Chapter 175

We rode east on the third day after Midwinter, the two of us and nobody else, with the roads gone hard as iron and the sky low and white over the whole of the country.

Rhys had looked at the two horses saddled in the yard, and at the King, and at me, and gone back into the guardroom without a word, which from Rhys was a blessing with both hands. Nana had put a loaf in each saddlebag and a pot of goose fat in mine and told me that if he got the wound wet again I was to bring him home over the saddle like a sack of meal.

I set the pace. I set it slow the first day, to see what he would do with it, and he did nothing with it at all. He rode at my side when the road was wide and a length behind when it narrowed, on my right hand always, so that when he spoke it went into the ear that could still hear him. He had worked that out in March and never once mentioned it.

At the inns we had two rooms. On the fourth night, at the inn at Harrow’s Cross, there was only one to be