The only hope for me was to find a decent meal and then to piece together the papers I’d stolen so I could get the ones I loved to safety, out of the reach of people like Oeric and Royce and Isther.

“Be careful,” Charlotte Joan quite literally hissed beside me, her curly hair in a ball of frizz around her head from its interplay with the humidity, “or Isther will educate the mind right off you.”

I chuckled at that and patted Charlotte Joan’s head, at which gesture she slapped my hand most sharply. “Do not pet me. I’m not some adorable idiot girl.”

“Charlotte Joan, where have your ribbons gone?” Isther scolded, pulling the child away from me. “Must you so closely resemble a mongrel?”

“Closer and closer,” Charlotte Joan muttered.

“Whatever is this? A family picnic? Was I not invited? Surprise, surprise.” Niall snapped his beige suspenders and then recoiled, rubbing his injured nipples. “A little aggressive, these new ones,” he muttered.

Royce scoffed. “Weak nipples.”

Niall frowned. “You are measuring the strength of my nipples against yours now, brother?”

“Hardly.”

“Hardly measuring?”

“Hardly brothers.”

Isther waved a lace-gloved hand at Niall. “Be scarce, won’t you? We are busy.”

“I was not meaning to run into you, Isther. It is not like I seek human companionship on a regular basis. It’s not like I long to be adored or even acknowledged by my own family. I was just, you know, ambling about with a broken heart and a similarly broken nose, hoping not to be noticed and included.”

Oreic groaned. “Tiresome as ever.”

Niall’s eyes met mine, his nose truly broken and swollen, a cut over his left eye and bruises trailing beneath that. I took a step to meet him—for certainly wherever he was off to was more agreeable than my fate at present, but Isther put a startlingly firm hand around my wrist.

Niall sighed and shrugged away, and I watched him go with sadness in my heart and the loss of blood to the fingers below Isther’s grasp.

“Ah, here she is—oh my!”

Oh my, indeed. For I—and all of us, I was sure—expected a noble carriage to wheel to a stop before us, but rather, in the distance rode a figure on furious horseback.

“Has she no accompaniment?” Isther gasped, her eyes wide and her mouth, for once, agape.

The woman pulled the horse to a rugged stop and crossed her hands over the saddle. She wore tight lips, a hooked nose, and the brightest eyes, her dusty hair contained in a bun at the base of her head—oh, of course, except for the strands that flew defiantly about her head, lit on fire by the setting sun.

She patted the horse’s neck. My horse’s neck. And then she lifted her chin. “June Rollins,” she said with a stern voice. “I hear you are in need of a governess.”