Prince, Cinderella Forsakes You novel · Chapter 26 of 32

Chapter 26: The Lease

We rode out at first light.

Cassian, me, Dulcie, the steward on a mule, and half the village on foot behind us with saws and bill hooks.

The east ridge was the only green left in the Thornwood.

It was old forest up there. Oak and beech and huge gray firs that the curse had never touched, because nobody had ever cared about them.

The orchards had always been the Thornwood's money. The forest was just there.

We smelled it before we saw it. Pine sap and wet sawdust and smoke.

Then we came over the ridge.

There was a gap in the forest the size of a market square.

Stumps everywhere, raw and yellow. Brush fires smoking at the edges.

A line of carts stood loaded with trunks, chained down, ready for the road south.

Forty men at least were working. The crash of a falling tree shook the ground under the horses.

And at the center of it, on a camp stool, with a ledger on his knee and a fur collar up to his ears, sat the timber merchant.

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