Chapter 25: The Purse and the Key

Alaric's POV

The captain of the guard broke the lock with the butt of his dagger.

Nobody in the council chamber made a sound while he did it.

I stood at my wife's shoulder and watched the lid come up.

On top lay a folded square of green wax cloth, and under it a plaster mould.

It was my wolf's head, cast so cleanly that I could count the teeth.

The captain laid it on the table beside the mould my own captain had taken from the arsonist.

They were the same seal, cast twice from the same wax.

"Two," said the chancellor. "Both of them pressed from one signet."

"Go on," said the king.

Next came a bundle of practice sheets, tied with string.

My signature was on them forty times, then Linnet's father's, then hers.

Under those lay a single sheet of heavy paper that made me forget to breathe.

It was a death warrant for the Earl of Trevanion, written out in full and dated twenty-two months ahead.

The king's name stood at the foot of it in an even clerk's hand, and my seal was pressed beside it in red.

The date was one that nobody in the room could have known.

Nobody except one woman, who had written it in a green diary on her first night at Wexmoor.

I did not look at the paper again.

I looked at Linnet.

Her hands were flat on the table, as they had been all day, and the knuckles were white.

She had not looked at Edmund once since the box came in.

She turned her head, and she looked at me.

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