Chapter 8: Four Days

Lysandra woke alone, with the sun on her face and her body aching in new places.

She lay still and counted them.

Her thighs, her shoulder where he'd bitten her, the small of her back.

The memory of the table came up fast and hot, and she pressed her face into the pillow and swore at it.

A folded note lay on the second pillow, where the Duke had no business leaving anything.

It was five lines in a hard black hand.

"Border. Four days. Do not drink anything she hands you. Do not carry anything to her. Lock your door. A."

She read it three times.

She didn't like how much she liked the last two letters.

"He left at four, Your Grace," Greta said from the doorway, with the morning tray.

"With six men and the black coat. He told the steward he'd be at the Gray Pass by tomorrow night."

Lysandra sat up so fast the sheet fell.

"The Gray Pass."

"Yes, Your Grace."

"Did he say why?" Lysandra asked.

"Raiders, he said," Greta said. "On the north road."

Lysandra's stomach went cold.

She had read this chapter.

It was chapter eleven, and it was one of the book's favorites.

The Duke would ride up to the Gray Pass to clear out raiders.

He would be ambushed in the narrow part by forty men who knew exactly where he would be.

He would lose six of his own, take a sword through the left hand, and lie bleeding in the snow.

And the Saintess would ride up, alone and glowing, to heal him.

That was the scene where the Duke first looked at Anneliese the way he had never looked at his wife.

Lysandra had not liked it much then.

She liked it a good deal less now.

[Scripted scene ahead: The Gray Pass. The Saintess arrives. The Duke is wounded.]

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