Chapter 9: The Field of No Names

Cadoc's POV

She told me at dusk, standing in the tower doorway with her arms folded over her apron.

"The Regent says the cure is my blood poured at the Stone," Bronwen said. "He says he won't stop the Moot from asking."

I was sitting at the oak table with a map of the valley under my hands.

The table was two hundred years old, and it split down the middle.

I heard it before I felt it.

The crack ran from end to end, and the map slid into the gap.

"Cadoc," she said.

"I'm quite calm."

"You've broken a table."

"I'll have it mended." I took my hands off the wood. They were shaking. "No one will pour your blood on anything. I want you to hear me say it."

"I heard you in the yard."

"Then you'll hear it again."

She looked at me for a long moment with those dark eyes, steady and sharp and tired.

"I believe you," she said. "That's the problem. I don't know why I do."

She left before I could answer.

I listened to her boots go down a hundred and nine stairs.

Then I put on my coat and went to find out what I had signed.

The Regency vault lay behind the Council chamber, behind a door with three locks.

I had not seen it since before the fever.

I did not have the keys, and I did not ask for them.

Dafydd had the Regent's second set of keys.

He had never mentioned it in ten years, and he handed it over now without a word.

The room smelled of wax.

The seal book was on the shelf above the door, a thick ledger bound in black.

Every use of the Crown's ring was written down in it.

My ring.

I opened it to the winter of the Madoc warrant.

It took me a long time to read the line, because I read it four times.

The ring had been signed out of my hand on the night of the fourteenth of December.

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