“Where are you going?” Merrick asked. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized he’d headed left. I pointed the way I was headed. “To the stables.” Merrick cocked his head and frowned at me. Apparently, I had to explain. “When we arrived yesterday, the servants took our horses that way,” I said. “You honestly thought we would keep the horses with creatures that would eat them?” Now that he said it, it did sound rather foolish. But I wasn’t going to admit defeat that easily. “I thought you’d probably devised some clever way of stopping them from doing it,” I said. “Yes,” Merrick said. “By keeping them in a different building.” Score one for the beast mage.”