Chapter 19: Last Stand

We reached the border gate before the sun was fully up.

Thane rode beside me with two hundred of the King's wolves behind us, and he hadn't said a word since the stable.

Past the gate, the Highmark road ran straight and white between wet fields.

Jasper stood in the middle of it.

He had forty men at his back in blue coats, with spears grounded and faces gone nervous.

His wrist was still in its splint, and his fine coat was caked with road mud.

"There she is!" he shouted. "That's my wife!"

Nobody answered him.

"I came to take what's mine!" His voice cracked on it.

"The Moot's ruling is a lie! Stanmore will not be robbed by a king and a whore!"

Thane's hands tightened on the reins.

I laid my fingers over his.

"Let me," I said.

"Elsie..."

"Let me, please."

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he nodded once and stayed in the saddle.

I swung down and walked forward alone, onto the white road.

My boots crunched on the gravel.

I stopped short of my husband, and I looked at the men behind him.

They were farmers and stable hands, most of them, with Stanmore blue sewn on their sleeves.

"Do you know what he's asked you to do?" I said to them.

"Don't talk to them!" Jasper snapped.

"He's asked you to march on the Alpha King's hall for a wife the Stone already says he never had."

A man at the end of the line shifted his spear.

"He signed for the poison that was in my cup for eight months," I said.

"His own hand is on the receipt. Your elders saw it."

"Liar!"

"Ask your elders."

"My elders are right here," said a cracked old voice.

A cart rolled forward from the road behind the Stanmore line.

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