Chapter 76

The bond came with me.

I had stopped noticing it years ago, the way you stop noticing a stone in a shoe you can’t take off. In the cells it had gone thin and dull, a cord running away up through the rock to somewhere I couldn’t see. On the second night out of the sheepfold, with the hills going on ahead of us in the dark, I felt it begin to pay out: like thread off a spool, further and thinner with every mile Mist put behind her.

I waited for it to break. I rode with my hand flat on my breastbone and waited, the way you wait for a thread to part. It didn’t break. It only went on getting longer, until I couldn’t tell any more whether I was feeling it or remembering it.

Rowan glanced at my hand once, and looked back at the track.

“It’ll not snap,” he said. “Not for distance. I don’t know much about that kind of thing, but I know that much.” A pause. “Whether it should be your business, class. Not mine. Not his.”

I took my hand away and put it back on Mist