All Chapters of Married Off as a Breeder, She Became His Only Mate. : Chapter 111 - Chapter 120

Briony POVI told Marisol I was fetching a second blanket, which was a lie so thin she could have read through it, and she let me go without a word, which was worse than an argument. The corridor smelled of rain that hadn't started yet. I walked it twice before I understood where my feet were taking me, and then I stopped pretending and went.On the way I passed the corridor window and heard Sage arguing with Pudding over a harness strap, and losing, and I stood there long enough to hear her lose twice.The healing house had thinned to eleven cots, with the worst of the wounded either mended or moved to their own beds, and somebody had propped the shutters open on a flat gray morning. Halric lay in the near corner on a proper cot, thinner than he'd been a week ago and snoring faintly through his nose, the way he used to in council when he thought nobody could tell. Rourke sat beside him on the stool I found him on every day for six days, a heel of bread go

Kieran POVThey agreed on the meadow below the north wall, a stretch of trampled grass where the creek bent east, because it belonged to nobody and had been fought over by everybody. By the time I got Halric there in the cart, with a blanket over his knees and Bettina walking alongside predicting his funeral, both packs had taken their places on either bank: ours in whatever clothes they had to hand, a good many still bandaged, with Dorric at the front and his arms folded like a man inspecting a bad harvest, and theirs across the water in gray, in a long uneven line that stopped a full ten paces short of the bank, as if the creek were a border neither side wanted to cross first.Halric refused help for the last stretch. He got down on his own, with Rowan hovering at one elbow and Briony at the other and both pretending they weren't, and walked the final thirty paces to the ford on his stick, so slowly I could hear the grass brushing his boots. Rourke stood waiting

Briony POVI heard Sage before I saw her, because she had never learned to walk quietly across grass and had decided that a sling was no reason to start. She came along the dark edge of the field with her cloak pulled over the bad arm and her boots swishing, stopped at the foot of the grave, looked at the gray stone, and lowered herself to the ground with a grunt, since standing, she explained, had started to cost more than it was worth."You've got wax on your hand," she said."I know.""Then stop holding that candle over the grass like you're threatening it." She waited, and when I only went on watching the flame she reached across with her good hand, took it from me, and pressed the stub into the loose dirt beside the stone, where it leaned a little and then righted itself. "There. Nobody's been hurt."For a while we both listened to the names. Rowan's voice came across the field, steady and a little hoarse, followed by Dessa's flatter

Bettina POVBy the fourth week I had stopped counting the cots in my healing house, partly because the number had dropped below ten and partly because I'd grown superstitious about saying it aloud. Faro was the first one out. He left on his own legs, carrying a crutch he didn't need, and he stood in my doorway that morning and told me very seriously that he would never be ill again, and then handed me a small bag of dried apricots to seal the promise.The wall was going up in the meantime, one crooked course at a time, and from the herb garden I could hear the hammering from first light, Ashvale carpenters and the Blackfen masons who had stayed behind after the others rode home, arguing in two accents over whether mortar ought to be mixed wet or dry. I had stopped minding it. It was a living sound, and I spent a month listening to the other kind."Again," I said.Briony sat across from me on an upturned crate with a clay dosing cup in her lap, and

Briony POVThe last stone went into the north wall on the first morning of hard frost, and it took two men and a quarter of an hour to do it, because Dorric and a Blackfen mason named Wick couldn't agree which way up it went. Dorric held that the grain should run flat and Wick held that it should run on edge, and they argued it in front of half the pack until Hale walked over, turned the stone on its side without a word, and dropped it into the gap himself. Dorric looked at Wick and Wick looked at Dorric, and then the two of them went off to find breakfast together, which by noon had become the story of how the wall got finished. I heard it four times before supper. Each version had a different winner.It had been six weeks since the candles in the north field, and I stopped waking up braced for a horn. I sat on the council now, in a plain chair with a cracked rung that Maeve had found for me and I refused to let anyone mend, and I learned to keep quiet for the fir