Chapter 18: The Northern Pass

The Northern Pass was a notch between two cliffs, white with blown snow.

Six of the king's riders had stopped at the top of it.

I reached it on four feet, an hour behind them, with Torren running beside me and Dalton following in a truck.

Harlan had been seen climbing it in the dark with two wolves.

The wind had taken one of them somewhere on the way up.

The other lay dead in the snow with his neck at the wrong angle.

I smelled blood, and old fear, and pine soap.

The riders had stopped at the ledge because the path beyond it had broken away in the storm.

Harlan stood on the far side of the gap, forty feet away, with his back to a wall of rock.

He was soaked and grey with cold, and his white beard was stiff with ice.

He had the brown ledger clutched against his chest in both arms.

Redmark's land lay a day's march behind him, and there was no way across.

I came up beside the riders and changed.

Torren put a coat on my shoulders without being asked.

"Miriam," Harlan called across the gap.

His voice was thin, but it carried.

"There you are. Let me look at you."

I said nothing.

"You've got your mother's height," he said. "Do you know that? I saw her once, at a border gathering, when I was your age."

"You don't say her name," I said.

"I kept you alive for twenty-six years," Harlan said. "Do you understand that?"

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