Chapter 4

She straightened in the saddle. She reached down and ran her hand once from the stallion's poll to his shoulder, and the animal dropped his head into the touch like a dog. Then she swung her leg over and came down to the frost. She stood a head shorter than the horse's crest, and her boots were cracked across the toe, and her braid came loose down her back with frost melting in it. She gathered the reins over the stallion's head and put her forehead briefly against his cheek.Edmund dismounted. The whole field was coming down the slope toward them now, and the noise of it was still far enough away to be nothing."What is your name?" he said.She held out the reins to him. He took them. Their hands did not touch.Corvus turned his head and watched her go, and she walked three steps toward the gate and stopped. Then, with her back to the Duke of Ravensmere and her hand flat on the gatepost, she spoke out loud for the first time in nine years, and it was not to him."Good boy," she said. "You remembered."Before the Duke of Ravensmere walked down to that yard the next morning, you should know one thing about the girl on the black horse: she was not brave. She told him so herself, and she was telling the truth.Rain came in the night and took the frost with it, and by morning, the lane down to Harrow's yard ran brown and loud between the hedges. The Duke of Ravensmere went on foot. He told himself it was the mud. The bay slipped twice on the hill, and he turned her back at the crossroads and handed the reins to a boy. He walked the last half mile with the wet coming through his collar, and he did not examine the decision any further than that.Three children stood on the wall above the ford. They stopped throwing stones at the water when they saw his coat."Harrow's yard," he said.The tallest boy pointed down the lane. Then, because he was nine or ten, and because the world seemed suddenly generous, he added, "The simple one lives there."Edmund stopped. The boy's grin faltered by degrees, the way a candle goes out in stages."What did you call her?"

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