NYRAThe ride home was different from the ride out.Not in any way that would have been visible to the escort wolves behind us. The track was the same, north through the same forest, the same cold air, and the same bare-branched trees and the same pale winter sky above it all. We rode at the same pace. We were the same two people.But the quality of it had changed.On the way to the summit, there had been the awkward newness of proximity without the Keep's walls to organize it. By the second day, it had worn smooth. By the summit itself, something had accumulated: the small true things on the road, the ceremony, and what he had done during it, the fire in the evening, and the silence that had been its own kind of conversation.The ride home had all of that already in it.We talked more. Not about the war or the curse or the even days or anything that required management. About the summit, the specific moments, the pack lords we had read differently than expected, the things that had s
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