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“Is it Alastrina?” I said instead. An old gray gelding snuffled sweetly at my hair.

Ryder nodded, leaning heavily forward on his thighs. “I don’t know how to exist without her. For so long, it was just us, trapped here in these trees, in this house. Learning how to live a lonely life cut off from the world, learning how to keep Father happy. And now she’s gone, and it’s as if half of me has been torn away.” He looked down at the birds, clucked his tongue. A raven hopped up into his lap, looking up at him expectantly with clever black eyes.

“I’ve wilded thirty of them today alone,” Ryder went on. “Mother says I’ll kill myself wilding so constantly. But I can’t possibly stop.Maybe one of them will find her.”

He cupped his hands, and the bird stepped into them. He brought the creature up to his face and murmured Ekkari to it, a long string of words. Instructions, I assumed. His wilding magic pulsed gently against me, against all of us gathered—a soft ripple of warmth that made the birds squawk and ruffle their feathers. One of the horses stamped its hoof. Then Ryder lifted his hands into the air, and the raven took off flying. In moments, its dark wings were lost in the trees.

I watched the spot for a long time. Then, carefully, I began to speak. “When the Warden took Mara, she was ten, and I was twelve. I woke up every day praying it had been a dream, that I’d run down the hall and find her safe in her bed. For weeks, I would go check every morning before I did anything else, my heart absolutely pounding, every inch of me aching with hope—only to find my mother there instead, clutching Mara’s sheets, crying for her. She wouldn’t let the staff wash any of it—her linens, her clothes. Only after Mother left could we finally clean her room. I stopped talking to the gods not long after that. Every now and then a prayer will escape, but only when I’m truly desperate. Those childhood rituals stay with you, even when you would prefer they didn’t.”

Ryder was very quiet, listening with such intense concentration that I felt a little embarrassed. Somehow I found the courage to look at him and face that hard blue gaze of his.

“I know it’s not the same thing,” I said, “but I do know what it is to grieve, the kind of grief that hollows you out and leaves you changed forever.” I gave him a small, rueful smile. “If I were a woman who prayed with any consistency or sincerity, I’d pray to the gods that you won’t have to know this grief you’re feeling for very long. But in lieu of that, I’ll simply say that if anyone can survive whatever’s happening, be it a firebird or Kilraith or just a dying Mist throwing a tempertantrum, it’s Alastrina Bask.”

Ryder smiled and looked down at his feet. We sat in silence for a moment, and I was ready to rise and say something about the horses, anything to break this strange quiet simmering between us, when suddenly he reached over and took my hands in his, and lifted them to his lips, and kissed my fingers.

He lingered there for a moment, his mouth hot against my skin, his eyes closed tight as if in pain. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. I could only stare at my small hands wrapped up in his, his dark head bowed over them.

“You act so fierce,” he said at last, softly, the words washing over my skin as gently as if he’d drawn a feather across it. “And you are, but…” His voice trailed off. He watched my hands as if trying to decipher a puzzle woven into my palms.

“But?” I prompted, my voice a mere breath.

“That was a kindness, Farrin, what you just said. A kindness I’m not sure I deserve.” He released my hands, his brow furrowed, and then looked at me with something like mirth in his eyes. “That’s one of the reasons why I like you when all reason and history tells me that I shouldn’t. Your tongue is sharp, you’re thorny all over, but there’s something underneath that, something you don’t let people see. A softness. We’re alike in that way.”

I was too shocked by the direction this conversation was taking to think before I spoke. “You’re sayingyoupossess a secret softness?”

He frowned at his boots. “I try to. It isn’t easy. You make it look easy, though. I don’t think other people see it—maybe you don’t even see it—but I do. I see what you mean to your family, how much you love them even when they infuriate you, how you’d do anything to protect them even when they may not deserve it.” He found an acorn in the dirt, picked it up, tossed it to a passel of squirrels squatting patiently on the roots of a nearby tree. “How safe that must makethem feel, your family, to know that kind of love.”

At first I couldn’t find my words. This was a remarkable moment, and remarkably strange, and I felt ill-equipped to handle it with any sort of delicacy. My heart was beating in my cheeks, my whole body warm and weightless. I was unused to the feeling and wasn’t sure I liked it. Flustered, I grabbed for any anchor I could find.

“If this is some sort of strategy to get me to like you,” I blurted out, “it’s not a very artful one.”

It was a terrible thing to say—not enough humor in it to be a joke, and even then, what a bad joke that would have been. I clamped my mouth shut before I could completely wreck our fragile rapport and watched Ryder nod to himself, elbows on his knees, hands clasped before him. The squirrels were fighting over the acorn, chittering furiously at one another. The absurd thought came to me that perhaps a gift from a Bask was something of a trophy for the Ravenswood squirrels.

After a moment of awful silence, Ryder stood, smoothing his tunic. “So,” he said lightly, all business now and not looking at me, “you said you wanted to punch something?”

I sat there in a stupor, watching him stride into the stable yard and wanting to scream at myself for ruining whatever it was he’d been trying to say. He retrieved our fighting staffs and the leather targets. The horses trotted after him, whickering happily, and still I couldn’t move, nailed to the bench. My fingers burned where his lips had touched them, and my heart raced as if we’d just run a fast mile. I pushed hard against the rise of my tears. A grieving man, worried sick about his sister, had tried to say something extraordinarily kind to me, and I’d bitten it off and spat it back at him as if it meant nothing to me, as if he meant nothing.

I didn’t knowwhatRyder Bask meant to me, but it was most certainly notnothing.

“Well, come on, then,” Ryder called out. He hung the targets fromthe stable rafters, and when I finally managed to move my shaky legs and join him, a thousand words of awkward apology fighting each other on my tongue, he tossed a staff at me and lunged before I’d even gotten a good grip on it. I flung it up wildly, instinct screaming at me to protect myself. Our weapons locked, and I reeled where I stood, my arms trembling as I pushed my staff up against his.

“You didn’t give me time to prepare,” I said, glaring at him. “And I said I wanted topunchsomething, not—”

“And will your attacker give you such a choice?” Ryder said, pushing hard against me.

All my regret and shame vanished in an instant. I got a better grip on my staff and pushed back, indignation giving me strength. I was pleased to see him take a step back and steady himself.

He smiled down at me. “Anyway, shoving something feels just as good, doesn’t it?”

I scowled and pushed him again, even harder, a sharp, mean thrust that made him stumble back just enough. In that moment of freedom, I managed to step away, reposition myself, and spin the staff around to block his when it came flying back toward me.

“Good,” he said, “but try not to give away your next move.”

“That one took you by surprise well enough,” I said. I blew a strand of hair out of my face and began circling him, my staff raised defensively.

“So you think,” he countered with a grin, “but in fact I let you have it as a courtesy.”

And then, too fast for me to block him, he whirled around and flung out his staff at my leg. The thing caught me in the back of my knee and sent me crashing to my hands and knees on the floor. The fall jarred me, made my head spin a little. Ryder came up to me, hand outstretched, and said, a little too smugly, “Sorry, Ashbourne, I couldn’t resist.”