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“When I first got out… I couldn’t stand to be indoors, so I took my Warhorse, and I rode all over the lands.”

I rose despite the protest from my legs and moved to stand beside him. The map smelled faintly of campfires and horse sweat.

His finger tapped a line running along the mountain’s eastern edge. “We go here. A half-day by Warhorse if the trail is clear. Longer if the snow has drifted.”

“One horse?” I asked, because I could already see where this was going.

His glance slid to me. “A Warhorse is warded—it can’t be seen from the Sky. And mine is bloodbound to me just as a Phoenix is bound to its Rider. It’s just our horses aren’t cursed.”

I snorted. “And I don’t suppose there’s one I can bond to?”

He ignored that. Probably because he knew if I had a Warhorse of my own, I’d flee at the earliest opportunity. “If there’s anywhere that a broken codex can be mended quickly, it’s there.” His index finger landed on a mountain range.

My pulse jumped with the kind of dangerous hope I didn’t want to trust. My fingers started to move before my mouth. “There’s a library in the mountains. No one else knows?”

“In the stories of this land, it’s a ruin.” His finger on the map traced the narrow pass leading into the mountains near the Wilds’ side. “This was here before the Kingdoms’ War and before all this was like it is.” He gestured at the map, the cabin, perhaps the whole cursed world.

I examined the line of the path. The mountain hemmed it in, a single route in and out. “That’s a trap.”

“It’s also the fastest way to get you somewhere that has the tools and wards to mend the book before Torran simply carries you off and takes the choice from you entirely. The book will tell us how to break the curse. Mabe has said so. Did you know that Bronwen had a son? She had him very young, and ten years ago he ran to the mountains…”

It wasn’t hard to understand what he was saying. That was the reason Bronwen was going to all the trouble of getting the codex and having me restore it. Of working with Riders whom the Ruckus had always hated. “He became a Rider at same time as Lex, Torran, and Kit?”

Aster gave me a small nod.

“Once we know the workings of the curse, we can decide what to do next.”

I just hoped that my fears were wrong and the codex really did explain the curse. They were all trying to outmanoeuvre each other, but I also had an agenda. Thorn wanted the codex read, and there was something about the small book that was unsettling, and I wanted to mend it too. And the oath I’d made to Bronwen on my arm needed to be fulfilled.

I turned from the map and crossed to the washstand. There was a ceramic basin, a clean cloth, and another pitcher of steaming water that Aster must have fetched. I glanced down at my worn dress, and one of my white curls caught my attention—it was tipped with blood. I checked my neck in the glass of the window. Bruising rose along my throat, blood dried at my collar, and the face of a woman who had escaped one cage only to land in another disguised by runes and rugs. “If I wash and sleep, you mean to wake me…” I signed, “…before dawn and put me on your Warhorse?”

“Yes.”

“How romantic.”

His silence behind me was warm and threatening.

I peeled off the dress slowly, wincing as the stiff fabric dragged against cuts and bruises, and wrapped myself in the blanket he’d set down within reach and without comment. Then I washed. Not properly, not luxuriously, but enough to get the grit and blood and the smell of fear off my skin. The water in the basin clouded pink. My body ached everywhere I touched it. My neck burned. My wrists throbbed under their clean wrappings. When I was done, I found a plain wool shirt and thick leggings folded on the nearby stool. His, perhaps, or clothes borrowed from some woman in the village. I preferred not to know. I dressed in them anyway, and the dry warmth alone made me nearly weep.

When I turned back, he had laid another blanket on the narrow bed in the corner and was tightening the straps on a travel pack. Knife. Herbs. Flint. Bandages. Waterskin. Rope. As ever, he was efficient and ruthless.

“How many times have you done this?” I asked.

Aster looked up. “Run?”

“No. Left.”

For a moment, an old and raw emotion ran across his face. “Every time I have to.”

The words lodged inside me.

Instead of biting back, I moved to the bed and sat, pulling the little book out of my dress pocket and rolling it in my tattered dress—Ember’s dress was going everywhere I did. “If we go,” I said, “and I mend the codex, then what? Bronwen tries to break the curse before the twelfth night is up? You ask me to trust a path and a library and a horse, but you still haven’t told me whose side you’re on.”

The fire crackled and then popped.

Aster came to stand in front of me. Close, but not touching, until he reached out and brushed a stray, wet strand of hair behind my ear. “I’m with the Ruckus now,” he said.

I laughed tiredly. “Perfect. Is it everything you’d hoped it would be?”