This morning, she couldn’t shake the sinking realization that she had said too much. That maybe Isobelle had realized what took Gwen a night’s tossing and turning to figure out herself: that what had bothered Gwen the most was just how badly she’d wanted to throw those boundaries of hers to the winds.

Damn those girls and their “tea.”

Gwen had tried to spend the day being as aloof as she could, hoping that if Isobelle had realized how pointed Gwen’s remarks had been the night before, today’s distance would shake her understanding.

And through it all, Isobelle’s gaze had stuck to her like some cornflower-blue curse from a hedge witch, and Gwen was desperate to figure out the terms of her release.

“Where is your head at, girl?” shouted Madame Dupont, chasing away the mental image of being haunted by wide blue eyes and replacing it with the tree bearing the tiny dangling target—a dragonseye, she had called it. “Ride, damn you! We do not have much time to practice!”

Drowning one’s feelings by hitting things only worked if one, you know, actually hit things.

Stop thinking about Isobelle, she commanded herself, and let Achilles burst into a gallop as she lowered the makeshift lance—a pole from Archer’s barn—into place. She tried to force the world to narrow down to that dragonseye, but her heart kept jerking bits of her attention this way and that. Achilles’s hoofbeats thudded against the ground, traveling all the way up her spine, her arm beginning to shake with the fatigue of having held the lance so many times in a row. She tried to focus on those sensations, if not that fury.

What it must be like to be Isobelle right now, watching her fail over and over to hit this mark, knowing her fate depended on Gwen being able to do this impossible thing? That thought opened a floodgate in Gwen’s mind, which surged with a thousand different questions, each of them triggering a pinprick of emotion, until she felt like she was bleeding from countless tiny wounds.

The dangling target whizzed by, untouched.

Dupont made a noise somewhere between a cluck and a hiss and stalked a few steps away before turning back around. “Again,” she snapped.

Stuffing her misgivings down was becoming harder and harder with every passing moment—but the alternative was whirling round and unleashing them on Isobelle, telling her there was no way Gwen could pull this off, and consigning her to her fate of being married off to someone who didn’t love her. Hiding her fears was hard—but hurting Isobelle was impossible.

Gwen swallowed, gathered up Achilles’s reins to turn him, and pointedly did not look at Isobelle.

Chapter Eighteen
Maybe we could wash the donkeys

“A hayloft!” Isobelle squealed. “Just like in an adventure story!”