Chapter 7: Steam

Corwin got to me before I finished running.

He took one look at my face and put his coat around my shoulders.

"They took her to the cellar," I said. "The elder. They said the infirmary and they went the other way."

"I saw." His voice was even. "Perrin's already at the back doors."

"We have to go in."

"We will. Tonight, when the lodge is asleep and two hundred wolves aren't at my throat."

He turned my chin up with one finger.

"If I break in now, your mother gets to say the outsider attacked a sick old woman."

"She's not sick."

"I know. That's why we wait."

I hated it, and I knew he was right.

Perrin came jogging across the snow with his red beard full of ice.

"Padlock the size of my fist," he said. "I can't hear a thing through the door. Either she's very quiet or it's very thick."

"Stay on it," Corwin said. "Eat something and stay on it."

"I'm always eating something."

He jogged off.

Corwin steered me away from the lodge, along a path through the pines.

"Where are we going?"

"Somewhere with walls your sister's people can't listen through."

It was a low stone hut at the bottom of a rise, with a plume of steam rising from its chimney.

The Penhale steam house. I had spent half my teenage winters in it.

Inside, the air was thick and wet and hot enough to bring tears to my eyes.

A fire burned under a stack of stones in the corner, and a wooden bench ran along three walls.

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