Chapter 75

Mist would not let me fall off. I learned that in the first hour.

I had not sat a horse in nearly four years, and my legs had forgotten everything but the four paces of a cell. Rowan put me up into the saddle with his hands under my bare foot, and the moment my weight came down she swung her head round and looked at me, white-eyed in the starlight, and blew—once, hard, the way she had blown into Caspian’s shirt the day she ate his button. Then she went where the cob went, and every time I tipped she shifted under me, the way you shift a tray to keep a cup on it.

We left the garrison by a drovers’ gap behind the hay barns, where Rowan had taken down two lengths of fence and would, he said, never be thanked for putting them back. Then across a water-meadow at a walk, and up the bed of a stream at a walk, the horses to their knees in black water, for so long that my feet stopped hurting and then stopped being feet.

“Wolves follow the ground,” Rowan said, low, over his