My Fated Mate Was a Lie, Now the Alpha King Wants the Truth novel · Chapter 24 of 24
Chapter 24: What We Chose
By noon the Council's grey chairs had been carried out of the Moon Hall.
Forty women in plain wool had pulled the horseshoe table to the middle of the Moon Hall floor, round and low, with no dais behind it.
I sat at it with my elbows on the oak.
Cassian stood in front of it, with no ring on his hand, holding out a folded sheet.
"You asked for terms in your own hand," he said. "I've signed it. Read it before you answer."
I read it twice, because I read everything twice.
No bond in Orrenmoor would be sworn in any room but the one the two people chose.
No certificate would say anything the two people had not said.
The queen of Orrenmoor would keep her own name, her own door, and a chair at the round table level with every other chair.
She could leave when she liked, and the Crown would hold the gate.
"You've left out the part where I kneel," I said.
"I never wrote it."
"Hester said the queens always did."
"Hester," said Cassian, "is a menace."
"I heard that," said Hester, from the back, through a mouthful of bread.
The forty laughed.
I took up the pen on the table, an iron nib with a plain horn handle, and I signed.
Idony Wrexham, who stayed.
"Well?" said the cropped-haired woman.
"It's a chair," I said. "I'll sit in it."
Verity Slattery, at the end of the table, burst into tears and hid her face in her apron.
"I'm not crying about you," she told Hester. "I'm crying because I peeled eleven apples this morning and I did it right."
The first house in Tarn End to get its roof back was the one the village gave us.
It was a low stone cottage with a new thatch, two rooms and a hearth wide enough to sleep on.
The Greyfall riders had left a stack of birch by the door, and the Hollin women had left a pot of honey and a note that said, Eat.
The snow had come early that year, and it lay over the hills in blue shadows.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of My Fated Mate Was a Lie, Now the Alpha King Wants the Truth are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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