Chapter 142

We were to leave at first light, the day after next. Quill wanted a day to copy the household book’s wool pages for Ashgrove’s own keeping, and Rowan wanted a day to find Harl a mule that would not throw a one-handed man into the Wendle. So there was one night left that nobody needed me for.

I spent it in the cook’s garden.

It lay where the smokehouse had stood, behind the kitchen wing, against the orchard wall. Somebody had dug the floor out after they pulled the roof in, and carted the stones away, and put down muck and ash, and now there were beds there in rows under the snow, with straw over the leeks and the cabbages showing their tops like a crowd of small green heads. A row of bean poles leaned in a stack against the wall where the girls had stood to watch.

I stood at the end of the rows in my good cloak with a lantern, and could not find the place. The door had been just here. The post had been just there. I had known it with my eyes shut for eight y