Chapter 33

By the end of May, Vaelmoor had turned so green it hurt to look at. Mist had shed her winter coat in great grey drifts all over the barn, Rowan had taken to riding out with me at dawn and back after dark, and Caspian had begun, now and then, to laugh in his sleep again.

The soundproofing in the Vaelmoor pack house was better than Ashgrove’s. It didn’t matter. I still heard everything.

Most nights I had learned to let it wash over me: the guards changing on the walls, the horses shifting in the stables half a mile away, Nana Odette’s radio murmuring in the kitchen long after she should have been asleep. Caspian’s heart, slow and steady against my back. It was like living inside a great breathing animal. You stopped noticing it, the way you stop noticing your own pulse.

So I don’t know what woke me that night in the last week of May. Only that something in the great breathing animal was wrong.

I lay in the dark and listened.

Caspian, asleep. The guards on