about for days in silence, as if lost in his own thoughts, and no one dares speak to him, not even the princess. At first I thought it was because of his little, you know, deformities, the spine and the oddly shaped face, but truly, he seems not to care about his body at all. It certainly doesn't impede him.” She glanced at Ingrey with belated wariness. “Do you know him well?”

“Not since we are grown,” said Ingrey. “I have a near tie to him by blood through his late mother. I met him a few times when we were both children.” Ingrey remembered the young Lord Wencel kin Horseriver as an undersized, clumsy boy, seeming slow of wit, with a rather wet mouth. Perhaps shyness had rendered Wencel tongue-tied; but the boy-Ingrey had lacked sympathy for a smaller cousin who did not keep up, and had made no effort to include him. Fortunately, in retrospect, Ingrey had made no effort to torment him, either. “His father and mine died within a few months of each other.”

Though the aged Earl Horseriver had died quietly and decently, of an ordinary stroke. Not in his prime, baying and foaming, his feverish screams echoing through the castle corridors as though rising from some pit of agony beneath the earth…Ingrey bit back the memory, hard.

“He was castlemaster of Birchgrove, under the lordship of old Earl Kasgut kin Wolfcliff.” And I am not. Would her rather too-quick wits notice, or would she merely assume him a younger son? “Birchgrove commands the valley of the Birchbeck, where it runs into the Lure.” Which did not, precisely, answer the question she'd asked. How had they drifted onto this dire subject? Her tone, he realized, had been as tensely neutral as his leading question about Horseriver.

“So Rider Ulkra told me.” She drew a long breath, staring ahead between her horse's ears. “He also said, it was rumored that your father died from the bite of a rabid wolf, that he'd tried to steal the spirit