“She could have been injured,” I say, a sick feeling in my stomach. I already know there’s no point in arguing; the deed is done and we both just watched Edlyna and her family depart. They won’t be back till fall, and all of this will be long past by then.

“Oh, hardly! That hostler caught her easily. What’s the use of a hostler to help you mount if they aren’t there to catch you, anyway?”

“Yes, but it was mortifying for her!” I can still remember the girl’s face, red with humiliation as she snatched herself free of the hostler.

“I know,” Valka says, beaming. “Utterly mortifying, and, really, one of the most satisfying outcomes I could have hoped for. It was just so fitting, don’t you think? And oh, how your brother laughed!”

I hunch my shoulders. He would laugh, of course. “Does he know it was you?” I ask.

“Does he know? Really, you are too precious!”

I am not precious at all. “Well?” I ask, as she tugs me forward once more, following one of the wooden hallways. “Does he?”

“How do you think the straps got cut? I could hardly do that on my own! I convinced your brother to create a distraction for me, and oh, he was so very good at it.”

“The . . . the oats?” A whole sack of oats had been spilled across the back path to the stables. I’d heard about it only because it was all my peers could talk about: how my brother discovered it and demanded the culprit be found and punished for causing such waste. As if he were a hero, standing against the delinquent behavior of servants. No one had confessed—of course they hadn’t, I realize now. He’d done it himself. But every hostler in the stable had taken a pay cut to cover the cost of the oats.

“Brilliant, wasn’t it?” Valka says.

“What was brilliant?” A voice asks from behind us.

Valka turns a bright smile on my brother, her grip loosening on my arm. I slip free and take three steps back as she says, “Oh, that little incident with the oats.”

My brother grins. At fifteen, he is taller than us both, his chest just starting to broaden but his body still a little gangly. He brushes a hand through his hair, combing back the blond locks he inherited from our father. My own mousy brown locks are a washed-out version of our mother’s shining chestnut hair.

“Were you telling Alyrra about that?” he asks, glancing toward me dismissively. “You know she doesn’t appreciate such things. Hasn’t the spirit for it.”