Nevan
I took the stairs five at a time.
Tiara was still stamping in the courtyard behind me, unsaddled, unattended, her reins dangling where I'd dropped them because the moment the stable hand had shouted that the Duchess was in labour, nothing else in the world existed except the distance between me and the room at the top of those stairs.
I'd been at Thornfield, inspecting the rebuilding of the village the blight had once consumed. The new cottages were nearly finished, their stone walls clean and pale, their gardens freshly planted. The well had water again. Children were playing in the square where a dead girl's shoe had once lain half-buried in grey dust.
That was where the rider had found me, breathless and grinning, shouting across the village green that it was time.
I hadn't stopped moving since.
