They had carried her the whole way from the Ridgeback. That was the first thing I understood when I reached the gate, before I understood anything else.
The courtyard was full of drawn steel and raised hackles, and the gate horn was still dying off the walls when I came down into it, and the scene inside the ring of wardens made no military sense at all, which is why it had frozen a whole garrison. There was no war band and no southern column. There were two figures collapsed just inside the gate, one old and one young, and both of them were wrecked with the road. The boy was on his knees with his hands up and empty, saying the same thing over and over in a voice that had run out of everything else. She asked me. She asked me. She asked me. He could not have been more than sixteen. I knew
