Chapter 25

Odile stopped talking at last, and looked at me.

It was a long look, and a cold one, and it went from my face to Caspian’s hand at the small of my back and stayed there, as if she were making a note of it. Vivienne had stopped crying. She sat on the rug inside Corwin’s jacket with her face washed pink and her hair loose and tangled from the shift, perfectly composed again, and she did not look at me at all.

“Mother,” she said quietly. “Let’s go.”

They went out the way they had come, by the kitchen passage. Odile said something low on the threshold that I didn’t catch and didn’t need to. The key to that door was in Caspian’s pocket.

The room let out its breath.

Caspian sat back down on the sofa, picked up his plate from the arm where he had left it, and went on eating his lasagna as if nothing had happened. On the floor, after a moment, somebody restarted the race. Within a minute, the eight wolves were shouting at the screen again, a little louder than