Chapter 160

Abby

I smelled him before I saw the hut.

We had come up through the trees in the gray half-dark, and crossed the line where Moonhaven’s scent thinned out and stopped, and climbed the last long slope of the western hill with the snow up to our shins. Kade in front. Imogen behind him, steady as a goat. Liam at my side. Ryan at the back. Nobody had spoken since the lake.

At the top of the slope, the wind turned and came down to us off the hill, and I stopped walking.

Woodsmoke. Leather. Cold iron, very faint. And under it, something I had no word for, something that belonged only to him, the way Kade’s scent belonged only to Kade.

I knew that smell. The last time I had smelled it, I had been in chains in a stone chamber under a mountain.

Diana went flat inside me. All at once, belly to the ground, ears pinned, the way a hare goes flat in the grass when the hawk’s shadow crosses it. My mouth went dry. My hands, inside my gloves, were suddenly w