Chapter 28

For three weeks, I went down to the stables every morning before the sun was over the trees.

The grey mare let me into her stall on the second day. On the fourth, she let me put a hand on her neck, and stood trembling under it as if my palm were hot. On the ninth, Rowan handed me a halter without a word, and I stood in the straw with it for half an hour, talking to her about nothing—the weather, Nana Odette’s pies, the ridiculous chandelier I had bought—until she sighed and dropped her head and let me slip it on.

“Nine days,” Rowan said from the door. “I had her for a month and got bitten twice.”

“Maybe she doesn’t like men.”

“Maybe she doesn’t like me.” He didn’t sound offended. If anything, he sounded pleased, the way my grandmother used to sound when a fever broke on its own. “Horses know things, lass. They know who belongs where.”

He taught me to ride her in the round pen, bareback first, because, he said, a saddle is a lie you tell a horse a