Chapter 63

In the fourth week, the night shift changed.

I knew it before the iron door opened. For three weeks the night guard had been a wolf who coughed into the brazier and came down the passage twice a night with his lamp held high, like a man checking traps. This step was different. Longer. Quieter. A tall man trying to take up as little room as he could on a narrow stair.

Then the heartbeat, steady and a little slow. I had heard it at the edge of every room I had been in for most of a year.

He came down the passage without a lamp and stopped outside the bars of the fourth cell on the left, and stood there in the dark, looking in.

Corwin.

He had been put to the gate for refusing to tell the King what I wrote. Now he was on the night shift in the deep cells, which was the worst post in Vaelmoor—the one they gave to wolves who were disgraced, or old, or drank. Nobody asked for it.

He had asked for it. I knew that the way I knew his step.

He didn’t s