Chapter 19

Lyra stayed. We talked on the black sofa until neither of us noticed the rain had stopped, or that the window had gone from grey to gold to the deep blue of evening.

She was Caspian’s tactical adviser. She said it with a perfectly straight face, and then watched me work out what it meant, and grinned when I did. It meant that when the King of Vaelmoor needed someone dead and couldn’t be seen to want it, he sent his sister. I wasn’t as shocked as I ought to have been. I had already made my peace with the fact that Caspian was not a saint. He was fair, and I was beginning to think that was rarer.

She had not grown up here. Her mother had sold her to a clan of snake shifters when she was five, and they had raised her the way you raise a blade—to be sharp, and to be pointed at things. She told me that lightly, picking a thread out of a cushion, and I didn’t ask her to tell it any other way. The rest I knew from the car. Sixty years in the pack since then. She had become, by