Chapter 31: A Day He Isn't Dying

Briony's POV

We carried my grandfather out to the orchard at sunrise in a kitchen chair.

Ewan and Corbin took the front legs, and I took the back.

"I can walk," Alden said.

"You can't," said the nurse, from behind us. "You can complain."

"I can do both."

Corbin was wearing a felt hat with a hole in the brim and he had mud to his knees.

He had been on the fence line for three days, and he'd stopped sulking on the second.

They set the chair down under the oldest tree, where the grass was wet and the apples were just going red.

The light came through the branches in long gold bars.

Alden looked up at it for a long time.

"Your mother planted this one," he said. "The year she married."

"I know."

"She told me it would take ten years to fruit. She was right. She was right about most things."

"Grandpa."

"I'm not going to talk about her," he said. "I only wanted to see the tree."

The nurse took Corbin by the sleeve, and the two of them walked away down the row of trees.

Ewan stayed a few steps back, with his arms folded.

I knelt in the wet grass in front of the chair and took my grandfather's hands.

They were thin and cold, and they didn't shake.

"I said I'd forgive you on a day you weren't dying," I said.

"I remember."

"Are you dying today?"

"Everyone is dying today, little wolf. I'm only slightly ahead."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only honest one I have." His mouth twitched.

"The nurse says I've got a month, with luck. The envoy says a season. I say I'll see the first frost."

"Then it's a good day."

He looked at me.

"I'm not going to say it was all right," I said. "It wasn't."

I held his hands tighter.

"You put me in a room with that man and watched him try to kill me. You didn't say a word."

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