Chapter 19: What He Never Said

Garrick's POV

I guarded the inside of the border tent, because she had told me to.

I stood with my back to the canvas and my hands behind me.

She sat on the cot in the lamplight with her boots off.

She had taken the stitches in her shoulder.

She looked at me with her grey eyes and no mercy at all.

"A hired sword," she said.

"Rhiannon."

"You said it outside this tent, to my face, and I want to know what you meant."

"It doesn't matter."

"It matters to me."

"The night before you're crowned, it shouldn't."

"Tell me," she said, "or I'll order you."

I looked at the lamp.

"The king called me to his study at noon on your birthday," I said.

She went still.

"I read you his note. I never told you what he said out loud, with the door shut."

My voice was not working well.

"He said, you'll want to stay. You'll want to see her turn eighteen. Don't.

"Don't say goodbye to her, because she'll see it in your face. Go to the border."

"He said that?"

"I never asked him why. I got on a horse, and I rode away from you with the whole kingdom in that hall."

I made myself look at her.

"I was the captain of the guard, and I left.

"I've told myself every hour since that he ordered it. It doesn't help.

"He's dead, and I was on a hill eating bread."

"Garrick."

"I'm not a sword you borrowed," I said. "I'm the man who left your father to die.

"You can call me hired. It's kinder than the truth."

She stood up.

She crossed the tent in her stockings and stopped one pace from me.

Keep reading free with an account. Start I Survived My Father's Test and Took His Throne from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.