Reborn, I Let My Sister Take the Poisoned Crown novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: Three Letters a Year

They held the judgment in the same hall the next morning, with the doors wide open.

Pell had been taken down to the cells before dawn.

The Council had voted forty to nothing to try him, and the stout woman in the third row had been the first to raise her hand.

The Highmoor delegation had come up the road overnight, nineteen villagers in their moot-day coats, because the king had sent for them.

They stood together against the left wall.

I saw the elder who had blocked my way at the moot, with his hat in his fists.

I saw the clerk who had written to the Council about me, and he looked at his boots.

Sorrel sat on a bench at the foot of the dais in a plain brown dress.

The band was gone from her head, and a red mark lay across her brow where it had been.

She had a fever.

I knew because I felt nothing.

All my life, her fever had been mine, and her chills, and her bad nights.

This morning I sat beside the king with my hands in my lap, and I had never felt so alone in my body.

Or so free.

"Sorrel Fenwick," said Rurik.

She stood.

"You took a potion to fake a death, to win a crown that was killing girls. You signed a paper to put the cost of it on your sister. And you rang a bell to bring the Council to her."

"Yes," said Sorrel.

She said it quietly, and every head in the hall tilted.

"Your law for the unchosen twin was death if she set foot in the capital." He did not look at me. "I have burned that law. I would burn yours, too, if it were mine to burn."

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