Chapter 39

The riders came back on Friday, a little after noon, and I learned what they had found from Corwin, in the tack room, because no one else would tell me.

I had heard them come in. Four horses up the long drive at a hard canter, lathered, and Rhys went out to meet them on the gravel. Then the low run of the sergeant’s voice, giving a report, and Rhys’s voice asking short questions, and the study door. That was all I could catch before the wards swallowed it.

Corwin had been one of the four. He came into the tack room with his saddle on his hip and dust on his knees, and stopped when he saw me sitting on the bench with Mist’s bridle in my lap, because I had been sitting there for an hour pretending to mend it.

“Luna.”

“Did you find him?”

He looked at the door behind him. Then at me. Corwin had packed my books into the trunk in Ashgrove and wrapped every one in his small neat hand, and when I had cried over the box with my grandmother’s ink in it, he had pr