My Fated Mate Was a Lie, Now the Alpha King Wants the Truth novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: Eleven Cairns

The doors boomed open before the note had died.

Hester came in first with her candle held high, and she took in the two of us on the marble floor, naked, bloody and tied together, and said, "Right."

She walked back out, came in again with three blankets and flung them.

"That's a king's coat, not a quilt," she said to me. "Put the blanket on or I'll tell the whole kitchen what I saw."

"They'll have heard," I said.

They had.

The hall filled while we were still finding our legs.

Forty women from Hollin came through the doors with lanterns, and behind them the Greyfall envoy with her two riders, and behind those half the palace servants in their nightshirts.

Cassian stood in his trousers with a blanket over his shoulders and a bleeding crescent of teeth at his neck.

The envoy walked straight to him and looked at his chest.

The mark was silver now, a clean new moon, and the lines around it lay still as old scars.

"So," she said. "The lamp rang in our valleys. The shepherds thought the sky had cracked."

"It's done," I said. "Not the Registry's kind."

"I can see it isn't." She nodded to her riders. "Then we begin. One cairn at a time. As she cuts, we swear, so the wards never fall to nothing."

I took a breath.

"Every cairn I free costs the wards a share," I said. "Ten more, and we end with a third of what we had."

"We know."

"People in the north will go without. A winter, at least."

"We know that too," said the envoy. "Better a bare winter than another harvest of daughters."

I stepped up onto the dais.

Cassian came to stand behind me and laid his open hand over his own silver crescent.

"Anchor," he said hoarsely. "That's what I am."

I put my palm over his hand, and I listened.

The rope under his vow was a rope no longer.

It was eleven separate strands, each with a name on it, each pulling a different way across the dark.

One lay slack where Hollin had been cut.

Ten more hummed with stolen voices.

"Marrow," I said. "The next one is Marrow Cairn."

"There are sixty bonds in it," said the cropped-haired woman, at my shoulder. "I know a girl who was sent there."

← Chapter 20 · All chapters · Chapter 22 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend