She rubbed her shoulder, feeling the bruise, considering. She needn’t wait for the guards to catch her now. With only two horses for three men, they wouldn’t go back for Mop. They’d still be trying to find her. And if she arrived at the king on her own—it could be easier to convince him she meant him no harm.

If she rode through the night… could she arrive before dawn?

“Can you go further?” she asked the horse.

Clambering onto a stump, she leaned her weight over the horse experimentally. When it stood quietly, she pulled herself onto the saddle. “There,” she murmured. She looked down at the wolf, still waiting with flickering ears.

It was probably better that he not follow. That he return to the mountains. The villages they would pass, the people who might see him, threaten him… she frowned, thinking of the harm that could come to him as they drew closer to the king.

But still… how relieved she was that he had followed.

How relieved she was not all alone.

Even just seeing him there, waiting, a shadow in shadows… she could not quite describe it, but it seemed somehow right that he was with her. That he was meant to be with her. It felt like Mop or Ness holding her hand. Yes. She opened and closed her damp fingers, glancing from her palm to the wolf—it did feel like someone had given her a hand to hold.

“Come, wolf,” she whispered. “You mustn’t stay here.”

Tentatively, feeling the horse’s warm hide aside her heels, she nudged, and the horse, tossing its head again, steps antsy and high, moved into the dark.

The wolf padded tsptsp behind.

XLIV

THE FEELING OF TEETH IN HIS MOUTH

The wolf could not turn away from the delicate animal. It had the same feeling of den, of warm wolf pup on wolf pup. He followed and followed. He followed though fear had prickled its skin, though another creature, heavy, lumbering, carried it as though it meant to devour it.

The animal swung its head on its delicate neck; it searched after birds. It lowered its tender limbs; it drank over streams. Watching, he tasted feather and bone; he felt the coldness of mountains. He raised his ears. Its voice was the singing of birds—a lilting of leaf-formed light. It thudded through leaves—the smell of earth-turned decay. He would follow and follow and follow.

When the delicate creature rested, he rested. When it trotted on, he trailed behind. He was dark in the shadows of trees, a shadow in the silence of forest. He padded after the creature, after the feeling of fullness and den.

The wolf had no words to shape thoughts, but distance he understood through the changing smell of the land, through the changing feel of earth and root and stone under his paws. Raising his nose, lifting his ears, he sought out mountain—the scent of wind-scoured stone, the sound of stone-scoured wind—but mountain was no more. He heard clatterings he did not know, the scent of animals he had never smelled or heard before. Clatterings clatterings. His fur was barbed with not knowing.