Chapter 35

The month had three days left in it when the stones began to talk.

On the twenty-seventh day, a Monday, the ward-witch finally found something.

Caspian came down to the stables to tell me. He didn’t wait until evening; he walked straight into the barn in his council coat and said it in front of Mist, because that was our rule.

“The gate-stones keep count,” he said. “Every pass that opens them, every time. But they’re old Lycan stone, and they’re slow—slow as glaciers. A night’s ledger can take weeks to surface. This morning, the last of the twenty-sixth came up.” He held out a scrap of paper in the witch’s crabbed hand. “One pass crossed into the inner garden that night. At ten past one, and out at twenty-nine minutes to two.”

I looked at the paper. I had looked at the clock when I came back upstairs that night. It had said a quarter to two.

“Whose pass?”

“A Seelie treaty courier’s. Edric Vane. Isadora’s man.” His jaw was tight. “I keyed every one