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Love,

Sophie

PS. I’m sorry about the mess.

CHAPTER 66

A piercing cry comes from down the hall. But it stops, mid-scream—like in a horror movie, when the killer sneaks up from behind and slashes the screamer’s throat.

Jordan sprints down the hall. Other people are sprinting, too.

The patients stay where they are, shock on their faces. Terror.

Not again.

Not this again.

Beatrix pulls at her hair. “Who is it, who is it, who is it?” she yells.

Indy says, “I think that was the safety check on Sophie.” He leans hard against the wall and then slides down it. Grief twists his face into something strange and terrible. “And I think that was Amy finding out that Sophie wasn’t safe.”

Hannah overhears him, and her face goes utterly white. Her legs give out.

She’s down. Out.

Gone.

CHAPTER 67

“I don’t remember him at all,” Conn said, wiping up the last drops of his stew with a heel of soft bread. “I try and try, but it doesn’t matter.”

“Father left when you were three,” I said quietly. “How could you remember him?”

He’d joined Baron Jorian’s army when it left to fight in one of the king’s foreign campaigns, and half a dozen other men from our village had gone with him. They had no weapons or training; they were porters, cooks, and diggers of trenches.

My mother had begged him not to go, but he wouldn’t listen. “I’ll come home with pockets full of silver,” he’d said.

But what happened instead was that he never came home at all.

“What was he like?” Conn asked.

My mother abruptly got up from the table and went to stand by the fire. She twisted her hands in her apron and her eyes shone with unshed tears. She’d never stopped missing him, and I knew that part of her believed he was still alive. That he was lost somehow, somewhere, and he didn’t know how to get back home to us—but that someday he would.

I couldn’t have convinced her otherwise, even if I’d tried.

If we’d had a body to bury, maybe that would’ve brought hersome peace. If she could lay her hands on him one final time before committing him to the earth.

I remembered him perfectly, and I missed him horribly. But not as much as I missed Mary, buried in an unmarked grave outside the castle walls. Buried next to Otto, my would-be husband.

“Was he very big and very brave?” Conn asked. “Was he ugly like Vincy’s pa?”

I took his hand in mine. “He was very brave indeed,” I said. “He was tall and thin, with a long, black beard. He had a big, deep voice, and he used to sing us songs. Would you like to hear one?”

Conn nodded eagerly. My mother turned her back to us, and I could see her shoulders shaking.

I took a sip of ale and sang.

Fair was the evening time and still the sun shone bright