They Gave the Doomed Duke the Wrong Bride novel · Chapter 8 of 32
Chapter 8: Fennick
Rook kicked dirt over the fire.
The cave went black.
He pulled me down behind the rocks at the back and put his body between me and the mouth of the cave.
The torches came along the bank above us.
I could hear the horses blowing. A man spat.
"Nothing down there but the river."
"Check the caves."
"In this? He's drowned or he's halfway to the March. Come on. There's a fire at the inn."
The torches moved on.
We stayed down for a long time after.
His heart was pounding against my back.
"They want you," I said into the dark.
"They want a lot of people."
"Double if you're breathing. That's a lot of money for a ranger."
He was quiet.
"I was at the Pass," he said at last. "I saw the sacks when they opened them. I saw the sand. The Prince is paying to make sure nobody who saw it gets to a magistrate."
It made sense.
It made perfect sense.
I lay there in his coat with the Prince's letter still folded in my bodice and thought, Draycott lives.
I thought about the scar.
I thought about how a ranger knew the Duke's treasury door in the dark.
"Rook," I said.
"Mm."
"Nothing."
He took me back up the river in the dark, along the bank.
He left me at the edge of the column's camp an hour before dawn.
"You'll freeze in that shift," he said.
"I'll manage."
"You always say that."
"I always manage."
He touched my face once, very lightly, with the back of his knuckles.
Then he was gone into the trees.
Isobel was awake.
She was sitting up in the cart with Ned asleep across her lap.
When she saw me climb in wearing a strange man's coat over a wet shift, her eyebrows went up into her hair.
"Don't," I said.
"I didn't say anything."
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