The Mate He Gave Away novel · Chapter 7 of 40

Chapter 7: The Clerk

I stood in the yard until the carriage was a speck on the south road.

His fever.

Two winters ago Osric had taken a white fever after a boar hunt.

He lay in a dark room for a month.

Only the old royal physician was let in.

When he came out, he was thinner and quieter.

And he never came to my bed again.

He told me it was my face. My smell. My empty belly.

I had believed him.

"What did she say to you?" Corvin asked behind me.

"Something I need to think about."

He waited. When I didn't go on, he nodded and didn't push.

That was the thing about him. He never pushed.

"She knew it had been a moon," I said. "She knew you sleep in the barracks. She knew about the frame on the falls."

"Riders talk."

"Riders don't know which room you sleep in." I took the folded note out of my sleeve. "Somebody wrote this in a court hand. Somebody inside these walls."

Corvin looked at the keep.

"I can line every man up and ask him."

"And they'll all say no. Let me try something."

That night at supper I stood up on the bench again.

The men were getting used to it. A couple of them banged their cups.

"Winter's coming," I said. "Half of you are wearing boots with no soles. Agnes and I have found leather in the old tack room. Every man who wants a new pair writes his name on this list tomorrow, with how many pairs."

I held up a sheet of the keep's gray paper.

"Write it yourself if you can. Have a friend do it if you can't."

The next day the list went around the barracks.

By evening it was full.

Some names were a scrawl. Some were an X with a friend's writing beside it. The sergeant's ran straight off the edge of the page.

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