They Gave My Crown to an Adopted Daughter. The Queen Raged novel · Chapter 9 of 24

Chapter 9: The Ribbon

I put the ribbon back exactly where I had found it.

I folded the lining over it, hung the coat on the chair, and lay down beside my husband with my eyes open.

He woke before the bells, as he always did.

I breathed slow and even and let him think I slept.

He dressed in the dark and went out past the guards, who let him pass without a word.

That was strange in itself, because the guards had not let me pass anywhere for three days.

I waited a count of fifty.

Then I put on the green gown and my boots and slid out after him.

The guards looked at my feet and looked at each other.

"I'm going to chapel," I said. "Come along if you like."

They did not like.

I found him at the bottom of the east stair, in the little stone chapel where my mother used to take me at Midwinter to light the first candle of the year.

It was cold and dim, with a rack of tallow lights under a painted saint, and nobody else was there.

I stopped in the doorway behind a pillar.

Conroy stood before the rack with his hands at his sides.

He took a taper, lit it from the lamp, and touched it to a candle on the left.

He said something low in the Skarn tongue, and I understood every word, because I had spent three years learning it.

"Forgive me, Mother."

He lit a second candle on the right, and his voice cracked in the middle.

"And you, little one. I have not forgotten."

He stood with his head down for a long moment, a big man in a black coat in a very small chapel.

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