He rode in alone, and my sisters ran out to catch him as he slid from the horse while I stayed in the doorway, knuckles white against the red of my skirt as the weak sun made its way down over the rooftops and I counted the shadows of the hunters who had not returned.

I should have run to him. I should have rested my warm hands on his frozen face, but I had felt misfortune’s shadow fall over me too many times before. I knew, even as the wealth of the forest promised new beginnings and an end to old debts, that Winter was upon us.

•   •   •

“Rowan, the door.”

I put down my spindle with a groan, gathering the gray wool into my basket and tucking it back underneath my chair. My younger sister rolled her eyes.

“You could pretend to be sick again,” Aspen suggested.

“That excuse is wearing as thin as my boots. Besides. Then they’ll be saying I’m weak as well as odd.”

Aspen faked a delicate cough and rolled her eyes at Juniper, our youngest sister. “Well, you’ve hardly gone out of your way to change their minds about the odd part,” she said.

I swallowed the bitterness and pushed down the memory of home— our real home in the city, not this thatch and timber prison surrounded by sentinel pines and hardwoods— and forced a smile.

“You could at least pretend to like him, then,” Aspen said, her tone softening. “It’s not as awful as all that.”

I lowered my eyes, hating myself for the rush of shame that flushed my face. Aspen was right, of course. At least we had this place, an oversight, a scrap of land so far removed from civilization that my father’s creditors had not even bothered to assess its value. At least I had the luxury of a house to hate.

“Pretend to like Avery?” This time the smile felt more real.

“He just hates that you can read and he can’t. Which, by the way, you might try not reminding him.”

“If he never opened his mouth that would be so much easier,” I said, my hands checking my hair despite myself. It was no use. It fell heavily around my shoulders, thicker and coarser than Aspen’s, and as unruly as a mountain goat’s.

Aspen, with her red lips and dark hair, was by far the beauty of the family, and the knowledge was not lost on her. Even Juniper, though she had yet to master the simultaneous use of all of her limbs— a condition that made itself apparent in symptomatic shards of shattered pottery— shared Aspen’s heart-shaped face and gentle curves. Where my father’s coastal blood had tempered my mother’s wilder features in my sisters, I alone looked like I belonged here in the tiny village of Three Elms.

The irony cut deep.

“You could try doing something besides talking.”