybody. It did not use the word cellar, or margin, or woman, and it did not mention the wall at Thornhollow that his own fifty coins had helped uncover, which is what makes him dangerous and what makes him honest, and those have turned out to be the same thing in his case.It said: that the county register of Ravencross, kept lawfully in the county office for eighty-six years, is held presently by a private person in a private house, and that the undersigned wish it returned to the office and kept as it has always been kept.Fourteen names under it.I read them at the kitchen table with Ade opposite me, and I got to the fourth and stopped, and Ade said, “I know. I did the same.”Hocken of Pellynt.The man who stood up in the long room on the ninth of May, third on his feet after Nance and Carrow Bridge, and

Wren POVI went to Nance on the nineteenth of August, and I walked the nine miles because I had decided somewhere around the fourth mile that arriving on a horse would make it a deputation and arriving on my feet would make it a visit, and I have since been told by Enid that this is the sort of thing I decide instead of eating.Third house down from the chapel. One room and a lean-to, a hen in the lean-to, and split wood stacked higher than the door.She opened before I knocked.“You’ve walked it,” she said.“I have.”“Then it’s bad.” Rhoswen looked past me down the empty lane. “Come in or don’t, but shut it either way.”Inside there was a table, a chair, a bed, and my copybook, propped open against a jug with the spoon across it, and beside it a slate with Rhoswen of Thornhollow written on it eleven times, and the last four were a woman’s hand and not a child’s.“I’ll say what I came for first and drink your tea after,” I said, “because if I do it the other way I’ll have had your tea

Wren POVThe long room over the corn store at Ollan holds sixty if nobody sits, and on the eleventh of September there were a hundred and forty in it and men three deep on the stairs, and the corn dust came down through the light from the end window the whole four hours.Thirty-five houses with a seat. Thirty-one of them with nine steps under a corn store. Hedrek at the top table with the box. Kellow on the left with his fourteen. And on the right, standing because there was no chair left, a woman of forty-one in a borrowed grey shawl with Tamsin of Carrow on one side of her and Nell Trevaskis on the other in a chair that two men had carried up two flights without being asked.Hedrek called it at ten past eleven and did the thing nobody expected, which was to talk about himself first.“Before there’s any standing, the room hears this,” he said. “Nineteen years ago I countersigned the Ranneck quarter-day list for the March quarter without turning the page over. There were five women on