All Chapters of A Crown Buried In Silence : Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

Wren POVGarrett had been standing near the stairwell for the better part of an hour, pretending to inspect a crack in the wall that had been there since before I went to prison."You're not actually looking at that wall," I said, stopping on my way past."Routine check.""On a crack that's been there for three years?"He didn't have a good answer for that, which told me everything I needed to know.The whole house had been in a low hum of chaos since word got out about the records room, servants whispering theories that ranged from simple theft to something darker nobody wanted to say outright. I hadn't thought much of it beyond the obvious inconvenience, half the staff too jumpy to get anything done, Marta re-drawing blood samples with a face like she expected the building to collapse around her.I hadn't connected it to me specifically until I noticed Garrett turning up everywhere I went.For breakfast, he'd

Alaric POVI didn't tell her.I told myself it was caution, the responsible choice, the only reasonable path forward until I had something sturdier than a feeling and a handful of circumstantial dates. All of that was true. None of it made the next few days easier to sit through.I started watching her differently after that conversation with Garrett and Emeric in the armory. Not the careful, investigative watching I'd been doing for weeks, cataloguing inconsistencies, building a case. This was something else. I'd catch myself studying the shape of her face at breakfast, looking for my mother in it, or my own father, some feature I could point to and say ‘There, that's proof.’There wasn't proof in a jawline. I knew that. I kept looking anyway."You're doing it again," Wren said, three days after the armory conversation, catching me mid-stare across the small sitting room where she'd been mending something, a task she seemed to find peace in t

Alaric POVRosalind didn't speak again right away. She sat with her hands folded in her lap, staring at the needlepoint she abandoned, like finishing the thought out loud required more courage than she managed to gather yet."Start from the beginning," I said. "All of it."She nodded, and when she finally continued, her voice had lost the careful composure she usually kept wrapped around herself."It was chaotic that day. I wasn't even supposed to be near the border, but I'd gone to visit a healer who lived close to the eastern settlements, someone who specialized in difficult pregnancies. I just lost my second child a few months before." Her hands tightened in her lap. "I was still half out of my mind with grief, honestly. I shouldn't have been traveling at all.""Go on.""The raid started while I was there. I don't know which house attacked, or why, not exactly. I just remember the noise. Smoke. People running in every directio

Wren POVI picked up a stem of mugwort and tied it to the others. Two turns of twine and a tuck, the same knot I always used. Then another stem, another knot."Wren," Alaric said."Give me a minute."He gave me six bundles. I pulled each one tight enough that the twine left a groove. He waited without fidgeting, which I hadn't expected. Across the yard someone was chopping wood, the way the new stable boy did it."When was the raid?" I asked."The fourteenth of the planting moon. Eighteen years ago this spring.""You're sure of the date.""I've never once been unsure of it."I did the arithmetic in my head. Nobody ever told me my real birthday, only the one Rosalind picked, the one with the cake. "How old was she?""Five weeks." "Rosalind always said I was about two when I came to this house.""She told me the same thing. She had her reasons.""I'm sure she did." I laid the bundle in the basket. "You said a servant remembers a newborn. Which one?""Margery.""Then she knew. She's bee

Dorrie POVForty-one pillowcases, and Mrs. Hale wanted forty-four. Dorrie had counted twice. The shelves in the east linen closet were crooked, that was the trouble. Everything slid, so the pillowcases ended up behind the sheets and the sheets ended up on the floor, and she was in there since breakfast with her sleeves shoved up and a splinter in her thumb.She left the door open a hand's width for the light. Straight across the hall was the Lady's door, the one everybody tiptoed past. It had been shut for two days. Marta kept leaving trays and taking them back untouched. Cook said the Lady was ill, the second girl said she was sulking, and Dorrie, who only came to the house after the spring thaw, didn't have an opinion yet.Then Miss Wren came up the hall with no tray.Dorrie knew her by sight, same as everybody did. The one who'd been in prison. The one who hauled firewood when she could've been sitting down. A few weeks back Dorrie had dropped a basket of eggs in the yard, and Miss