Chapter 131

I had my boots on before the porridge was cold.

Nobody stopped me. I noticed that with the part of me that had been counting doors for most of my life. Nana took the bowl from in front of me without remark. Rhys stood aside from the stair. Caspian stayed where he was at the end of the table, with the cake paper still under his hand and the scout’s dispatch lying open between us, and neither got up nor said my name.

I read the dispatch again standing. The scout’s hand ran downhill at the end of every line, as though he had written it on a saddle.

Two of Malachai’s men in the high villages above the Kestrel pass, before the snow. Asking the old people of a woman, four and twenty winters gone, dark hair, a child’s age with her or none. Asking after a road. Not this road nor that one. An old place, they said, up past where the shepherds go. One of the old people said there was such a place once and the snow has it now. They paid her in old gold. They went north.