Chapter 11: The Keeper

The Keeper of the Moon Stone was a small, white-haired woman with a leg brace and a cloak that smelled of horse.

The border patrol had found her sitting on a milestone a mile short of Stanmore land, too dazed to say how she got there.

They laid her on a cot in the same infirmary where I had been told to take off my skirt.

She grabbed my hand the moment I came in.

"Elspeth Marrow," she said. "You have your mother's eyes."

"You knew my mother?"

"I read her bond, too."

Her fingers were dry paper and they trembled.

Thane stood at the foot of the cot with his arms folded.

"Keeper, who took you from your tower?"

"A man with a hood and a cup of something bitter," she said. "I never saw his face."

"Whose ring did he wear?"

She shut her mouth.

Her eyes slid to the door, then to me, and I watched her decide.

"I'll answer that to the Stone," she said. "Not in a sickroom, and not to a whisper."

"Keeper-"

"A King who asks in a tower gets a tower's answer, Majesty. Let me say it where nobody can say I was frightened into it."

I looked at Thane.

His amber eyes had darkened, but he nodded slowly.

"Where is your ledger?"

"Sewn in the hem of this cloak," she said. "Where it has been for thirty years, whenever I travelled."

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