Erased by My Family at Seventeen, I Heard Every Lie at Eighteen novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: The Pencil

The short captain went down on the east stair with a Watch sergeant's knee in his back.

Theron marched him to the cells himself and was gone a quarter of an hour.

Linnea sat in the sand with the crossbow bolt in her hand and listened to her own heartbeat.

She had heard him.

She had heard it for the length of one breath, and now there was nothing again.

When Theron came back, he locked the door of the training floor behind him and stood with his back against it.

"Say it," she said.

"You heard."

"I heard that my father told you to say it."

He closed his eyes.

"Your father came to me in the week before your birthday," he said. "He had not slept. He told me the king keeps a Quiet Corps inside the Watch."

"What is that?"

"People who hear. Where you were born, in the Blomqvist line, the gift wakes at eighteen in the daughters. The king has taken every one of them for three generations."

Linnea set the bolt down.

"Your father had watched two of his sisters go to Highcastle and not come back. He had you, and you were seventeen."

"He never told me."

"He couldn't. If you knew, you'd have done something. Your mother would have given it away in a look." Theron opened his eyes. "So he did the one thing the king can't undo."

"Strike me from the book."

"In pencil. A name closed in ink is a death. A name closed in pencil can be opened again by the keeper, any day, when the king is gone." His voice was rough. "To the king's census you stopped existing on your birthday. There was no Blomqvist girl of eighteen to find."

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