Chapter 20: Wolf Road

Lucan's POV

I shifted at the keep gate and ran.

Eight Ashfall wolves went with me, in fur, spread out over the valley road in a long line.

A wolf can cover in one night what a horse covers in two days, if he does not think about anything but the next stride.

I thought about the smallest girl.

She was the one who had sat on my boot at the first supper and refused to move for an hour.

She did not talk much.

She had put one hand flat on my shin, as if she were checking that I was real.

I had been her father for less than two weeks.

I ran harder.

At midnight the scent of the horses crossed the road, and my beta, who ran at my shoulder, put his nose to the ground.

*Three riders,* his thoughts said. *Two men and a woman. Fresh.*

*And the children?*

*Riding in front of them.*

*Both of them,* I said, and found that I could not make the thought sound like anything else.

We did not stop.

I knew the ridge by dawn.

It stood up out of the mist, black and bare, and at the top the lone tree where her brother had chained her.

I stopped on the path below it, with the ice in my fur, and smelled the air.

The tree was empty.

Perrin's scent lay on it, old and cold, and there was none of the children.

*Not here,* my beta said.

*He wanted her to come to the tree.*

*Then he's waiting somewhere he can watch the road.*

I turned my head.

A thread of smoke rose from a stand of fir on the south slope, a quarter mile off.

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