Chapter 103

ROWAN

There’s a kind of summer weather that sits on a road like a hand. No wind, a white sky, the flies thick on the horses’ necks, and thunder somewhere off in the hills that never quite makes up its mind. We rode three days in it out of Mirefold, and by the second I could have told you every stone in Pudding’s near hind shoe by the sound.

They were behind us the whole way. Not close. Close enough.

I never saw them. You don’t, with the Seelie. What you see is a farm wife at a gate who’s had visitors that morning and won’t say so, and once, on the second evening, a line of bracken on the ridge above us lying flat, too straight for any beast to have made. Twelve horses, Lucien had counted.

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The lass rode in the middle, because I put her there and for once she let me.

She sat Mist the way she always had, light and a bit stiff in the back. The satchel was across her body, and she kept one hand on it more than she knew. When we stopped to wa