Chapter 10: The Pass

"There are two spare wheels in the stable loft," Min-jun told the wright. "Under the straw. Bring them."

The wright stared.

"You knew, Prince?"

"I hoped I was wrong."

They fitted the new wheel in the cold by lamplight, with Seo-jun holding the axle steady and Yul handing up wedges.

By the second bell the carriage stood sound.

The convoy rolled out of Wolfhold gate with forty riders in northern gray, and Ren Ito at the back between two guards.

Nobody spoke of the split wheel.

Everyone had seen it.

On the fifth day they reached the Haeneul pass.

It was a narrow road cut into a mountain wall.

A drop of three hundred feet lay on the right, and a slope of broken rock on the left.

Snow lay everywhere, thick and bright, and the sky above it was a clean hard blue.

Min-jun had seen this place every night for a month.

In his first life it had been the last place his husband and son had ever been.

He rode at the head of the column on a gray horse, with Seo-jun beside him on a bay.

The carriage came behind, with Yul's face pressed to the window.

"Slow here," Min-jun said.

"There's a bridge ahead."

"I know."

"You've been this way before?"

"Once," Min-jun said, which was true.

The bridge crossed a gap in the road: a plank span over a drop, with a rope rail.

He put up his hand, and forty riders stopped.

"Hold the carriage," he said to the captain. "Nobody crosses until I have walked it."

He swung down and tested the first plank with his boot, and the second.

The third was sawn through on the underside.

He did not shout.

He straightened and turned, slowly, to the slope above.

The first arrow hissed past his ear and buried itself in the carriage roof.

"Down!"

He threw himself on Seo-jun and dragged him out of the saddle onto the snow.

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