Chapter 139

CASPIAN

Rhys rode into Ashgrove on the fourth evening with two horses and no escort, which was what I had asked for, and a face that told me exactly what he thought of it, which I had not.

“Twenty,” he said, in the stable yard, before he had his feet out of the stirrups. “I say it every time. One day you’ll hear it.”

“Not this time.”

“No. I didn’t think so.” He swung down, and took a cloth-wrapped loaf and a cheese out of his saddlebag and put them in my hands. “Odette. She said you’d know why.” Then he looked past me, at the kitchen door, where Elowen stood with her arms folded against the cold. “Does she know?”

“She named it,” I said.

She came across the yard then, and stopped at the distance she keeps, and looked at Rhys and not at me. “Bring her back,” she said. “Both of you.” Then, to me, plainly: “Go yourself. All the way to the gate.”

It was the most she had said to me in a week. I have signed treaties on less.

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