Chapter 13: Where I Pulled Her Out

The rider's pen stopped halfway through my surname.

She looked up at me.

Then she looked at Mags, on her crutches by the window.

"Is that the name under your seal?"

"It is," Mags said. "I've been waiting six years to hear somebody say it in a room."

The rider finished writing.

She blew on the ink.

And the great room went off.

Langtry wolves shouting over each other.

The cook saying, "I knew it, I knew it, I said so at the biscuit," to nobody in particular.

Somebody near the door said, "The nanny?"

Somebody else said, "Keep up."

I didn't look at any of them.

I was looking at Aldric.

He hadn't moved from the hearth.

He was standing exactly the way he'd stood the night the bond tore out of my chest.

Only now it was his face that had gone to pieces.

"Elspeth," he said.

Not loudly.

Just his mouth, finding the shape of it.

I turned around and walked out of his house.

Nobody stopped me.

I went down the lawn where the ceremony tables had stood six days ago.

The grass was still flattened in squares.

I went down the boathouse steps, the same ones Clover had walked down.

I stood on the flat gray stones at the edge of the water.

The lake was clean now.

Aldric had had it drained at the boathouse end and flushed twice.

I heard him on the steps behind me.

"Don't," I said.

He stopped on the bottom step.

"You don't know what I was going to say."

"You were going to say my name again."

He didn't deny it.

"Don't," I said. "You don't get to taste it yet."

The wind came off the water and pushed at my braid.

I looked down at the stones.

"This one," I said, and put my foot on it. "This is where I laid her."

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