The Healer Bride: Awakening the Ruined Dragon King novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: The Stone Cellar

The ox cart on the north road had held forty empty casks and a sack of straw.

Ronan said so aloud when the captain finished counting, and the plain fury in his voice made the soldiers around him look at their boots.

"She wanted us on the road," he said. "She wanted the city quiet. Where do you hide a woman with nowhere to go?"

Sorrel thought of a smell.

She thought of cut grass and cold iron.

On the day they came to Thornhall, a thin cold draft had risen through a grate beside the dais, and it had smelled of exactly that.

"Under the throne room," she said. "The Stone cellar. Ronan, I smelled it that first day."

They flew back at dusk.

The council was still in the palace, and when the king went down the cellar stair behind a guard with a torch, the chancellor and thirty lords followed without being asked.

The cellar ran under the whole length of the white hall.

It was a low vault of black stone, and veins of gold ran through the roof where the Stone's light came down.

At the far end, at a small table, sat the Queen Mother.

She had a pot of tea, two cups, and a single remaining cask of nightfern at her elbow with the bung drawn.

The smell filled the vault.

"Sit down, my dear," Helene said to Sorrel. "You look weary. I have kept the pot warm."

"Madam," the chancellor began.

"Let her come, my lord. Let her come and sit with me and drink, and we can all be civilized."

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