Chapter 15

It was eighteen minutes to the airstrip. I counted them on the clock in the front of the car. Somewhere around the ninth minute he began, very quietly, to snore.

The car stopped. The door on my side opened, and Rhys bent down to look in.

“We’re here—”

“Shh.”

He saw, then. Caspian had slid down in the seat until his head was against my collarbone, his hair across his face, one hand loose on my knee. Rhys looked at him the way you might look at a bear that had curled up in a cradle.

“He’s asleep,” he said, under his breath.

“He does that.”

“He doesn’t, though.” Rhys crouched in the open door, so that his face was level with mine. “Not like that. He sleeps the way a sentry sleeps—half of him is always up. Change the guard on his door and he’s on his feet. He can go weeks without sleeping at all, months if he must. I’ve served him for two hundred years.” He looked at the hand on my knee. “Except, it seems, on storeroom floors in Ashgrove. And no