Chapter 9: The Green Cloak

I left the Hart and Plough before dawn with Merewyn's kiss still on my mouth and her words in my ears.

A green cloak.

I walked to the charcoal burners' hollow with my teeth locked.

The captain was waiting on his grey with a lantern.

He had been gone four days on the Tamworth road.

He came back with mud to his thighs and the look he wore before a battle.

"The Crow and Lantern," he said, as I came up. "I found the widow."

"What widow?"

"The innkeeper died six winters ago. His wife keeps the house."

"She remembers the day the old Duke stopped there and left with a child on his saddle."

"She remembers me."

"She remembers you crying." He held out his hand.

In it lay a small bronze disc on a cord, no bigger than a thumbnail.

Someone had stamped a hound's head on it.

"The man who sold you left this behind, drunk, the winter after," the captain said.

"She kept it because it was bronze, and she thought it might be worth something."

I took it.

It was warm from his palm.

"A hound," I said.

"The kennel badge of the reeve's house at Thornwick. Gaunt keeps the hunt for the manor. Every man who feeds his dogs wears one."

"She knew whose man he was?"

"He bragged. He said a gentleman had paid him a silver mark to take a child off the fair."

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