All Chapters of A Crown Buried In Silence : Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

Wren POVAlaric had cleared the long library table before we reached it, shoving the heralds' atlases onto a window seat, and Garrett set the chest down in the space he made with the care of a man putting a sleeping child on a bed. Nobody sat. It was a little past noon, but the shutters were closed against the yard and four lamps burned along the oak, which gave the room the stale look of a sickroom.Alaric lifted the vials out one at a time and stood them in rows on a square of linen, and I watched him count under his breath until he reached forty-one and stopped. Marta, who had been fetched from Luna's room and arrived with her sleeves still rolled, picked up the nearest bottle and turned it to read the half-moon on the base."That's the crown's own apothecary," she said. "Penal service contract, the same house that supplies the army surgeons. You can't buy these. They're numbered and signed out to a warden, and he answers for every one.""Then

Emeric POVIt reached me before she said a word.I was standing in that yard long enough to sort out every smell in it, the horses and the split pine, the iron of her torn hands, so when the new one arrived it was as plain as a lamp lit in a dark room. It ran faint and brown beneath the blood and sweat, warm like the inside of a den in late winter, and I knew it for a wolf as surely as I knew my own name. For weeks, standing near Wren had been like standing beside a hearth that had gone out, and I hadn't understood how cold I'd gotten used to it being until that moment."It stopped," she said. Her voice was scraped to a thread. "She went quiet again.""She didn't go anywhere.""You can't know that.""I can smell it." I said it the way I have reported the things, because I thought she could take that better than gentleness. "Give it a little while."Across the yard Damian had started forward again, and this time Garrett d

Calla POVThe maid who brought my supper tray kept her eyes on the cloth and said nothing about the noise in the yard, which told me more than any gossip would have.I'd been shut in my rooms since morning with Brandt and the younger one, Tam, posted outside my door as if I might climb out a window, and by suppertime I would piece the day together from everything the servants weren't saying. Uncle Edran's cottage had stood open at dawn, and Aunt Lena's picture was gone from the wall of his study. Fifteen of his retainers had left with him. Damian had ridden out at four with Garrett and half the barracks, and sometime that day a chest had come up out of the root cellar behind Edran's kitchen, carried between two men who wouldn't look at anyone.Then there was the man past the eastern wall, who told me three weeks ago that I had one last courtesy left, and I had spent every night since sitting up with that sentence.I had never worried about Edran running. He wanted a quiet house and an

Alaric POVCalla was still shouting when Brandt took her by the elbow, and she kept it up all the way to the door, but by then it had stopped being words and became the kind of noise a person makes at a locked gate. I waited until it had faded up the stairs before I turned back to the room.Perrin had already dipped his pen, Wren hadn't moved from where she stood the whole time, and Emeric had given up pretending to be part of the wall. Somewhere around the word ‘quarry’ I had decided what I meant to do, and it surprised me how calm it felt."Perrin, a clean sheet." I drew the ink toward me. "I'm opening a Crown inquiry into three matters: the death at the mill by the north ford, the trial of Wren Voss, and what was done to her afterward at Hallow Quarry. Under the royal charter no pack may refuse its questions, and nothing in any pack's papers may be burned, moved, or altered while it sits.""Into the matter of Wren Voss," Perrin murmured, writin

Wren POVBy the time Jory had sent Finn off with a bun and a clap on the shoulder, the story had gone through the house like a draft under a door. I heard it first from two scullery maids who stopped talking when I came into the kitchen passage and started again the moment they thought I'd gone, in the high flat whisper people use for things they badly want to be true. One said she ran off with the gamma. The other said no, Malvern had got her, and then, with a sort of relish, that it served her right after what she'd done to that girl.I stood in the passage until they carried their buckets off to the pump. Guilt, they decided, as if one word could cover eighteen years.Alaric had the grooms and Perrin in the carriage house by then, with a map spread over an upturned feed bin. "The south gate book has the black carriage going out a little before dawn," he said when I came in. "Nobody stopped it, because there was no reason to. Burrell on the box and Luna