Chapter 11: Quartermaster

He stopped three steps from me.

Up close he was smaller than I had thought, a stooped grey man in an old coat.

He wore a quartermaster's brass keys on his belt.

His hands shook so badly the cap in them trembled.

"That girl," my father said, to the courtyard, not to me. "That girl is a stranger."

A long breath went through the pack.

"My daughter ran away five years ago," he said. "She's dead. I won't hear it said that she's come back."

He stared hard at the cobbles.

Behind him, on the hall steps, I saw the stepmother's face, calm as a plate.

"I see," I said.

I kept my voice low, so that only the front rows could hear.

"I don't know you either."

His eyes came up for the first time.

They were grey, and wet, and tired, and I felt the strangest pull in my chest.

"I woke up in a snowbank at eighteen with my wrist cut open and no name."

"Yesterday you told your guards you'd never seen me."

"Please," he whispered.

"I'm not asking you to say I'm your daughter. I'm looking for a reason to be sorry. Give me one."

"Lenna," said a voice, quite near.

It was the old woman with the shawl over her head, the one who had said Wrenfield hands.

"Hush," hissed somebody.

"I won't be quiet," she said. "I nursed that girl through the measles, and I'll say her name in the sun."

Two or three people moved their feet.

A younger man in the third row said "Lenna" too, under his breath.

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