“Might as well,” the courier said. “We made a good start. Unless you want to be crowded up, we won’t stay in that inn at the head of the pass. I know a little flat place we can camp. Be there before sunsetting.”

“Suits me,” Arvid said. To the boy, he said, “Let me show you how to undo the girths, and you can help.”

He tied the horses to the line the courier strung between trees, then showed the boy how to unfasten the girths and told him to try that on the two shorter horses. He unsaddled his own, checked the back for signs of rubbing, and then unsaddled the others, handing the light packs to the boy to set down at a distance.

Explaining as he went, he showed the boy how to check the horses’ hooves for stones or cuts, how to check their backs, how to lead them, one at a time, to water and then to grass, and it felt both new and familiar. The boy was as he had seemed earlier in the year: bright, willing, intensely alive. He did what he was told with a mixture of eagerness and solemnity that tugged at Arvid’s heart, and ate a cheese-stuffed roll as they sat beneath one of the trees.

When the courier stretched and stood up, Arvid nodded at the boy. They took the horses to water a last time, saddled and packed, then mounted and were off up the trail, passing again the caravan they’d passed earlier. Now they saw caravans heading south, toward Valdaire, and the dust was thick on their side of the road. They could not move far aside, for the increasing roughness of the terrain. Arvid showed the boy how to wrap a scarf over his nose and mouth.

By the time they reached the South Trade Road in Tsaia, at Fiveway, the boy rode like an expert. Arvid avoided the inn where he usually stayed—where thieves lurked—and instead found them a room in a private home, paying for stalls for their mounts in a livery stable a short walk away. He noticed that a man traveling with his son was more acceptable than a man alone. The family welcomed them without any sign of concern.