This Time, I Won't Beg for His Mark novel · Chapter 15 of 24
Chapter 15: The Brask Knot
Valerie's POV
I came out of Agnes's door and the yard was full of strangers.
They stood in rows between the hall and the woodpile, Ridgeback women with babies, old men in feed caps, the cook in her apron with a child on each hip.
Every one of them had empty hands.
Cold Spur stood at the doors and windows and watched them, and nobody spoke.
Then a Ridgeback girl of about eight walked across the packed snow to a Cold Spur boy and asked him if he wanted a cookie.
He took it.
After that, people started to move.
I stood on the hall steps with the moonstone under my sweater and Agnes at my elbow.
"The elders will sit tonight," she said. "Out here. Before all of them."
"Can they?"
"They'd better. Look at the faces."
The eldest came out with a lantern, then the woman on his left, then the heavy one.
They sat at the table on the steps, and I laid the leather stamp in front of them.
I told them where it had been.
Agnes told them whose sewing basket.
Hester came out last, in her cardigan, and stopped at the sight of it.
"I've never seen that thing in my life," she said.
"It was under your wool," said Agnes.
"Then somebody put it there." Hester's voice shook, beautifully. "Doyle has the run of my house. He fetches my firewood. I have trusted that man like my own son."
"Doyle," said the eldest.
Doyle came up the steps with his splinted wrist and his jaw set.
"It's a Ridgeback lie, Elder."
"Is it?" said a woman's voice.
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