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I waited a beat, took a drink of water. If he was trying to frighten me as he’d frightened everyone else, it wouldn’t work.

I left the room sedately, pausing to examine one of the tapestries, and only began to hurry when I reached the stairs to the guest wing. Once safely in my room, I shut the door and leaned back against it, breathing hard. What a horrible house, so dark and cold and quiet, with its looming black walls and its cruel-eyed master. At least my room was warm. A fire blazed in the hearth, and my bed was piled high with furs to ward off the northern chill. Beside it, on a marble-topped table, sat a small piece of paper, folded in half.

When I opened it, the sight of Ryder’s familiar handwriting made my heart jump strangely.

Come to the northern stable yard in the morning, read the note.I’ll be there at eight. It’s time to fight.

Chapter 7

When I arrived at the stable yard the next morning, blowing on my fingers to warm them, I found Ryder already there, shirtless and sweating, fighting an invisible enemy with a long wooden staff.

The sight of him stopped me in my tracks. Even when he was fully clothed, his strength was obvious, but without a scrap of fabric on his torso, every line of muscle was startlingly…present. Broad shoulders, broad chest, sweat trickling down his abdomen and highlighting every chiseled line. Damp tendrils of his shoulder-length dark hair had fallen loose from their knot and now clung to his neck. He spun and swerved through a series of elaborate movements I couldn’t follow. Beyond him, the blanketed horses stuck their heads out of their stalls to watch, their breaths puffing in the cold morning air.

I marched over to the stone wall surrounding the yard before he could catch me staring at him, but whatever advantage I thought that would give me was lost when I blurted out, “Why aren’t you wearing clothes?”

He stopped exercising to look at me, then glanced down at his dripping torso. “I got hot,” he said simply, “and I wanted to catch youoff guard.”

Then he rushed at me without warning, leaped over the wall, and swung the staff at my head before I could even think to move. The thing whipped through the air and then stopped right at my nose. Only then, standing there cross-eyed, frozen with fear, did I manage a muted yelp.

Ryder gave me a hard smile. “It seems my ploy worked perhaps a little too well. Do you not know to duck when a weapon comes flying at you?”

Mortified, I opened my mouth, closed it, then finally remembered how to speak. “You surprised me.”

“That was the point. Most attackers don’t announce their presence before having a go at you.” He looked me up and down, frowning. “Why are you wearing that?”

My cheeks grew hot as I imagined how I must look to him: a shivering southern girl wearing a plain work dress, muddy boots, and a fur-trimmed coat so rarely used that the stiff leather creaked when I moved. Wishing fervently that I were anywhere else in the world, I made myself raise my chin and meet his gaze.

“This is what I wear most of the time,” I told him. “Well, without the coat. It seemed practical to train in it.”

“Fair enough. But we’re not fighting today.”

I stared at him. “We’re not? But your note—”

“You’re not ready to jump right into combat training. First I’m going to teach you how to strengthen your body.”

“I’m not a weakling. I walk miles almost every day at home.”

“I didn’t say you were a weakling, did I? And walking isn’t fighting.”

He jumped back over the wall and strode into the stable while I stood there fuming, staring resolutely at the ground, unable to find even one sufficiently scathing reply and determined not to gawk at his muscled back. In general, I’d cared very little about muscled backsuntil this morning and didn’t appreciate what the sight of his in particular was doing to me.

When Ryder returned, his arms were full of clothes. “These are my sister’s work clothes. They’ll be a little big on you, but they’ll serve for now.”

I unlatched the gate set into the wall and joined him, keenly aware of the horses’ curious eyes on me. “Do you ever walk through gates like a normal person?”

“Of course. But it’s more fun to jump over them.”

“Are you a man or an animal?”

He grinned and tossed the clothes at me. I just barely caught them. “I suppose you’ll have to wait and find out for yourself, Ashbourne,” he said, and then paused, catching himself, and sobered a little. “Farrin,” he said, with a little bow. A strange cloud darkened his face; he turned around to tug on a shirt of his own. “Hurry and change. We’ll start with a run.”

***

Ryder did his best to kill me. We began with a two-mile run, followed by carrying heavy flat stones the size of serving platters from one end of the stable yard to the other again and again andagain, followed by punching a painted leather target Ryder held to his chest until I started to see spots.

“You’re slowing down,” he told me, maddeningly unmoved by the pathetic pummeling of my fists. Even when I missed the target and hit him—which happened more often than it didn’t, a circumstance of my inexperience that I couldn’t bring myself to be angry about—he was like a tower of stone, not even swaying back on his heels.

Anger blazed up in me, threatening to erupt. My hands hurt, I was sweating right through my borrowed clothes, and I dearly hoped that the horses were the only ones watching us. I shoved Ryder as hard as Icould, which was nearly as impactful as a kitten barreling into the side of a bear, and then spun away, breathing so hard my chest burned.