Chapter 110

He rode out at dusk the next day.

I watched him go from the loft door with a pitchfork in my hands. Four riders came round from the front of the house, and he was the second, on a tall black horse that did not like him, bareheaded in the cold. They took the road up the valley to the south and east, toward the passes—the guest road, the stable-man called it. When they were gone it seemed to me that the whole valley let out a breath.

Gone to look at a king, said my wolf.

I put the pitchfork down.

***

Lyra came up the loft ladder a little after midnight, in the dark, without a light.

Rowan was awake before her head came over the edge. She stopped on the top rung, and in what little light came through the loft door I could see her face, and it was different.

Not free. I would not have called it free. But the hand that had lain over her in the yard, close as a glamour, had loosened, as a rope goes slack when the man holding it has walked o