The lanterns went on at the Keep gate, one to each cart pole, and the road ran out ahead of them into the dark.
Calen rode in the front cart with the reins across his knees. The horses knew the road better than he did. They kept to the middle of the stones and slowed by themselves at the bad dips.
After the first mile he stopped watching the ruts. He watched the lantern light instead, moving over the hedges and the wet grass.
Behind him, the carts creaked. Somebody coughed. Somebody else was humming a song Calen did not know, very softly, and then stopped when the horse shied at a fallen branch.
The cold came up off the fields in a grey fog that caught the lanterns and held them. It got into the wool and the leather. It got into the hands first. Calen felt it in his left palm under the glove, a dull ache along the seam, and he kept the hand on his knee and did not look at it.
Vesna rode in the second cart with a bowl in her lap.
It was a plain brown bowl from the Keep kitchen, and it was full of warm water, and she held it with both hands under the blanket. Every few miles she dipped her fingers into it and then took them out and flexed them slowly, one by one, the way a musician might before a hard passage.
