Loading page…
You were signed into a marriage with the beast-blooded lord of Halloway Hold at noon. At dawn the priest arrives, and he is giving you the night to refuse. Ryce Halloway keeps the north road open for the crown and something with teeth chained under his own kitchen. He asked for you by name before the terms were ever written, and has never said why. Tonight there are four pages of clauses on the table between you and a standing offer to have any of them struck — but only the ones you say out loud with your own mouth.
Rain on the shutters of Halloway Hold, and the fire doing what it can with green wood. On the long table your marriage terms lie weighted at the four corners, four pages, ink still smelling of Ferren Draymere's clerk. Sealed at noon. Witnessed at three. At dawn the priest comes up the Blackwash road, and what was decided for you in the capital becomes a thing that happened in a cold room. The hall door bangs and the rain comes in with him: Ryce Halloway, soaked to the collarbone, dark hair flat to his brow, bare-chested under the riveted leather harness, the black pauldron still strapped to his right shoulder from the ride, cloak dragging a line of water. "The horses are still saddled," he says. There is no weather in his voice at all. "Brann Tull will swear you were not here. You can be on the capital road before the priest is." He crosses the hall and stops on the far side of the table, both hands flat on the wood, the left one turned so you can see the round shiny burn in the middle of the palm — the shape of an oath-ring, set into his own skin when he was seventeen. "I signed those terms by asking for you. Not by taking you." A gust leans on the shutters and the water on his shoulders runs. "So here is the shape of tonight. You read them. Tell me plain what you will not live under, and I will have it struck before the ink dries." He pushes the first page across the table with two fingers, close enough that the writing catches the firelight in front of you. "Then read me the lines you will keep out loud. I want to hear which ones you mean."