They All Forgot Me, So the Lycan King Marched for Me novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: A Scrap of Blue

I woke up in his tent with a crick in my neck and the King sitting on the other side of it, watching me.

He had washed his face and put on a clean shirt, and he looked embarrassed.

"You stayed," he said.

"You fell asleep sitting up," I said. "I didn't want to leave you on the floor."

"I've slept on floors for sixteen years," he said. "It has never felt like this."

He didn't say what he meant by that, and I didn't ask.

The general had left a pot of tea outside the flap, and I poured two cups.

His hand shook a little, and I pretended not to see.

"What is that?" I asked, nodding at the scrap of cloth that now lay on the blanket between us.

He picked it up very gently, in two fingers.

"My wife sewed it," he said.

I put down my tea.

"She was a healer, and she wasn't a good seamstress, so she sewed the crescent crooked on purpose," he said, and almost smiled. "She said the baby's blanket ought to have one thing about it that was ours and no one else's."

"The baby."

"My daughter," Aldric said. "She was nine days old."

His thumb rubbed the worn corner.

"Our hall was in the Black Hills, in a valley where no one ever went," he said. "One night in winter, there was fire at every door at once."

I didn't breathe.

"My wife got the nurse and the baby out through the back," he said. "I was holding the front. When I got there the nursery was ash, and she was gone."

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