Then they were running through the woods, over marshy ground beside the stream. Just downhill a few hundred yards, the stream would meet with the River Wye, and there Gaborn hoped to find a means of escape. The maid and the wizard could not match Gaborn’s speed. He jumped some low bushes, and in a few moments they reached a small cottage with whitewashed wattle and a thatch roof.

“I must go and save my seeds,” Binnesman hissed. “Rowan, you know the way to the mill. Take Gaborn. May the Earth be with you both!”

“Come,” Rowan said. “This way.”

She reached back for his sleeve, pulled him down a brick road. Gaborn did as he was told, rushing with a renewed sense of urgency. He could hear shouting in the meadows behind him. He still had his boots in hand, was painfully aware with each step that he needed to put them on, yet Rowan ran over the uneven stones recklessly, feeling nothing.

Yet even as he ran, he felt . . . astonished, full of wonder, incapable of comprehending all that had just happened. He wanted to stop, to take time to ponder. But at the moment, he knew it was too dangerous to do so.

At the edge of the garden, Gaborn told Rowan, “Stop, stop. Put on your shoes, before you break every bone in your foot!”

Rowan stopped, put on her own shoes while Gaborn pulled on his boots; then they ran with greater speed.

She raced out the garden gate, along a street to the King’s stables, an enormous building of new wood. She pulled one of the doors open.

A stableboy sleeping in the hay just inside the door shouted in alarm, but Gaborn and Rowan rushed past him, past the long stalls. Here, slung from the ceiling in belly harnesses, were dozens of the King’s Dedicate horses—horses robbed of wit, brawn, stamina, or metabolism so that the King’s own force horses could have greater power. Rowan ran past the long row of stalls, then fled out the back door. Here a stream, the same stream that had flowed through the wizard’s garden, wound through a muddy corral, where the horses stamped and neighed in fear. The stream passed under a great stone wall, the Outer Wall to the city’s defenses.

Gaborn could not climb that wall, some fifty feet in height. Instead, Rowan squirmed under the wall, where the stone had eroded over the ages. The passage was narrow, too narrow to admit a warrior in armor, but the thin girl and Gaborn squeezed through, getting wet in the icy water.

Now the stream tumbled downhill, down a steep green. All around the stream grew tall pussy willows.

Gaborn looked up. An archer on the walls was posted just above them. He looked down, saw them escape, and pointedly looked the other way.