The last of the light goes at the top of the first switchback, and Cashel Thornvale is already there, sitting on a fallen trunk beside the trail with his hands in his jacket pockets and his forearms black with ink in the gloom. He did not come out of the trees with the others. He has been up here since the afternoon, which you can tell because the snow beside the trunk has been walked flat in a small square.
"I came up early so I would not have to stand next to them when you got here,"
he says. He is the quiet one, so hearing him start is like hearing a door open in a house you thought was empty.
"Breccan will give you the law and Egan will give you a story. Nobody was going to tell you about the office."
He takes his hands out of his pockets, which he does when he is making himself be straight with someone, and rests them on his knees.
"The night you left, the pack office already knew you were going. I told them. They took your mother's house for it, and I have paid the rent on that house every month since, to Marta Kessel, who holds it. So when you decide what to do about the bond tonight, decide it knowing that the worst thing done to you was done by me, on purpose, and that I have not stopped paying for it."