The Grand Duke Gave the Hostage Prince the Only Key novel · Chapter 24 of 24
Chapter 24: The Only Key
That night, in a tent on the north bank, Teodric opened the Book of the Dead to the page with the thirty-one empty lines.
Elior sat beside him with the captain's paper and a lamp.
He read each name aloud, slowly, and the duke wrote it in his square hand.
Two of them were boys of seventeen.
One was a man of sixty who had rowed the royal barge for thirty years.
By the thirty-first, the ink was spotted with wet.
When it was done, Teodric laid down the pen and looked at the full page for a long time.
"They have names," he said.
"All of them."
"All of them," said Elior, and put his head against his shoulder.
The wedding was on the first warm day of spring, in the cathedral of Aurelle, and the bells rang from morning until dark.
Elior had never heard them so loud.
They shook the stone under his feet while he stood at the altar in white and blue, with the plain gold circlet and the black ribbon.
The nave was full of lords from both kingdoms, who had been seated carefully and were behaving badly.
Sigrun cried openly in the front row and called it hay fever.
The captain of the left wing wept into the sleeve of a lancer.
Teodric came up the aisle alone.
He wore the black coat with the grey wolf collar, and he had cut his beard fresh.
He walked slowly, as he did everything, and Elior watched him come and could not feel his own hands.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–12 of The Grand Duke Gave the Hostage Prince the Only Key are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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