All Chapters of A Crown Buried In Silence : Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

Rosalind POVI had meant to be finished before anyone came. In my bag, under the letters I never posted, was a paper I'd written at the shrine's side altar that morning, with space left at the bottom for a warden's name, and I thought it would take a quarter of an hour and a purse. Now Wren stood in the doorway with the King at her back, and Lena's picture sat on the desk beside Edran's hat, and my carefully rehearsed sentences had all gone out of my head like pigeons."Do come in," Edran said, with a small gesture to the corridor, "all three of you. It's drafty out there, and I find a story goes better with company." He had always said things like that, and I had always laughed, because Lena laughed. "Rosalind has been telling Mr. Aske how very polite she's been. I thought you ought to hear about the politeness, Wren, since it concerns you rather closely."Nobody moved, so he told it himself, standing easy with his hands folded over his stomach like a man giving a lesson. "In the thi

Alaric POVI had watched Edran for weeks without once seeing him afraid, so I knew it now only by what it did to his hands. The handkerchief slid from his fingers and he made no move to catch it, and the hat on his knee went the same way a moment later, rolling off along the floor until it fetched up against the leg of the desk. He rose to his feet in the slow, careful manner of a man who has been told the ground is not what he thought."That isn't possible," he said. He said it to Aske, not to us. "She had the cup until the very morning she walked out. You told me it takes the better part of a year for a wolf to stir, even after the last dose, and that most never do.""Gamma, the stock's been thin this past year." Aske's red neck had gone a mottled white, and his eyes slid toward the door behind the stove. "The apothecary's been sending it cut. I may have stretched a measure now and then, and sold on what I saved. The girl's cup was always…"Edra

Damian POVCorran's rider found us at Carter's Ford a little after four, a boy on a lathered grey who delivered the King's message in one breath and then sat down in the road. It named the place where they'd gone, and I read it before I understood it was a place I had sent my sister to without once going to look at it. By half past we were in the saddle, eleven of ours and Dunmore, Edran's sergeant, riding up from the rear without being asked,his eyes on his horse's ears. Garrett caught us at the fork two miles on with mud to his thighs. The sign he'd been cutting north had ended at a stream, he said, where a man could walk a horse in and out going the other way, and he hadn't needed to say what that meant.We rode the last stretch in the dark with no lanterns, because Garrett said any man on that wall could count a lamp, and left the horses in a hollow a hundred paces out. The cold came up off the river road and got into my teeth. I'd have said I was afraid for her, and I was, but un

Wren POVThe silence broke the way silence always did in that place, with one man too frightened to keep still. A guard at the corridor door, a boy hardly older than the one at the gate, flung a coil of silver chain across the room at my back with a shout he hadn't meant to let out, and the net opened in the air and came down over my shoulders.It burned. The smell of my own singed fur filled my head, and somewhere under the pain I heard her laugh, if a wolf can be said to laugh, a short hard sound of pure contempt. I dropped my shoulder and rolled the way I'd seen Emeric do it, and the chain came off in a clash, and the boy at the other end of it went over the dead man's legs and onto his back. I had him by the thigh before he finished falling.Teeth in a living leg are nothing like I'd have imagined. It is hot, and it gives, and the sound is close and small, and I felt her bear down for the long shake that would have taken the muscle off the bone. I stopped her. I don't know how, ex

Wren POVI took him in the chest, not the throat. She wanted the throat, and I felt her gather for it as we went down, clean and eager and without a shred of doubt, but my forepaws landed on the thick wool of his coat and the old man's breath left him in a whistle, and the barrel flew out of his fist and rang across the flags. Then it was only the two of us, close enough that his bare unfinished face filled my whole sight, every pore of it, with the pipe smell and the fear, and his pulse going in the big vein under my teeth."Do it, my dear." He said it quietly, without any of the old twinkle. "It would be kinder. I've no wish to stand in front of the whole kingdom and be read my own letters."That was what stopped me, more than any order. He wanted it, a clean quick death in a quarry office with nobody to ask him anything, and everything that place had taught me about wanting said that was the one thing I mustn't give him. I lifted my head away from the vein by the width of a finger