The wind off the gorge changed direction while Cassian talked, and it carried his smell up the wall to me, and that was how I knew how close he was to dying. Rot. Under the sweat and the horse and the road, actual rot, sweetish, the smell of fruit gone dark in a bowl. The swarm inside him had started on the meat.
"Say it, then," Alaric called down. "You've come a long way to stand in the cold with it."
"I'm getting there." Cassian's breath smoked. He pulled a fold of paper from inside his coat, and twenty wolves behind him shifted their weight at once, and he heard it and laughed without turning around. "They searched me at the border, you know. Twice. Took my knife, took my flint, patted me down like a market thief." He held the paper up. "Nobody checks the lining of a boot. You taught
