The Rejected Beast Bride's New Mate novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Stoneyard

Clover asks Orrin why he signed and hears about his sister, then a Registry inspector demands thirty days of logged courtship.

Wilda read the counter-petition over my shoulder and said a word that would have gotten her banned from church.

"Confined," she said. "Like a dog with worms."

"Like a wife," I said. "Same thing, at that house."

I read it four more times in the empty shop.

Leonie had a healer's letter attached, on Hallam letterhead.

It said I'd shown "erratic, bond-sick behavior including public destruction of property."

The property was a ring in a tub of dough.

I didn't sleep that night.

I baked through my shift with the letter folded in my apron pocket, and at seven in the morning I walked to St. Brendan's.

The cathedral sits on the hill above the harbor, black with a hundred years of soot, wrapped in scaffolding.

The stoneyard is behind it, through an iron gate somebody had propped open with a cinder block.

It was full of stone.

Blocks of pale limestone stacked on pallets, broken finials, a pile of old rain spouts shaped like snarling dogs.

Along one wall stood a row of gargoyles in different stages of being born.

One was only a block with chalk lines on it.

One had wings and a jaw and no face.

The last one was finished, a hunched stone beast with its tongue out, so ugly it was perfect.

Four carvers worked in the open shed, masks pushed up, chisels ringing.

An old man with white eyebrows saw me first.

"Boss," he called, without turning around. "There's a fox in the yard, and she smells like trouble."

"He can't smell me," I said.

"No," the old man agreed. "But we can, sweetheart. Close the gate, you're letting the trouble out."

Orrin climbed down a ladder at the back of the shed with a mallet in one hand.

He was in a gray T-shirt with the back cut open, and for the first time I saw his wings loose.

They were enormous, dark as wet slate, folded half open behind him like a cloak.

He looked at my face, then at the paper in my hand.

"You got Leonie's letter."

"You knew?"

"I came by last night. Wilda told me. You were asleep." He set the mallet down. "I left oranges."

"I saw the oranges." I pushed the petition at his chest. "Why did you sign?"

The carvers had gone very quiet.

Every chisel had stopped.

"Out," Orrin said, mild as milk.

They didn't move.

"Out, or no coffee till Easter."

They went, grumbling, and one of them took the coffee pot with him.

Orrin sat down on a block of limestone and put his elbows on his knees.

Even sitting, his eyes were level with mine.

"I had an older sister," he said. "She wasn't stone. She was hare-kin. It skips around in our family."

I waited.

"She was bonded at twenty-two. He didn't want her either." He turned a chisel over in his fingers. "She filed four times. The Council told her four times it was a private matter between mates."

"What happened?"

"Her fifth Heat."

He didn't say anything else.

He didn't have to.

I knew what the fifth one did. Every bride in Greyport knew.

"Nine years ago," he said. "I started on the night desk the next month."

My throat had closed up.

My tail was wrapped so tight around my leg it hurt.

"So you sign for every bride who walks in," I said. "Out of guilt."

"You're the first one who got to that box." He looked up. "The others went home before the end of the form."

"And if I'd been awful? A biter? Married to a mob boss?"

"You put a lion's ring in bread dough in front of the morning rush." Something moved at the corner of his mouth. "Half the harbor's seen it. I'm not worried about your nerve."

I laughed, and then, to my horror, I started crying.

Orrin didn't come closer.

He took a clean rag out of his back pocket.

He held it out at arm's length.

I took it.

It smelled of stone dust.

"I'm not going into that house," I said into the rag. "Not for a week, not for a day. I'll fight it."

"Good."

"I mean really fight. In front of the Council. In front of his mother."

"Good," he said again, like it was the easiest thing in the world.

"Will you stand there with me?"

"I wrote my name in the box, Clover."

The old carver stuck his head around the shed door.

"Boss," he said, and he wasn't joking now. "There's a man at the gate with a Registry badge."

The inspector was a thin deer-kin man in a raincoat, with a clipboard he held like a shield.

He looked at Orrin's wings.

He looked at me.

He wrote something down before anyone had said a word.

"Miss Saxby. Mr. Wyck." He clicked his pen. "Under section nine, a rematch petition can't be heard until the candidate and the bride complete thirty days of logged courtship."

"Logged?" I said.

"Every meeting, every hour, signed by both parties and witnessed." He tore off a sheet and held it out. "Thirty days. Starting today. If you miss a night, the clock starts over."

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