He took a sharp right. “Where are we going?” Ayla demanded, scrambling after him.

“For a ride.”

People had feet for a reason, Ayla thought, seated atop one of the royal horses, and it was to prevent things like this from ever happening. Her thighs ached. Every muscle in her body was clenched tight. She hadn’t mastered how to move with the rhythm of the horse’s strides; her tailbone kept cracking against the saddle.

“How . . . can you possibly . . . enjoy this?” she gasped, gripping the reins so tight it hurt her palms. The horse Storme had chosen for her was barely bigger than a pony, and still she felt miles off the ground. If she fell, she’d break her neck. Or get trampled. Or get crushed, if the horse fell with her. What if it threw her off its back? There was a spark of evil in its eyes, she could tell. The horse could not be trusted.

“I love riding,” Storme said pleasantly. “It relaxes me.”

Ayla might have throttled him, if she’d been able to let go of the reins.

They joined a stream of fishermen and traders and merchants leaving Thalen, passing through a set of gates much smaller than the ones Ayla and Benjy had used to enter the city on the day of the Maker’s Festival. Then they were outside the high white walls at the northernmost point of the city, winter-yellow hills stretching out before them, dead grass rustling in the wind coming in from the sea. It was chilly, but nothing like the cold of winter in Rabu, which settled into your stomach and gnawed at your bones like a starving dog. Ayla felt almost overheated in her thick wool coat. The sky was the white-shot gray of a frozen pond. Above, the perpetual seabirds, crying out.

Storme took the lead, though it didn’t seem like he was going anywhere in particular. He just kept a steady pace into the hills, in the opposite direction of the main road all the traders were using, the one that led to the port. After a few minutes, Ayla found herself not fully relaxing but loosening her grip on the reins, letting herself stop impersonating a statue, stone-stiff. She found herself looking around just because it was a pretty view, the sky and the golden hills, Thalen like a huge white crown. The air smelled like winter and the sea. It reminded her of home.

“All right,” said Storme, slowing his horse until he and Ayla were riding side by side. “Let’s talk. What do you want to know?”

“Brother, what do you think I want to know?” she said, incredulous. The sun hit his face, revealing freckles like her own. Like their mother’s. “Something about the last seven years, maybe? About how you went from a nine-year-old orphan in northern Rabu to adviser to the queen of Varn?”

“I don’t know where to begin,” he confessed.

“Well . . . If you don’t want to begin with the worst part, begin with this. Considering everything you and the queen know about Scyre Kinok, do you have any idea why he’d be interested in our family’s history?”