The Girl He Sold Returned as the King's Mate novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: 0918

The woman stopped three paces from me with the lantern shaking in her hand.

She was thin, with cropped hair, and she looked at my face for a long time.

"You have her eyes," she said.

"Whose?"

"A girl I slept beside for four years. Grey, like yours. She sang under her breath when the wardens counted us."

My throat closed.

"What did she sing?"

The woman opened her mouth, and what came out was a tune.

It was a dock song, the one about the cook's cat, the one my mother had sung in the kitchen at Riverbend when I was small.

I had not heard it since I was nine, and I had never sung it to anyone.

"Thea," the woman said. "You're Thea."

"I'm Astrid," I said. "I was Thea."

The lantern dropped.

I caught it before it hit the floor, and she caught me, and we stood in the dark of the salt warehouse holding on to each other with our wrists crossed, the two numbers side by side.

Her hands smelled of lye.

She was sobbing in great dry heaves, with no sound.

"They told me you died," she said into my shoulder. "I was fourteen. They took you off the barge in a fever, and the warden said you were buried in the marsh. I saw them carry you out."

"I was sold on to the quarries," I said. "They said the same about you."

"I stayed," she said. "I stayed because someone had to mind the little ones. Nobody else would."

I held her until her breathing evened.

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