Page 6 of Kingdom of Chains

Hadewaye jogged up to the group, stopping next to Alveye. ‘Was that the warden?’ Then, reading everyone’s expressions, he asked, ‘What did I miss?’

‘What did I miss,Commander,’ Tatum said.

Hadewaye frowned at him. ‘What?’

‘We’re going to the wastelands, and the warden put Tatum in charge,’ Alveye explained.

Hadewaye appeared genuinely surprised. ‘Really? Not Blackmane?’

Tatum threw his hands up. ‘The absolute lack of respect from the lot of you.’

‘I’ve no interest in commanding anyone,’ Blackmane said. ‘The warden made the right choice.’

Tatum waved a finger in his direction. ‘Don’t act like you don’t care, like we barely matter to you. I know for a fact that you would take an arrow through the skull for any one of us.’

‘Don’t read too much into that,’ Blackmane replied. ‘It was beaten into us during training.’

Hadewaye tucked his hands under his arms, still looking confused. ‘Why are we going to the wastelands?’

‘To find a woman willing to sleep with Alveye,’ Tatum replied.

Alveye gave him a tired look. ‘Is that your attempt at winning my respect?’

‘Is that your attempt at winning my respect,Commander?’ Tatum corrected.

Blackmane clapped Tatum on the shoulder. ‘I need a wash. I’ll leave you to fill Hadewaye in on the details of our vague assignment and the size of the unit you’ll be leading.’

Hadewaye perked up at that. ‘How many men?’

Tatum cleared his throat. ‘It’s on the smaller side.’ He looked over at Blackmane, who was now backing away from the group. ‘Don’t forget we’re leaving at first light.’

The defender saluted him. ‘Yes,Commander.’

CHAPTER 3

Isabel woke during the night to tapping on the window shutters. Flinging back the blankets, she leapt off the bed and ran across the icy stone floor to the window, trying to stay on the balls of her feet. She peered through a crack and found Margery looking back at her.

‘What are you doing here at this time of the night?’ she whispered as she opened the window. ‘You think simply because it is dark it is safe? All it takes is one guard mentioning that he saw you flying free and His Lordship will shoot you from the sky himself.’ But as she was delivering her speech, she was also guiding the eagle onto her arm. ‘Fine, you can stay, but you need to be gone before the sun rises.’ She made a face as she added, ‘His Lordship wants to take a walk in the morning.’

Isabel made her way back to the warm bed and climbed in. As she was lying down, she noticed something wound around Margery’s leg. She slid the eagle across the linen until the bird was directly beneath the moonlight coming in through the open window. Isabel’s breath caught when she saw it was a daisy chain, just like the ones she and Ita used to make when they were children.

‘Where did you get this?’ Isabel asked as she attempted to unwind it. Losing patience, she broke it apart and held it up to the light to study the handiwork. It was painfully, and impossibly, familiar. She held the ends together to see if it was the right size for a crown.

It was perfect.

‘If she was alive, I would know long before now.’ She laid the daisy chain on the table next to the bed. ‘If she had made it out of the house, she would have run straight to me. Am I wrong?’

Margery blinked sleepily.

Isabel had screamed Ita’s name over and over, pulling against Lord Hodge’s iron grip to return inside the burning house for her friend.

‘Stop,’ her mother had cried.

‘Do not go,’ Everard had pleaded as he clung to her waist.

‘It is too late,’ Hodge had said moments before the roof collapsed, sending flames twenty feet into the air.

She could almost feel the heat from them. Her toes curled beneath the blankets at the memory of walking barefoot across a scalding floor. It had taken a month for the burns on the soles of her feet to heal.