He Chose the Wrong Sister novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Why Did She Have to Die Instead of You
Imogen hears the prince's cruelest line on her wedding night, dies unproven, and wakes nine days before he arrives. She asks her father for a husband, and the border lord who rides in that evening has been offered her already.
A corridor of palace servants watched the Crown Prince lead me to our bridal chamber.
Every one of them heard what he said at the door.
"Why did she have to die instead of you?"
He did not whisper it.
He looked at my face, which was my dead sister's face, and he asked it as a fair question.
The servants stared at the carpet.
"Your Highness, I'm the one who found you at the ford," I said. "I sewed your shoulder with thread from my own hem."
"Don't," he said. "Your sister told me everything. Don't use her story in her own wedding dress."
He went in and shut the door.
I slept in the corridor chair that night, because no one would tell me where else to go.
I spent eight years trying to prove it.
Every proof I owned had gone to Rosalind before she died, by way of my stepmother's hands.
My letters to my old nurse were gone. So was the silver wolf button he had pressed into my palm in the mill.
He never believed me, and in the end he stopped looking at me at all.
I died at thirty, in a cold wing of the palace, listening to him order a memorial service for my sister.
Then I opened my eyes.
It was the attic bed at Tarrant Hall, with the crack in the ceiling that I had stared at for two years.
My hands were not thin and my chest did not hurt.
The calendar on the washstand said the sixth of Harvest Month, and I knew what that meant.
The prince's carriages would reach this house in nine days.
I knelt, pulled up the loose board under the bed and took out the tin.
The wolf button was inside, small and cold and silver, exactly where I had left it three years ago.
I closed my hand around it.
Last time I had waited for the prince to come, and I had told the truth too late.
There was a knock, and my door swung open.
"Mother says breakfast, and wear the blue," Rosalind said. "It suits you."
She stood in the doorway in her morning gown, with her hair already pinned.
My sister was alive, and she had my face with lighter eyes.
I had followed her coffin once.
She had climbed three flights to the attic and wasn't even breathing hard, though the whole house said she couldn't manage a single staircase without sitting down.
"Imogen? You're staring."
"I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't sleep well."
"Then eat something." She smiled, and went down ahead of me.
At breakfast my father had his newspaper up and my stepmother was pouring tea.
"Sit, darling," Hester said. "You've gone thin. Aldric, make her eat."
She put a warm roll on my plate herself.
She had never put a roll on my plate before.
I waited until Rosalind had gone to the window and my father had lowered his paper to reach for the butter.
"Father, I want to marry," I said. "Find me a husband. The sooner, the better."
My father's knife clattered on the plate.
"Marry? You're twenty-two, and you've never once asked about it."
"Before the prince's party arrives."
"Oh, my love, of course," Hester said.
She said it before he could finish his sentence, and she smiled while she said it.
"What a sensible girl. Aldric, we'll see to it at once."
She didn't ask me why.
She didn't ask why now, or why before the prince, or who I had in mind.
The last time I had sat at this table, she had asked me a great many questions, and every one of them had been kind.
I looked at Rosalind at the window.
She was turning a teaspoon in her fingers and watching the lawn, and she didn't look at either of us.
That afternoon I stood at the top of the stairs while the dogs barked in the yard.
A rider had come up the south road, alone, on a big grey horse with northern tack.
He swung down and handed his reins to a groom, and he stood a head taller than the groom.
He wore a plain wool coat, worn at the cuffs, and a sword he did not bother to hide.
A scar ran through his left eyebrow.
My father hurried out to meet him, bowing too low.
"Lord Garrow! The border tithe, of course. You are always welcome at Tarrant Hall."
I knew that name.
In the first life, Cade Garrow was the only lord at court who had ever told the Crown Prince no to his face.
He came up the steps and stopped in front of me, because I was in his way.
He looked at me for a long moment.
"You're the daughter," he said.
"I'm one of them."
"The plain, sickly one." He said it flatly. "Lady Tarrant's words, not mine."
He looked at my face again, and at the color in it, and frowned.
"You're neither."
"Lady Tarrant wrote to you?"
"A week ago," Cade Garrow said. "She offered me the daughter nobody wanted, and she asked me to take her quickly."
A week ago I hadn't asked anyone for a husband.
I turned around and found my stepmother standing in the hall door with her hands folded, smiling at me.
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