Chapter 140

They came down the Wendle road on the eighth day, two horses, three riders, in a light snow that had been falling since noon.

Joss had been at the gate since dawn. When the horses came round the bend under the bare alders he did not shout. He went down the road toward them at a walk, and then not at a walk, and Caspian reined in and lifted the girl down into the snow, one-handed, and stood back.

I was at the kitchen door. I did not go nearer. Nobody did. It was not ours.

They did not run at each other. They stopped an arm’s length apart in the road and looked, as two people look who have each been carrying a picture for seven years and need to put it down beside the real thing and check it line by line. Then Tansy said something I could not hear, and Joss laughed—a cracked, terrible sound—and put his arms round her, and she let him, with her bundle squashed betwe