They Gave My Crown to an Adopted Daughter. The Queen Raged novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: The Wolf's Sister

The guards let me go, because Conroy asked them to.

They marched Marigold off to the royal physician with a hand on each elbow, and she wept the whole way down the gallery.

She did not look back at him again.

The tower door shut behind us, and the bolt went across outside.

I put the tonic bottle on the table.

I put my hands flat on either side of it, and I did not turn around.

"I'll answer one question," Conroy said behind me. "Ask the right one."

"Who is she?"

The candle flame leaned and straightened.

"My sister," he said.

I had known it, and it still went through me.

"My father's daughter," he went on, flat and low. "Her mother washed linen in the north kitchens. She was nineteen. She died of a winter fever when the child was four."

"The old king took the girl into the nursery and had her raised among his bastards."

"I was eighteen."

"I taught her to ride a pony. I sang her the wolf song every night because she wouldn't sleep without it."

I turned around.

He was standing at the end of the room with his arms at his sides and his face shut.

"She was six," he said, "when my father sent her south with a Merrow envoy and a story about a burned farm."

"He told me she was going to be fostered in a good house. He told me the war would end sooner with a Skarn child inside the Merrow court."

"I was eighteen, and I believed him."

"You believed him for fifteen years?"

"I understood within a year," Conroy said. "I wrote to her. Every spring, with a letter and a bit of gold. She never answered."

"And then you married me."

"Then I met you."

"You came to Merrow for her."

"I came to Merrow for the peace. I came for the peace first." His voice cracked. "And I thought, if I held the peace, I could ask for her back."

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