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Chapter 81

Wren POVThree days after the quarry the house still hadn't learned how to be quiet. Every room on the east side had a wounded man in it, Dunmore's retainers on pallets in the library, Garrett's warriors in the old nursery, and Marta moved among them with a basin on her hip and the grey set look of a woman who had been awake for three nights and meant to manage a fourth. The air smelled of boiled linen and willow bark. In the yard the quarry's guards sat on the barn floor under Alaric's men, passing one bucket.I helped where I could, which mostly meant carrying. My palms had closed over the cracked skin in two days, faster than any wound of mine had a right to, and Marta had looked at them, said nothing, and handed me the heaviest basket. The wolf was quiet, but not gone; she lay curled somewhere under my ribs like a cat in the sun, and when I passed the kitchen door she lifted her head at the smell of roasting meat and I had to stand in the corridor a moment and

Dernière mise à jour : 2026-10-28

Chapter 82

Wren POVAlaric came down the cellar steps still buttoning his coat, took in the cot and the cup and the grey mouth in a single look, and said, "Nobody touches anything," in the level voice he used at the quarry. Then he stood beside me for a while without speaking, looking at the old man's folded hands."He knew," I said. "That's what I can't get past. He took his boots off and set them side by side, he put the picture where he wanted it, and he lay down. Nobody holds a man down for monkshood. He drank it.""Or he thought it was something kinder." Alaric turned to the guards on the stairs. "Who has had this door since midnight?"Four names came out of them in the wrong order, and Perrin wrote them down in the right one. Alaric sent Garrett to take each man aside and ask him the same five questions, and then he looked at me. "The kitchen next. I'd like you with me, if you're willing. I can read a ledger, but I can't tell which end of a dose is the

Dernière mise à jour : 2026-10-29

chapter 83

Garrett POVI asked for the whole of it that same morning, standing in the barn with Gil Marrow's hat still over his face and thirty men looking at their boots. Not part of the watch, or the barracks, or the cellar door, but every lock and cup and key on the estate, from the cookhouse to the attic stair, until the Lord Justice came. Alaric looked at me for the length of a breath, with his sleeve pinned across his chest and two nights' stubble on his chin, and said, "You'll answer to me and to nobody else." I said that was how I preferred it.The first thing I did was go and look at Rusk. I kept him in my head for ten days as a name on a list, and it came to me on the cellar stairs that if somebody had gone to the trouble of killing Edran and Gil, a man who put an arrow into a doorframe and sat locked up since without a word was the next one it would occur to them to quiet. He was alive, sitting on his cot with his hands between his knees. He looked up at me and sai

Dernière mise à jour : 2026-10-30

Chapter 84

Garrett POVI held that book for the better part of an hour before I told a soul, and I'm not proud of the reason. The moment it left my hands it would belong to the Crown and the Lord Justice and every Alpha who had ever sent Edran a ham at midwinter, and the one line that mattered would turn into a story before anyone had looked at it properly. I spent two years believing a story about this family that nobody had looked at properly. I wanted to know what I was holding.So I wrapped it in its oilcloth, buttoned it inside my coat against my ribs, and went to find the only person in the house who could read the Voss family the way I read a border.She was at the long kitchen table with seventy tin cups in rows in front of her, going down them with her eyes shut, and Margery stood behind her with a slate, ticking. "Tea," Wren said. "Water. Water. That one's only gone off, Margery." Emeric sat two chairs along with his arm in its sling, doing nothing in the way he learned to do nothing b

Dernière mise à jour : 2026-10-31

Chapter 85

Wren POVAlaric heard it in the library with the door shut, standing beside the cold hearth while Garrett laid the green book on the desk and Perrin, who had been told to write nothing, held his pen clear of the paper as though it might drip. I said what I knew about the winter of the borrowed name, in order and without ornament, because that was how I found it easiest to carry. When I finished, nobody said anything for a while. Then Alaric asked whether Calla was awake, and Garrett said she'd been walking her room since four."Then we don't send for her," Alaric said. "We go up."Her door was guarded by two of Alaric's men, as it had been for ten days, and the room behind it had gone sour with that particular staleness a room gets when someone has been living in it with the curtains closed. She stood at the window when we came in, in the plain grey wool, her hair down her back in a plait she'd clearly done herself, and she did not turn round at once. I wa

Dernière mise à jour : 2026-10-31

Chapter 86

Wren POVNobody helped her. She must have noticed that first, because Calla had spent six years in a house where somebody always did: a hand under the elbow, a cup pressed into her fingers, Damian saying ‘don't, she's been through enough’. The room stayed exactly as it was. Garrett stood at the door with the green book under his arm and his face shut. Alaric stood by the cold hearth as easily as if he had nowhere else to be until she was ready, and in the corner Perrin held a pen over a clean sheet and looked at nothing."I told you in the library," Calla said at last. Her voice came out thin, and she tried it again, lower. "A man was arguing with Uncle's retainers, and there was a noise.""You said a noise," Alaric agreed. "It's written down." He didn't leave the hearth. "Wren asked who he was, what happened to him, and what you did. I find I'd like those answers too.""I don't know who he was.""Then I'll tell you what we have." He nodded to Garrett, who took a small tin the color o

Dernière mise à jour : 2026-11-01

Chapter 87

Wren POVAlaric stood where he have been standing, with his bound arm held against his coat, and Perrin's pen hung over the clean sheet without touching it, and in the long quiet Calla began again by herself, the way a person does who has carried a thing in front of her for so long that her arms have given out and she has to set it down somewhere."I have been opening them." She said it to the buttons in their tin. "The packets. Not that night only, for months. I stop at the old mill on the way to the ford and lifted the seal over the lantern on the wheel hook, and read it, and press it down again with a warm knife so you couldn't tell." She almost smiled. "Edran taught me the wheel himself, my first winter helping, as a game. I don't think it ever crossed his mind that a girl who'd been taught to count could also read.""Why?" Alaric said."Because it was the only thing in that house that was mine." Her chin lifted a little. "Everyone knew about Wren. Wren knew where the salve was an

Dernière mise à jour : 2026-11-02

Chapter 88

Alaric POVPerrin finished reading. A bell in the stable yard struck the noon hour, thin and far off, and below it Margery's voice went on calling the cups, tea, water, water, with the flat patience of a woman who had decided that nothing short of a flood would stop the household from eating. I stood at the cold hearth with my bound arm against my ribs and listened to a clerk's paper settle in the quiet. Garrett was still in the doorway with the green book under his elbow, Calla had sat down on the end of her bed,her plait across her knees, and Wren stood at the bedpost with both hands round the wood, so quiet that I could not tell from where I stood whether she was breathing.I knew the law Perrin's paper had touched, because I read it at twenty-two, newly crowned, in the same week as the penal regulations. Every chancery in the realm is bound to report any foundling that matches a Crown notice to the High Herald within seven days. It is one of the oldest statutes

Dernière mise à jour : 2026-11-02

Chapter 89

Damian POVWren told me in the order it happened, which was the only way she told anything, and she was gone from the room before I found a single word to put against it. She sat on the edge of the bed with her hands in her lap and her eyes on the quilt, and she said the dead man's name, once at the start and once at the end, as if she wanted to be sure I kept it. When she stood, she turned the lamp wick down a quarter inch, the way she used to for me when I was ill as a boy, and she drew the door behind her without a sound.The wound beat slowly and steadily under the bandage, like someone knocking in the next room, and I found I couldn't lie flat with it. I tried the pillows, then the left side, then the right, and in the end I sat up against the headboard with my knees drawn up under the blanket and counted the ceiling beams. There were eleven. I counted them in a fever at nine years old, and I counted them now, and the number did no more good than it had then.

Dernière mise à jour : 2026-11-03

Chapter 90

Alaric POVThe Lord Justice arrived at dusk the day before with sixty of the guard and a clerk's wagon, and by morning he had turned the Voss great hall into a court without once raising his voice. He had the pack banners taken down and the Crown's hung in their place, and a plain wooden chair put at the head of the tables for himself. Hallam Merrick was seventy, lean and grey as a winter hedge, and he paused before every noun as if choosing it from a drawer. I had known him since I was ten, and I had never seen him hurry."Your Majesty will sit at my right," he said, "as a witness, not as the Crown. A King who judges a matter touching his own blood is a King the next generation must forgive."I sat.The hall was full, the household crowded into the gallery and the pack's elders along the wall. Rosalind sat in black in the front row with a hand flat on her breastbone, and beside her Damian had been carried in a chair and wrapped to the chin like something precious going to market. Wre

Dernière mise à jour : 2026-11-04

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