Chapter 117

We came down out of the snow on the third morning, and the King of Vaelmoor rode ten lengths behind me all the way.

I had set the number myself, in the yard of the shepherd’s hut, with the horses saddled and our breath hanging in the air. Lucien and Saskia were already out of sight down the far side of the pass. I checked Mist’s girth, which did not need checking, and said without looking round, “Ten lengths.”

A short silence behind me.

“Ten,” said Caspian.

“Not nine on the narrow places. Not twelve when you think I’m angry. Ten.”

“Ten,” he said again, and that was all. When I looked back from the first bend he was exactly where I had put him.

Rowan, beside me, with his bad leg stuck out stiff from Pudding’s side like a bowsprit, said, “That’s a lot of lengths on a mountain road, lass.”

“Then it will be good practice for him,” I said.

***

He kept it for eighteen days.

He kept it on the switchbacks above the tree line, where