Chapter 15: The Second Seal

Corwin's POV

"Who told me to sign?" I said.

Oswin spread his hands, gentle, almost sad.

"She's cornered, brother. A cornered woman will throw any name she can reach. I told you to wait a night. You didn't."

It was possible.

That was the worst part.

I could not remember the study.

I remembered the paper, the pen, and a roaring in my ears.

I remembered somebody's warm hand on my shoulder.

The chair set the unfit motion for dawn, in the circle.

Moot law lets a Beta who names his Alpha unfit prove it with his body.

Maud was walked off to the healers' tent between two old women.

Oswin was left free.

Nobody had anything on him but a burned page and a hysterical woman's word.

I told Tilda to wait with Hetta and the ferryman at the cart by the long hall.

She looked at my face and did not argue, which frightened me more than anything else that day.

At midnight Oswin was eating with his captains at the far end of camp.

I could hear him laughing in his good carrying voice.

I walked into his tent alone.

The Beta travels with the second seal in a locked box.

It sat under his cot, small and iron-bound, with a lock the size of my thumb.

I had never asked to see it in eleven years.

I knelt, set the lock against the tent pole, and broke it with the hilt of my knife.

The first thing in it was the seal itself, a heavy brass stamp on a ring.

A thread of grey wax was still caught in the grooves.

The second was a sheet of rejection paper in Oswin's tidy hand.

It was a draft of the decree I had signed. Every clause was the same, with the date at the top.

It was dated the day Tilda told Maud about the letter.

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Left My Rejection on His Desk, So I Signed It Myself from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.