Chapter 132

Caspian lifted the ban the morning after the letter came, before the council, in one sentence.

I heard it from the end of the bench. The Crown strikes its order against the King of the Silvaran house. He did not explain it, nor say it had been made in anger on the night of a ball, or that he had made it without asking whose father he was driving off his land; all of that was already in the record, in Quill’s hand, from the day he knelt. Quill drew one line through the old order, ruled, and wrote the date beside it, and the eldest struck her staff on the floor, and that was the end of a thing that had stood since the Ball.

“He’ll come either way,” Caspian said to me afterward in the passage, at the distance I kept. “I know. I didn’t do it to make him welcome. I did it because it should never have been written.”

“You could have done it last spring.”

“Yes,” he said. “I could.”

***

They came up the north road on Midwinter eve with the light goi