All Chapters of MARKED BY THE ALPHA I WAS TOLD TO FEAR: Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

Wren’s POV“Twenty more,” Ise said. “She has got the number right.”“Say that again.”“Twenty-two houses left on the list, and eleven of them are entered houses with men in them, and eleven are kept houses with a board and a bolt and one keeper.” She had the third book open on the table and both hands flat on the page like a woman holding down a sail. “So there are twenty she can walk into on her own, and she has done one, and she has counted them, and she cannot have got that off my book because my book has been in a cart with me.”“Then how?”“She has been in four houses in eleven months.” Ise looked up. "Ardh, the store at Corrach, and two before that. That is the way they move a girl who will not settle. And every one of those houses has a board on every door with a name and an age on it, and she can read.“Nobody has ever thought about what it means that some of us can read the boards.”“Then she has been counting doors for eleven months.”“She has been counting doors and remembe

Wren’s POV“His name is Del,” Rhys said, “and he is fifteen, and I have had him in my yard for six years, and he read that letter to that keeper on Tuesday and about four hundred others before it.”“Where is he?”“In the kitchen with Talia and a plate, and he came when I asked him, and he has not stopped talking since I said the word, Cully.”He was small for fifteen,n and he had a good voice for reading, which I suppose is why they used him.“I am not in trouble,” he said.“That is not a question.”“No.” He put his fork down. “I know what I have been doing. I have known since I was about twelve. I want to say that first because everybody has been kind to me all evening and I would rather they were not.”“Then say it in order,” I said.“I get a letter at the gate on the ninth with the cart, in a bundle, and there are between four and eleven of them, and each one has a house on the front. I take them round on the cart with the grain, and I read each one out loud to the man at that hou

Wren’s POV“Ask her,” I said. “Not you, Ronan. Not eleven men in a hall. Me, in the kitchen, with the door shut, and Ise on the bench because Ise wrote those letters and has a right to it.”“Wren.”“She walked nine days on turnips to get to me, and she found Aled’s tally under the blotter and brought it to Rhys instead of to him.” I had my hand on the door. “So she gets a kitchen and two women and no benches, and if it goes badly you may have her afterwards.”She was at the table with the flour out. She looked up, and she knew, and I watched her decide not to run, which took about a second and a half.“You have seen the gate book,” she said.“Sit down, Talia.”“I would rather stand.”“So would I. Sit down anyway.”She sat down. She put both hands in the flour and left them there.“The eighth,” I said. “Half past six. Out the north gate on foot, back at a quarter past seven.”“I went to the byre and burned Del’s papers, same as most evenings.”“That takes nine minutes.”“It takes nine

Ronan’s POV“A woman.”“A woman in a lane at eleven at night who knew the child’s name and the mill and that her mother was dead,” Wren said. “That is not a cart, and it is not a keeper, and it is not a letter. That is somebody who went and stood in a lane at Ranneck on the eighth of this month and picked a child up by talking to her.”“The eighth,” I said.“The eighth. The night the board went on the cart with her name on it.”I put the gate book back on the table and turned it round.“Then it is not Talia,” I said. “Talia was out the north gate at half past six and back at a quarter past seven, and Ranneck is seven miles.”“I never thought it was Talia.”“No,” I said. “But I did, for about four hours this morning, and I want that in the book with the time on it, because I have been wrong about four people in five weeks and I have decided to write down the ones I get wrong as well as the ones I get right.”Rhys came in at eight with the man back from Ranneck.“The mill is empty,” he

Ronan’s POV“The fifteenth is Thursday,” Rhys said.“Then we have four days, and we do not touch that wall,” Wren said. “Nobody near it, nobody watching it, nothing changed. If whoever wrote that is inside this house,e then they will be looking at that wall every day between now and Thursday, and the one thing that will lose us this is a man standing in a hedge looking clever.”“You cannot let a child of eleven stand at a wall on Thursday.”“I have not said what I am going to do on Thursday. I have said what we are going to do until then, which is nothing.” She looked round the room. “Ise. Can you write on her?”“On Bekka?”“Can you write on her arm the way it has been written on. Can that be done from outside?”Ise thought about it for longer than I expected.“No,” she said. "It comes out of the office, and it comes out in the hand nearest to it, and that is not a hand any of us has got. It is not being written on her by a person with a pen.“But somebody is putting it into the offic