Chapter 26

The stables were the first place in Vaelmoor that smelled like home.

Not the pack house, with its wet paint and its fifty kinds of polish. Not the city, with its glass and its cameras. The stables, at the bottom of the long north lawn, where the grass gave way to paddocks and the paddocks gave way to forest. Hay and leather and warm animals and old wood. The first time I walked down there, a week after we arrived, on a raw grey January morning, I stood in the wide doorway and breathed it in until my eyes stung.

My mother loved horses. My father had painted her on one, on the wall of my bedroom, a white mare with my mother on her back and my father holding the reins and looking up at her as if she had personally invented the sun. It was the last thing I looked at every night and the first thing every morning, until there were no more mornings in that house.

I hadn’t been near a horse since.

“If you’re going to stand in the door, lass, stand in it on the inside