They Sold Me as a Brood Bride, So I Enrolled in the Boys' Alpha College novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Strike It Out
At the high table Gwen reads the brood-bride schedule, hears Rhodri say she has the hips for it, strikes her own name and writes her cousin Gwyn's over it, and throws her cut braid out of her brother's car.
The schedule was on the last page, and the last page was in my father's handwriting.
I read it standing at the high table with the wine jug still in my hand.
Three litters of sons of royal blood, to be delivered to the Penhallow hearth.
The bride to be returned to the Crown after the third.
Returned, like a borrowed mare.
Forty wolves were eating lamb below me in my father's long hall, and not one of them had told me what I was for.
They had let me carry the wine instead.
It was three days before my twentieth birthday, and the betrothal feast had been called for that night.
The contract lay open between the salt dish and my father's seal.
On top of it sat the grey-blue slate paperweight that was always at his hand.
My father sat in his high chair with a blanket over his knees, and he did not look at me.
He had not looked at me since the soup.
The groom looked at me enough for both of them.
He was Rhodri Penhallow, forty-one, heavy and handsome, with a navy coat and a pewter pin at his throat.
He had buried two wives.
He picked up his cup and held it toward me, and I filled it because forty people were watching me not fill it.
"Your daughter's grown well, Madoc," he said, loud enough for the benches.
"She has the hips for it."
A few men laughed.
Most of the hall studied their plates.
My second cousin, who had taught me to ride, found something fascinating in his bread.
Nobody said a word.
I stood there with the jug and my face on fire and the page still open beside the salt.
I had a reason to read the last page after all.
The ink on it was a different black from the pages before.
Fresher, with a blue edge to it, as if it had been added after everything else was signed.
I did not know what that meant.
I knew what the words meant.
I set the jug down on the cloth.
I took the quill from beside my father's seal, and the whole high table went still.
"Gwenllian," my father said.
It was the first time he had said my name in a week.
I drew one line through my own name on the schedule.
Then I wrote above it, in capitals so the back benches could read them: GWYN TREHARNE, COUSIN OF THE NORTHERN VALLEY.
I did not even know why that was the name.
It was the first one that came into my head, a boy cousin who had died as a baby.
The nib scratched in the quiet like a mouse.
"If the Penhallow hearth wants a Treharne," I said, "it can have the one who isn't breathing."
Rhodri's smile stayed where it was.
But his hand closed slowly around his cup, and I heard the pewter crease.
"Get her out," my father said, and his voice broke on the cough that was killing him.
I did not wait to be sure which of us he meant.
I walked down the dais steps through forty wolves and not one of them stood.
I went out through the kitchens, past the cooks who stopped chopping, and through the yard door into the rain.
My brother Elis was waiting in the lane with the engine running and a college trunk in the boot.
He did not ask what had happened.
He held the back door open, and his face was the face of a man who had been told this might come.
"Get in," he said. "Quickly."
"You knew," I said.
"I knew you'd read it."
I got in.
There was a pair of kitchen shears lying on the seat.
He climbed in beside me with his big hands shaking a little, and he said, "Hold still, Gwen. You'll thank me."
I had not agreed to anything.
I felt the shears at the back of my neck anyway, and the cold, and then my whole braid came away in his fist.
He had cut it before I could say yes.
I sat there with the air on my bare neck, and I wanted to hit him.
I wanted to cry too, and I did neither.
The lane lit up in the beam of the castle gates behind us, with men coming out onto the steps.
"There's a letter in the trunk," Elis said. "Don't open it until term's end."
"What term?"
"Craig Cadarn's."
I stared at him.
"It's a school for boys, Elis."
"It's the one place Rhodri Penhallow can't walk in," he said. "Not a lord, not a parent, not a betrothed. Three hundred years, no exceptions in term."
He started the car.
Beside him on the floor sat a flask of something black and bitter-smelling, and I did not yet know what it was for.
I looked down at the braid in his lap.
My mother had tied the ribbon at the end of it the winter before she died.
I took it from him and held it up so the lantern light caught it.
Then I wound down the window and threw it out onto the castle drive.
Let the Penhallow men find it in the morning.
Let them know what I thought of being delivered.
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