The Wrong Brother's Bride

CHAPTER TWO - The Third Exit

The captain read the rest of it in the same carrying voice, and Wren stood through every word without moving.

Elowen Ashenmoor, last of the Warden line, had been named by the Moon as fated mate to Kaelen Varrow, heir to the Alpha King. She was to be received at Hollowfang Keep under the Crown’s protection and mated before the Concord, in token of peace between the houses. The word peace came up twice. The word consent did not come up at all.

When it was done, nobody spoke. A child asked something and was shushed. Orla Fenn looked at her across the green with an expression that finally made sense, and Wren understood that the pity had been for this. The village had known a reckoning was coming. It just hadn’t known whose.

Garrow reached her before the captain did. He said it quickly, like pulling a splinter. The Crown’s message had come a week ago. Twelve riders at noon, the whole village on the green, not a word to the herb-wife. He had been told it was for her safety.

“I didn’t know your name,” he said. “I swear to you, Wren. I thought it was Hesper’s old debts, or, I don’t know what I thought.”

“You knew they wanted me.”

His silence agreed. She patted his arm, which she suspected was the cruelest thing she could do to him, and went to meet the captain herself, because the alternative was letting him come to her in front of everyone.

Up close he was older than she had first thought, and tired in a way sleep would not fix. He gave his name as Garrick Voss, captain of the Hollowfang gate, and he called her Mistress Hale. He did not say Ashenmoor again in front of the village. She marked that.

“You’ll have the night to settle your affairs,” he said. “We ride at dawn. Two of my men will stand at your door.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Then they’ll be bored,” said Voss, and did not smile.

She spent the evening acting like a woman who was not going anywhere. She fed the hens. She banked the fire. She scrubbed the table twice, which was what she did when she did not trust her hands, and listened to the guards shifting on the step, and watched the road through the window for a lean figure with ink on his cuffs. The light went. Nobody came up the path.

She packed what she could not leave behind: Hesper’s herb-chest, a dozen jars, the almanac with Hesper’s cramped handwriting crowding the margins. The chest was heavy and older than the cottage, its lid scarred where someone long ago had tried to pry it open. She would have carried it on her back if she had to. When she asked, the guards lifted it into the cart without a word.

At full dark she took the last measure of tonic, tilting the vial until it ran dry, and sat with the empty glass in her palm. The bitterness stayed on her tongue a long time.

Then she wrote a note, six lines, small and quick. Taken to Hollowfang by Crown order. Don’t follow. I’ll find a way to send word. She folded it into her sleeve, pulled the satchel from beneath the floorboard, and went out the back door, which the guards had not thought to watch because it opened onto a ditch.

The ditch was the third exit. She crawled its length with the river growing louder, came up behind the byre, and ran bent double along the mill lane to the old footbridge. She and Elias kept a hollow in the third post, where a knot had rotted out, for the days one of them was late. She pushed the note in deep and went on, over the bridge and up the far bank, past the last field where the stubble pulled at her skirt.

At the first trees she stopped.

It would have been easy to keep going. She had worked out the route a hundred times: north to the hills, east along the drovers’ road, a new name she had never used. Hesper had taught her how to leave without a trace. Behind her the village lay low and quiet, a few lamps burning, the church tower leaning against the stars.

She looked at the lamp in Orla Fenn’s window and did the arithmetic differently.

If the Crown knew her name, it knew where she had been for twelve years. It could have taken her at any hour of any night, with twelve riders or two, and it had sent a Writ instead, read aloud, with the whole village as witness. A man who wanted her gone would have sent a knife. A man who needed her willing would send paper and a tired captain. And if she vanished, Marlow’s Ford would answer for it, and then the scattered Ashenmoor families Hesper had whispered about over the years would answer after that.

The King wanted her alive and cooperative. That was leverage. It was thin, and she had never held any, so she hardly knew how to hold it.

“The fence would have been faster,” said a voice behind her.

She did not jump. Years of practice. She turned slowly, and Voss stood ten paces off in the shadow of an oak, alone, his sword sheathed and his hands in plain view, like a man who had rehearsed standing that way.

“I thought you might try it,” he said.

“And you came alone.”

“If I’d brought men, you’d have run.” He glanced at the satchel on her shoulder. “You’re prepared. Good.”

“Are you going to drag me back?”

“I’m going to walk you back, if you’ll let me. Dragging would be a poor start.”

She studied him. He looked at her the way a person looks at something he has already seen once and hoped not to see again. “Have we met?”

“No.” Too quick. Then, more slowly: “I know the name. That is all.”

She let it lie. She was good at that, at setting a thing down where she could find it later.

“I’ll come,” she said. “Willingly, since the King seems to prefer it. But I have a condition, and I want it carried to him in your own words.”

“Go on.”

“Nobody touches me, marks me, or moves me anywhere against my will. Not the Prince, not the King, not the Concord. I want it in writing, in the King’s own hand, before I reach the Keep.”

Voss was silent long enough for the river to fill the space. “The King does not often put his promises on paper.”

“Then he can start.”

Another silence. Something like respect crossed his weathered face and was put away. “I can carry it to him. I can’t promise what he’ll say.”

“That’s all I’m asking.”

“No,” said Voss quietly. “It isn’t. But it’s a start.”

He walked her back along the edge of the field, a pace behind her left shoulder, and she let him, because refusing would have meant admitting she needed something to refuse. At the cottage the guards straightened and pretended not to notice she was coming from the wrong direction.

She slept an hour, perhaps. Before dawn she dressed, buckled the satchel, and left the cottage with the door unlocked, since there was no one left to lock it against. The riders waited on the green with mist at their horses’ knees. Garrow stood by the well and could not look at her.

Orla Fenn crossed the green with Tam at her skirt and a loaf wrapped in a cloth. “It’s still warm,” she said, as if that explained something.

Tam looked at the riders, then at Wren’s satchel. “Are you in trouble?”

“I don’t think so. Check your bandage at dusk.”

“I know.”

“Good.”

Orla’s mouth worked for a moment. “You were always going to be somebody’s trouble,” she said finally, and it was the kindest thing anyone had said to Wren all day.

She asked the captain for a moment and walked down to the footbridge alone.

The third post was as rotten as ever. She slid her fingers into the hollow and found it empty.

Not damp, not mouse-chewed. Empty. Her note was gone.

Elias, she told herself. It had to be Elias. He had come in the night, after she had gone to ground, and taken it, and he was already on his way to wherever he meant to go.

But the hollow had held three years of her notes, and he had only ever answered them by daylight. When she drew her hand out, the wood smelled faintly of coal-tar soap.

If Elias had been close enough to take her note, he had been close enough to knock. Behind her the captain called her name, the false one, and she walked back up the bank without turning around.