They Gave the Doomed Duke the Wrong Bride novel · Chapter 13 of 32

Chapter 13: What You Owe

He stared at me for a long time.

"How long?" he said finally.

"Since the meadow outside Fennick. Your mother slapped you so hard the sheep woke up."

He shut his eyes.

"Eleven days," he said. "You've known for eleven days."

"Eleven days of basins."

"You let me wash Ned's stockings."

"You let me think my husband was a dead traitor in a ditch. I think the stockings were fair."

He opened his eyes again.

There was no Rook in them now. Just a tired man with a hole in his side, looking at his wife for the first time in daylight.

"Tell me," I said. "All of it. Before your mother wakes up and does it for you."

He told me.

The last supply wagon at the Pass had carried six casks of wine and nothing else that wasn't sand.

The officers drank it the night it came.

"I had one cup," he said. "The men who had three didn't wake up."

Two of his riders found him in the snow at dawn, still breathing. They carried him down a goat track to a shepherd's hut and kept him there through the worst of it.

"When I could stand, I went south. I wanted to warn my mother. I came over the garden wall the night of the wedding and found the house full of guards and a girl in my sister-in-law's veil walking out of my treasury with nothing in her hands."

"Your sister-in-law's veil," I said. "You were betrothed to her for four years."

"I met her twice."

"She laughed at the wrong things."

His mouth moved. "Mother told you that."

"Your mother tells me a great deal at night, when she thinks I'm asleep."

I leaned back against the wagon wall.

"Why didn't you tell me in the vault?"

"I didn't know who you were. You were a Penhallow." He looked at the canvas roof. "By the river, I knew who you were. That's when it got worse."

"Worse how?"

"The Prince has men on this road looking for me. If they find me inside the column, they don't take me alone. They take everyone who hid me. My mother. Ned. Thirty-one families." He turned his head. "You. As long as nobody knew, nobody could be hanged for knowing."

"So you decided for all of us."

"Yes."

"Without asking."

"Yes."

"And you let me carry it alone. The letter. Your mother's face. Every night pretending I didn't see her cry into her soup." My voice was going up and I let it. "You let me stand in that vault and play the Duchess to my own husband while you laughed at me in the dark."

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