Chapter 53 Into The Bone-thicket

• The horses were half-mad.
• Kaden grabbed the black stallion’s bridle, yanking its head down before it could rear again. The animal’s eyes were rolling white, foam gathering at the corners of its mouth. It smelled the wrongness in the air, the way the wind now carried notes of decay and iron instead of hay and wood smoke.
• “Easy,” Kaden muttered, though his own hands were shaking. He could still feel Alina through that thin golden thread in his chest. The tether pulled north, always north, like a fishhook buried in his sternum.