MARKED BY THE ALPHA I WAS TOLD TO FEAR

Chapter 19

Ronan’s POV

The reeds are burning when we come down the last stretch of road. A column of smoke going straight up in still air, and I have never in my life covered half a mile as badly as I cover that one.

The yard’s finished by the time we’re through the gate.

Four of them face down and roped. Two gone into the water. One of mine sitting against the trough with his arm strapped up in somebody’s apron, and the rest standing, which is more than I let myself expect at the top of that road.

The house isn’t burning. The reeds are, the whole waterline of them, white smoke rolling flat across the yard, and it takes me a moment to understand that somebody did that on purpose and it is the reason this yard is still ours.

“Alpha.” Isen comes at me out of the smoke with blood down one side of his face and a fence rail in his hand. “Two went up the bank. Not the tall one. The tall one went into the reeds, and I lost him in the smoke.”

“Wren.”

“Alive.”

“Where.”

“With my wife,” Isen says, “and I’d thank you to knock.”

Corrin is sitting on the mounting block with a harness strap still wound round his fist and his shoulder out of true. He doesn’t ask me for anything. He doesn’t even look up. I let him keep that, for now, because there’ll be a reckoning and this isn’t the hour for it.

Wren is on the cellar steps with Nell’s head in her lap.

That’s the first thing I see,e and it stops me in the doorway. Soaked through and filthy, sitting on cold stone with a woman she met yesterday laid across her knees, holding a cloth to the side of Nell’s head and talking to her in a low steady stream about nothing at all. The weather. The boat. Whether apples keep better in sand.

She looks up at me.

“She threw a lamp at him,” Wren says. “Eleven years in a bed, and she got up and threw a lamp at him and set half the waterline alight, and then she fell down these steps.”

“Is she hurt?”

“She’s finished.” Wren’s voice is entirely level and completely wrecked. “Maren says the loosening isn’t a cure. She says a body that’s lain still eleven years can’t do a thing like that and not pay for it.”

Nell’s eyes are open. She’s watching me.

“Blackwood,” she says.

“Yes.”

“You’re bigger than she said.”

Everything in me goes still.

“Say that again.”

“Your mother.” Nell’s hand comes up and finds Wren’s wrist and holds on. “Eleven times, in a cart. Ronan Blackwood, Ronan Blackwood, Ronan Blackwood. She kept it in her mouth like a stone.”

“Is she alive?”

“She was.”

“Where?”

“North,” Nell says. “Past the crossing, past the stone bridge, and then a house that isn’t a house. Low. Long. No upstairs to it, and a yard with a wall, and the wall’s on the inside.” Her eyes drift and come back with effort. “They called it the Long Yard. That’s all I ever heard anybody call it.”

“Nell.” Maren is at the foot of the steps with her bag. “Enough.”

“I’ve carried it eleven years, Maren. Let me put it down.” Nell’s grip tightens. “She said one more thing, and I never understood it, and I’m saying it now while I’ve still got the mouth for it. She said, tell him it isn’t the blood they want.”

“What?”

“That’s what she said.” Nell’s breath is going shallow. “It isn’t the blood they want; it’s the girl. Tell him it isn’t the blood, it’s the girl.”

She says nothing else that night. Maren gets her back into the bed, and Isen sits down in the dent eleven years of him has worn into that chair and puts his face in his hands.

Wren and I end up at the kitchen table some hour past two, because neither of us can manage the part where you lie down.

“There’s a deferred conveyance,” she says.

“What?”

“That’s what he called it. He said I was sold six years ago and the delivery was deferred until I was worth collecting.” She’s turning a cup on the table without drinking from it. “He said Garrick’s name is on the third page.”

“That’s a real instrument,” I say. “It’s used for stock and for indenture in the eastern territories. It is void on a person.”

“He didn’t seem worried about that.”

“Men like him aren’t. Three territories will honor it, and a fourth will look away.”

“He also said there’s a witness mark.” Her hands stop. “He said it was my mother’s.”

I take that apart for as long as it deserves.

“That’s the first thing he’s said that I know is a lie,” I tell her.

“Why?”

“Because your mother spent the last four years of her life spoiling merchandise. Isen’s own words for it. She bound Nell, she bound two others, and she had you bound.” I lean in. “A woman doing that is not a woman witnessing a conveyance. He said it because it’s the one thing that would take the fight out of you, and he said it in a yard he was already losing.”

Wren looks at me a long moment.

“I need that to be true,” she says, “and it frightens me, because needing something to be true is exactly how I spent six years believing I killed my parents.”

“Then don’t take my word. Take the paper off him and read it yourself.”

“Is that a plan?”

“It’s becoming one.”

Something almost like a smile, there and gone.

“Say the other thing,” she says. “You’ve been sitting on it since you walked in.”

“What other thing?g.”

“Ronan.”

First time she’s used my name without a rank in front of it. I notice it. I suspect she notices me noticing.

“Talia’s cart is in the reeds half a mile up the Thornhollow road,” I say. “Wheel broken. She scratched three words into the underside of it. They want her. And half of a fourth. Raven.”

“So she’s alive.”

“She was this morning.”

“And the house?”

“Empty. I sent two men on while we turned back, and they’ve just come in.” I put my hands flat on the table. “Wren, there’s more, and this is the part I’d rather not say.”

“Say it.”

“Your brother isn’t in it. Neither is the conveyance. The study’s been stripped, and the desk drawers are out on the floor.” I hold her eye. “Garrick has run somewhere holding a document that says he sold you, and there are only two markets for a paper like that. The people who bought you and me.”