Chapter 83

RHYS

I had worn the badge for two hundred and four years. A silver wolf’s head the size of a thumbnail, on a pin, at the left side of the collar. He had pinned it there himself the day I swore to him, and I had never once taken it off except to sleep, and on the eleventh morning after the cells were found empty I took it off in his study and threw it on the floor at his feet.

It made a very small sound on the boards. I had hoped for a bigger one.

He was at the desk. He had been at the desk, as far as I could tell, since the dawn they came to tell him. The equinox had come and gone without a wedding in it; he had said on the first morning, on the stair, that the equinox would wait, and given the council no other line and no reason, and Valerian had smiled and called it decent of him. There was talk of hounds. He had not yet said yes to the hounds, which w