They Gave the Doomed Duke the Wrong Bride novel · Chapter 6 of 32

Chapter 6: Sand in the Wagons

Nobody said it out loud.

They didn't have to.

A woman from the officers' families pulled her daughter back by the shoulder, away from me.

The sergeant stood up slowly and kept his hand near his sword.

I stayed kneeling in the mud beside the dead man.

"I swapped the skins," I said. "If I wanted the boy dead, I'd have let him drink."

"Unless you wanted us to trust you," somebody said.

"Then I'm very bad at this, because none of you do."

It was Isobel who ended it.

"Get up," she said to me.

I got up.

She looked at me for a long moment, still holding Ned against her side.

Then she turned to the column.

"She's been feeding my son out of her own hands for three days," she said. "She stood up to that man with a sword at his chest when the rest of us sat in our carts. If a Penhallow paid for this, it wasn't this one."

Nobody argued with the Dowager Duchess of Draycott.

Not even in exile.

The guards buried the thin man by the road.

We moved on.

Ned rode beside me on the cart shaft for the rest of the day.

He didn't say a word, which for Ned was a kind of illness.

At the evening halt Isobel sent the cook away with the boy and sat down beside me at the fire.

She didn't look at me.

She looked at the flames.

"My son was betrothed to your sister for four years," she said. "He met her twice. He said she laughed at the wrong things."

"She still does."

"When the news came from the Pass, your father wrote to me. A very kind letter. He said Seraphine was prostrate with grief." Isobel's mouth twisted. "Then a week later she was promised to the Crown Prince."

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