The Mate He Gave Away novel · Chapter 5 of 40
Chapter 5: Greyford
Corvin didn't say anything on the walk back up to the keep.
He carried the coil of wet rope over his shoulder and looked straight ahead.
At the gate he stopped.
"Eight years," he said. "My brother told the court I burned it drunk. I let them say it. I thought maybe I'd left a lamp lit. I thought maybe it was my fault."
"Quarrymen don't work for free," I said.
"No."
"So somebody paid them."
He looked down at the black mill on the falls.
"Somebody with money who wanted the north's rye going south."
Neither of us said the name.
We didn't have to.
"We need a new runner stone," I said. "My father has a spare at Greyford. Two days' ride."
"Then we go to Greyford."
He sat down at the table in the hall and wrote an order for an ox cart and two drivers.
His handwriting was square and heavy.
I watched him write it.
I didn't think anything of it then.
We left the next morning with Davy waving from the stable roof.
Greyford sat where the Greywater bends, a village of thatch and stone around a square with a well in it.
My father's mill stood at the end of the lane, the wheel turning slow in the race.
He was in the doorway when we rode up, white to the eyebrows with flour, exactly the way I'd left him three years before.
He was thinner.
"Clemmie," he said.
Then he had me off the mare and up in the air like I was six.
"Put me down. I'm a grown woman."
"You're a grown woman who stabbed a king, I hear."
"I stabbed myself. It's different."
"Not the way they tell it at the alehouse." He set me down and looked at Corvin over my head. "So you're the brother."
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