After My Husband Abandoned Me, I Rule All Dragons novel · Chapter 14 of 32

Chapter 14: One Table

Wystan pulled the arrow out of his gate and read the scroll in the yard, with the whole Hold around him.

He didn't read it out loud.

He handed it to Bettris.

She read it and laughed, a short hard bark.

"War," she said. "They've been hanging us one at a time for thirty years. Now they've written it down."

A clansman by the well spat in the snow.

"That's because of them," he said, and pointed at the hay loft.

Nine southern faces were looking down out of the loft door.

By noon there'd been a fight.

I heard it from the tower.

When I got down to the yard, the elder's son had the cowlick boy pinned against the well.

Two of the clan's drakes were holding the sorrel boy by the arms.

The grey boy with the nicked ear was bleeding from the nose and trying to get at all of them at once.

"Your Wing hanged my cousins at Highcrag," the elder's son was shouting. "You hunted my king over the moors like a stag!"

"I wasn't even born when your clans walked out!" the cowlick boy shouted back.

"You'll burn us all down on our own mountain!"

"Enough," I said.

Nobody heard me.

So I put my hands to my mouth and sang.

Not loud.

Just the pot song, and their names over it, one after another.

Every drake in that yard knew my voice by now.

Every one of them stopped.

The elder's son let go first.

He stood there breathing hard, staring at me.

"Don't do that," he said.

"Then don't make me."

I looked round the yard at all of them.

"Supper's at dusk," I said. "Everybody eats in the hall. At one table."

"There isn't a table that big," Bettris said.

"Then the cook can push two together."

That evening the cook did.

He put the southerners down one side and the clan down the other, because I hadn't told him not to.

So I got up, picked up the grey boy's bowl, and put it down between the elder's son and Bettris.

Then I did the same with the sorrel boy.

Then the girl from the quarry.

By the time I'd moved six, the hall had gone quiet.

The elder stood up at the end of the bench.

He looked at the girl sitting next to his son.

"Pass her the bread," he told him.

His son passed her the bread.

The next morning Dorrit took the Wing out to the practice yard.

"You lot have been sung down by one woman your whole lives," she told them. "That's done. From now on, every one of you learns twenty voices up here. Shepherds. Cooks. Him."

She pointed at the elder.

"Why would I sing to the crown's drakes?" the old man said.

"Because when they burn defending your wall," Dorrit said, "you'll want them to come down on your side of it."

He sang.

Badly, but he sang.

By the end of the week the school had twenty students instead of ten.

Two of the shepherds' wives had come.

The elder's son had started bringing the clan drakes to the gorge rocks to hear the southerners practise, and the other way round.

On the seventh night, a shepherd came in off the high pastures and said there were campfires on the moors below the pass.

Hundreds of them.

Wystan sent the scouts out and came in from the wall late, after everyone had gone to bed.

I heard his door shut along the passage.

I lay in the dark for a long time.

Then I got up and went to it.

I didn't knock.

His room was at the top of the keep, with one window over the lake.

The fire was banked low.

He was standing by it in his shirt and breeches, barefoot, a map of the pass still in his hand.

He looked round.

He put the map down.

"Alys."

"You said not on a wall," I said. "You said not the first time."

"I did."

"This isn't a wall."

His eyes went over me, slow, from my bare feet to my loose braid.

"No," he said. "It isn't."

"There's an army on the moors."

"I know."

"So I'm not waiting for a better night. There won't be one." I pulled the tie off the end of my braid. "I've been thinking all week. About you. Only you."

He crossed the room in three steps.

He didn't touch me.

He stood so close I could feel the fire coming off him.

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