Free A Brother's Price by 111325346436434 Page A

with him, paper labels proclaiming EVERLAST. A crib drug, meant to keep the men passive, willing, and able.
    Her women had uncovered the grave, and they stood silent, staring at the body. The younger Whistlers hung back, their fierceness stripped by their shock, unable to even look at the man. Her eyes furious, Eldest knelt beside the corpse and covered his nakedness with her coat.
    Ren didn’t want to look at the body, even with it decently covered. She didn’t want to think of a rich Wainwright home now reduced to ash, of the intelligent women who were now burned shells, nor of the handsome husband showed off to visiting royalty. She turned instead to Raven. ‘‘It’s Wainwrights’ husband, isn’t it?’’
    ‘‘Yes.’’ Raven said. ‘‘His name was Egan, if I remember right.’’
    ‘‘They overdosed him?’’ Ren guessed. It was a common problem in cribs, and even in a few families where the number of wives was high.
    Raven looked bleak and confused. ‘‘They cut out his tongue, I suppose to ensure his silence, but botched it completely. Either he choked to death on his own blood, or he bled to death.’’
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    Wen Spencer
    ‘‘Holy Mothers!’’ Ren trembled. ‘‘What kind of animals could do this? Rape a man, then maim him so. What if he got you with child? What do you tell your daughter? ‘I tore your father’s tongue out after I raped him’?’’
    Raven shrugged. ‘‘When your family’s been bred out of the cribs, you don’t talk about how you got pregnant. You go into an unlit room, a man half incoherent with drugs ruts on top of you, breaks your hymen—hopefully plants a fertile seed—and you leave. What’s there to say except it was dark, painful, and bloody?’’
    Ren glanced at the gathered women. The women of her guard—all fathered from cribs—were passive in the face of this horror. The Whistlers, two generations removed from the cribs, looked panic-stricken. Did you have to have a loving father to understand the horror?
    ‘‘Your Highness.’’ Eldest struggled to keep fear from her face. ‘‘There’s nothing here for us. We need to go!
    We need to get back to our brothers!’’
    Jerin! Odelia! Ren nodded even as she glanced to Raven.
    ‘‘The other five are river trash.’’ Raven indicated the other five shallow graves holding women in dirty ragged clothing. ‘‘The largest is wearing a bandage on her arm.’’
    ‘‘Odelia’s attackers.’’
    ‘‘They’ve been shot, searched, and buried. There’s nothing to identify them with.’’
    Ren looked out upon the river. The trail ended here, then, at least for her. Summer Court opened in less than a week, and she needed to return home to Mayfair to act as Elder Judge. ‘‘There’s nothing here for us. Let’s go.’’
    With no twenty sisters and one wounded princess to feed, Jerin did not hold dinner. He sent a tray of food up to Odelia with Summer, and the family ate a quiet dinner. He put the leftovers in the warming ovens for the others. Cleanup would have to wait until the others had eaten.
    His announcement that it was bath night was greeted A BROTHER’S PRICE
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    with much groaning and moaning. He supervised the water brigade to fill the tanks of the bathhouse boiler, and had the fire built up. As the water heated, he sent the little ones up to their rooms to strip down and to troop back for the cold-water scrub and hot-water communal soak. He went up to his quarters, undressed, and realized there was a good chance Ren and her women would return before he finished bathing. He couldn’t go out in just a towel as usual. He opened his wedding chest and found his grandfather’s silk bathing gown. It slid on like a cool, soft hand. Just in case Ren saw him, he also put on his only piece of jewelry, a small golden deer encrusted with green stones strung on a gold chain. Eldest had told Jerin once that most neighboring families found the Whistlers’ bathhouse a source of mystery. Apparently most