Chapter 5

"Everyone calls her that, sir. Your Grace." The boy looked at his feet. "She don't mind. She don't understand it.""Go home," Edmund said.He heard them scatter behind him, and he found no satisfaction anywhere in it, because the phrase came out of his own mouth on the huntfield the day before in front of twelve men, at a volume he chose on purpose.The yard smelled of wet straw and apples going soft, and the cold iron smell of a forge that went out hours ago. A gander came at him sideways along the wall and thought better of it.She stood at the far end with a carthorse, an old gray mare thick in the leg, one eye clouded white. She was picking out the near hind hoof with the mare's whole weight leaned into her shoulder like a wall about to fall. She did not look up."Miss Harrow."The mare's ear swiveled. The girl's did not.Edmund walked around. He came at her from the left side and he saw it work—saw her chin lift, saw her find him, and he filed the fact away with the discomfort of a man learning something he should have known for nine years. She set the hoof down. She straightened: mud to the elbow, a farrier's pencil behind her ear, that loose braid over one shoulder."I came about the horse," he said.The yard door banged. "Your Grace!" Silas Harrow crossed the mud at the speed of a man watching the lane since dawn, wiping his palms down his front, hat already in his hand. "Your Grace, forgive the yard. We don't... she didn't mean anything by it, up on the field. She don't know what's proper. She never did.""I want her at Ravensmere."Harrow's mouth stayed open for a moment. "She's simple, Your Grace," he said gently, the way a man points out a crack in a wall he's trying to sell. He said it the way he said it every week for nine years, without once stopping to ask himself whether a girl who kept his books since she was ten could be simple at all. "Kind enough, works hard, but she don't talk and she don't take instruction. And if she gave you trouble up there, I'll see to it. Only I'd not want the house thinking we—""She rode Corvus."

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