Chapter 154

CASPIAN

I have been cold before. A thousand winters will do that. I have lain out on the high fells in a blizzard with my wolf curled round me and woken stiff under a drift, and once, after the second Seelie war, sat three days in a cell with no fire while a treaty was argued in the room above me. I knew cold as a man knows an old neighbour.

This was not that cold. This one was inside, under the ribs on the left side, where his hand had been. It sat there like a stone in a riverbed, and the rest of me ran round it, and every time I tried to come up past it, it held me down.

So I stopped trying to come up, for a while, and went where the water took me.

***

It took me to Blackwater.

I knew it before I saw it, by the smell. Smoke that has been rained on. I was riding up the last mile of the border road in the grey before dawn with the relief column behind me, too late, as I had ridden it once already, and the gate was standing open, as it had