Chapter 96

The Seelie post at the border was a stone house with a striped pole across the road and a warden who read Terwil’s letter three times, holding it closer to his face each time, as though the words might change if he caught them off guard. Then he looked at Rowan, and at me, and at Pudding, who looked back without interest.

“A horse-breaker,” he said. “And his sister.”

“She’s the quiet one,” said Rowan.

The warden lifted the pole. He did not like it. Terwil had said he would not.

***

Mirefold lay where four roads came down to meet a slow brown river, and the town had grown up in the knot they made, the way moss grows in the fork of a tree.

It was a town of couriers. Every second house along the river front was an inn, and every inn yard had horses in it with the dust of some other country on their legs. Riders came and went at all hours with satchels across their chests and the patient faces of people who spend their lives carrying things that matte