Corvis watched him come. The horse stood saddled because Lord Mobre wanted to buy him, and Fenwick brought him down to be looked at, and for no other reason on earth. Nobody intended him to be ridden that morning. Nobody intended him to be ridden at all. The stallion stood 16 hands three black to the hoof with one white hair above the off eye that his brother once swore brought luck.
In June the horse put Tom Reedi through a rail and broke the man's collarbone in two places. In July he sent the Marlo boy over a hedge without a saddle to follow him. In August he put Fenwick's second man through the door of the feed store and stood over him until the yard came running. In September, Edmund signed the paper that sent him to the sale yard at Layminster, and then stood in the stable doorway for 11 minutes with the smell of iron and clean straw in his throat, and put the paper in the fire. The horse never stood still for anyone, not for Fenwick, not for him.
The horse stood still now. The girl sat in the saddle, with her spine easy and her heels down, in a brown wool habit worn pale at the elbows, and she did not look at the Duke at all. She looked at the space between the stallion's ears, and her hands rested low on his withers, and she moved her thumb once across the black hide like a woman smoothing a page. Edmund knew her face without knowing her name. He passed it a 100 times across the market square, and never once thought about it, Harrow's niece, the one the village called Simple.
"Get down," he said. She did not get down. Behind him, Lord Mobre made a sound in his throat, and one of the younger men laughed. A short laugh cut off fast, the laugh of a man who looked around and found himself alone in it. Edmund reached for the bridle.
The stallion's head came up. The bit rang against itself, a small bright sound in all that cold, and Edmund stopped with his hand in the air 6 in from the cheekpiece, and every muscle in the animal gathering under the black coat like water rising in a well. She lifted two fingers off the withers. That was all. Two fingers, an inch of movement, a thing meant for the horse and not for him.
Edmund lowered his hand. She let out a breath. The stallion let out one after her long and slow, and shook his mane and settled. The whole thing happened so simply that Edmund understood, with a coldness that had nothing to do with the frost, that he was the only dangerous animal standing in that circle. Your grace, Fenwick said from somewhere behind him.
The field is waiting. The field was waiting. 12 gentlemen and 40 hounds and the whole county in wool and brass waiting on a morning they talked about all through August. Edmund looked up at the girl. She looked back at him for the first time, quick, level, gone again.
Gray eyes, nothing simple in them whatsoever. Then she turned her head a little to the right, the way a person turns toward a sound. He saw that it brought her left ear round to him and carried the right one away, and something in his chest slipped a half inch out of place. "Ride, then," he said. She rode.