Chapter 21: The Pass

Lucan's POV

My mother's note was four lines long, in the cramped hand she uses when she is angry or afraid.

Hattie read it over my shoulder before I could fold it.

"She's heard you're in love," Hattie said, "and she's furious that nobody told her first."

"That is a fair summary."

"Is she nice?"

"No," I said. "She is just."

Hattie looked at me with her round glasses flashing.

"Be kind to my friend," she said. "I don't care how many centuries you have. I'll haunt you."

"I believe you."

She hugged Eloise at the cottage gate for a long time, and neither of them said anything that I could hear.

Then Hattie put the old tin lamp in Eloise's hands and went back inside.

We rode out of Ember Ridge at midday, with the elders lining the road and four of my guards behind us.

Eloise did not wave.

She sat very straight on the grey mare Hattie had found for her.

She kept her eyes on the road, and I watched her the whole way.

I was waiting.

I was waiting for the moment she turned in the saddle and looked back at what she was leaving.

I expected her to decide she could not do it.

It did not come.

We climbed past the lower fence, past the cottage, past the Kestrel boundary where Dalton's mill was a smudge of smoke against the hills.

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