Chapter 2

Edmund said nothing. He walked out across the turf, and the frost broke under his boots with a sound like paper tearing, and the line of gentlemen opened for him the way lines opened for him every day of the two years since his brother departed.Corvus watched him come. The horse stood saddled because Lord Mowbray wanted to buy him, and Fenwick brought him down to be looked at, and for no other reason on earth. Nobody intended him to be ridden that morning. Nobody intended him to be ridden at all.The stallion stood sixteen hands three, black to the hoof, with one white hair above the off eye that his brother once swore brought luck. In June, the horse put Tom Reedy through a rail and broke the man's collarbone in two places. In July, he sent the Marlow boy over a hedge without a saddle to follow him. In August, he put Fenwick's second man through the door of the feed store and stood over him until the yard came running. In September, Edmund signed the paper that sent him to the saleyard at Leominster, and then stood in the stable doorway for eleven minutes with the smell of iron and clean straw in his throat, and put the paper in the fire.The horse never stood still for anyone—not for Fenwick, not for him. The horse stood still now.The girl sat in the saddle with her spine easy and her heels down, in a brown wool habit worn pale at the elbows, and she did not look at the Duke at all. She looked at the space between the stallion's ears, and her hands rested low on his withers, and she moved her thumb once across the black hide like a woman smoothing a page.Edmund knew her face without knowing her name. He passed it a hundred times across the market square and never once thought about it: Harrow's niece, the one the village called simple."Get down," he said.She did not get down.Behind him, Lord Mowbray made a sound in his throat, and one of the younger men laughed—a short laugh cut off fast, the laugh of a man who looked around and found himself alone in it.Edmund reached for the bridle. The stallion's head came up. The bit rang against itself, a small, bright sound in all that cold, and Edmund stopped with his hand in the air, six inches from the cheekpiece, every muscle in the animal gathering under the black coat like water rising in a well.She lifted two fingers off the withers. That was all. Two fingers, an inch of movement—a thing meant for the horse and not for him.Edmund lowered his hand. She let out a breath. The stallion let out one after her, long and slow, and shook his mane and settled. The whole thing happened so simply that Edmund understood, with a coldness that had nothing to do with the frost, that he was the only dangerous animal standing in that circle."Your Grace," Fenwick said from somewhere behind him. "The field is waiting."

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