All Chapters of A Crown Buried In Silence : Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

Emeric POVI kept my word to Garrett and gave him his ten minutes before I told Alaric about the juniper snuff and the red clay on the sergeant's boot. He listened to all of it without interrupting and asked only whether the cellar door had a lock, and by then it did, because Garrett and Ovid had walked Rusk down there without a fuss, the man going along like somebody who was expecting the errand. Alaric told me to go and sit with Wren, since she would be better off with someone in the room who could hit things.I found her in the kitchen, where Margery had just discovered the blood on her sleeve.She went back to picking mugwort off Wren's shoulders, and when she turned the sleeve over she found it stiff and brown from the elbow to the cuff, and she announced, loud enough to make Damian jump, that she had enough people bleeding on her clean bench without a word of explanation."It's a scratch," Wren said."It's a splinter the length of m

Rosalind POVMarta came up at noon with a tray Rosalind didn't touch, and she barely set it down before she said what she had clearly carried up two flights of stairs."He told the King no.""Who did?""Your son." Marta straightened the napkin beside the plate, which she did when she was upset. "Stood in the middle of Margery's kitchen with the King right there in his good coat and said Wren stays unless Wren says otherwise. Cook says you could hear the stove pipes ticking."Rosalind turned that over and couldn't quite make it fit. Damian had spent his whole life saying yes, to his father and the council and to her, and she always counted it a kindness that he never made a fuss; now he was twenty-six and had found his voice, and it had taken an arrow to make him use it."And Wren?""Sat there with her arm in a bandage and not a soul daring to touch her." Marta went to the door. "She's all right, Luna. Whatever that arrow

Garrett POV Damian wouldn't have the book in his study. He said so before I finished asking, and when I looked at him he shrugged without much humor and said that his uncle walked in and out of that room as if he paid the rent, and had done it since Damian was in short coats, so that he never once thought to count how often. That was how the green leather volume ended up in my own room above the armory, shut in the iron-banded chest at the foot of my bunk with the tribunal file and the capital copy of the adoption papers, and the key went back on its cord around my neck. I liked to sit on that chest until morning, but Alaric wanted to know what sort of man we were dealing with before anyone else went near the cellar, and nobody else could ask without it sounding like a question. On my way across the house I passed Wren's door, where Emeric sat on a stool with his sword across his knees and a candle stub for company, and he lifted two fing

Wren POVI wasn't asleep, but I have been lying on top of the blanket long enough to stop pretending, and when the knock came I knew whose it was before Emeric's stool scraped the boards outside, because Damian had always knocked twice and then waited, as if the door might want to change its mind."It's only me," he said through the wood. "Wren, I need…I'm sorry, I know what time it is.""It's nearly four," Emeric added, dry as toast, from the hall.I opened the door on the two of them standing a careful yard apart, Emeric with his sword half out of its scabbard and Damian holding a bundle of oilcloth against his chest in both arms, like a man carrying something that had once been alive. He hadn't shaved or slept, and his coat was buttoned wrong."You can put that away," I told Emeric, and he slid the blade home with the air of a man who hadn't really expected to need it and wasn't sure whether to be glad. "Come in, both of you, before th

Alaric POVBy the time the sun cleared the orchard wall I had every gate on the estate barred and every ground-floor door watched by someone who had sworn to the pack rather than the pack office, which narrowed my trustworthy men to Garrett's warriors, my own four riders, and two stable boys I judged mostly by their age. Garrett had been through the retainers' hall bunk by bunk and come out with a list of thirty-one names, fifteen of them gone and the other sixteen sitting in a row along the dining-hall wall with their hands in their laps, while Ovid wrote down where each had slept the night before. No one could say why his friends had left, and I believed most of them, because fear has a smell and these men hadn't learned to hide it.I gave the orders from the mounting block in the yard, since it was the only place everyone could see me: nobody in or out without my seal, nobody walking alone, the cellars and stables and pack office closed to all but the guard, and