The Tyrant's Pet novel · Chapter 22 of 32

Chapter 22: Clear Water

Ossian turned toward the river road.

I caught his black hand before he'd taken two steps.

"Let them run," I said.

"They're running to the man who poisoned my well."

"Then they'll all be in one house." I held on.

"And we've got his ledger, and twelve miners who'll say where the salt went."

He looked down the valley at the river running glass.

"In front of everyone," he said.

"In front of everyone."

He stayed where he was, quiet, and didn't go.

Corran stayed in the valley with the miners.

Nobody asked him to.

When our wagons left, he was in the drained pond to his knees with a shovel, and he didn't look up.

The river under my window in the Coil was still gray.

"Forty miles of clear water has to come down," Agatha said, at breakfast. "Give it time. It's a river, not a miracle."

All eleven of us were at the long kitchen table for the first time since Saltgate.

The two women who'd stayed behind wouldn't stop touching our sleeves.

"The Alpha came in the north gate last night," one of them said. "With his son and a strongbox."

"They went straight to the chancellor's townhouse. Nobody's come out."

"And Lettice?"

"Came back from the Fork days ago. Hasn't left it since."

Ossian came in late with his sleeve rolled up.

Two Coil physicians trailed behind him with a measuring tape and very worried faces.

"Show them," Agatha said.

He held out his right arm on the table between the bread and the jam.

Black from the fingertips to just below the elbow.

The stitched line from the Fork sat above it, pink and clean.

"Same as when we measured it three days ago," the older physician said. "To the hair."

"It's stopped?" I said.

"It's stopped moving, my lady. For the first time in two years, it hasn't moved."

Nobody said anything.

The newest tribute put her face in her hands.

The woman with flour on her arms got up and banged a pot very loudly so nobody would see her eyes.

Ossian looked at his arm.

Then he looked at me, down the length of the table.

He didn't say anything.

I waited for him to ask.

He didn't.

He picked up a piece of bread and put jam on it.

"That's mine," the newest tribute said through her fingers.

"I'm an emperor."

"It's still my jam."

He gave it to her.

I spent the afternoon in the poison-house with the windows open.

I didn't work.

I sat on the worktable where he'd lifted me once and listened to the river.

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