He Chose the Wrong Sister novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: Harrowgate

I started at the river, and I told it plainly.

I told him about the ford at Sele, three years before, when I was nineteen and walking home from my mother's grave with a basket of mending.

Seven men on horses had come out of the reeds.

The prince's guards were fewer than that, and they went down quickly.

Casimir took a blade in the shoulder and another in the thigh, and he got off his horse and fell into the river.

I dragged him out by the collar.

I took him to the old mill because it was the only roof, and I kept him there for two nights with a lamp turned low.

I sewed his shoulder with green thread from my hem, because it was the only thread I had.

Cade listened with his elbows on his knees and did not interrupt once.

"When he could talk, he hummed a song and held on to my sleeve," I said. "He asked who I was, and I said only that my father was the Earl of Tarrant."

"Not your name?"

"I was afraid of the bandits. I thought they might come back and ask the villagers for a girl with a name."

"That's why he came to Tarrant Hall."

"And found two faces."

Cade was quiet for a long while.

The carriage rocked, and the lamp on the hook swung.

"Which hand did you sew with, that night at the mill?" he asked at last.

"My left. I told you I'm left-handed."

"Aye." He turned his own left hand over on his knee and looked at it. "The surgeon who treated him at the palace complained about it for a week."

I stared at him.

"The prince's surgeon?"

"I was there on border business. He said whoever stitched the shoulder was a left-hander, neat as a seamstress, in green hem-thread. He said it was the best field work he had seen and he'd have taken her on as an apprentice."

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