I didn’t enlighten them. They hitched four horses to the lightest sleigh they had and sped me down the solid-packed river road in my idiotic—but warm!—dress. It was a fast drive, and an uncomfortable one, flying breathlessly over the icy road, but not fast or uncomfortable enough to keep me from thinking about how little hope I had of doing anything but dying, and not even usefully.Borys had offered to drive me: a kind of guilt I understood without a word. I had been taken—not his girl, not his daughter. She was safe at home, perhaps courting or already betrothed. And I had been taken not four months ago, and here I was already unrecognizable.“Do you know what’s happened in Dvernik?” I asked him, huddled in the back under a heap of blankets.“No, no word yet,” he answered over his shoulder. “The beacon-fires were only just lit. The rider will be on the road, if—” He stopped. If there were a rider left to send, he had meant to say. “We’ll meet him halfway, I’d guess,”
