So late that the last of the resident stable boys had already burrowed into the straw to sleep. Ash had assisted with a breech foaling of a mare down at the military barns and that had put him behind. It had been a week since he’d put the king’s gelding down. He’d insisted on doing it himself, by using magic to stop the blood as it rushed through the great artery in his neck. It was a painless death, as far as he could tell, but that didn’t make it any easier. It was a horse, but that didn’t make it less important. It was one more piece of evidence that there was no place to hide, in all of the Seven Realms, where the evil at the top of the Ardenine Empire didn’t percolate down. Ash might try to turn into somebody else—Ash Hanson or Adam Freeman, but the king of Arden would not. He wouldn’t stop killing until he’d extinguished the Gray Wolf line. Ash wished he had let Crusher kill the bastard. And he would have if he’d known who the rider was, and if it hadn’t meant risking Bellamy.
