Chapter 64

There were three wolves on the day shift, turn and turn about, and the oldest of them talked to his knee.

He did it on the stairs, every morning, all hundred and twelve of them. Come on, then. Come on. Nobody asked you. He was grey all over—hair, beard, the stubble on his cheeks—and broad in the way of a wolf who had been a warrior once and had sat down a great deal since, and he smelled of pipe smoke and of a house where somebody baked. He talked to the keys, too, when they stuck, and to the brazier when it smoked, and to the weather through the grating. He never once talked to the prisoners. I had been in the fourth cell on the left for five weeks and he had not said a word to me. I liked him a little. It was a kind of honesty.

On the first day of December, he came down the passage at noon with something under his arm.

He stopped outside my bars and looked at the wall above my head, the way Corwin did, and then he pushed it through, folded, without a word.