Her words doused any good mood I had managed to salvage. “Keep an eye out for father while I’m gone,” I said, feeling her smirk follow me out of the room.

The cold air in the narrow hall of our entryway, so different from the decorated foyer of our town house, served as another unpleasant reminder of how much harsher everything about this place was compared to the coast.

“Rowan.” Avery Lockland’s broad frame took up the doorway and blocked the dim light of the winter sky. His dark brown hair curled disobediently on his handsome head, and his full lips smiled easily and often.

Unless, of course, he was looking at me. Then he didn’t smile so much as grimace.

I could feel Aspen’s eyes sticking to my back like pine sap. Aspen would have smiled up at Avery with all the reserve of a mare in heat. Probably had, but that was not something I cared to think about.

“Hello, Avery.” His name tasted like ash and brittle bones.

“It’s a beautiful day,” he said, gesturing at the sleet spitting down from the glowering sky. “Care for a walk?”

A gust of wind blew the sleet into my face. I braced myself as the ice stung my cheeks, something in my chest aching to fly away over the trees, down the sloping lowlands to the sea, away from the shadow of the mountain and the boy who was to be my husband.

I thought about slamming the door in his face, and then, unbidden, came the thought of retreating back into the house where my father’s dreams lay sleeping, and spending another afternoon staring into the fire while my hands performed the menial tasks that now defined my existence.

“I would love to,” I said, taking vindictive pleasure from the look of surprise on his face. I shrugged into my cloak and took the arm he offered, stepping out into the cold. We ignored each other, walking in silence down the village lane until we came to the edge of the forest. A cardinal swooped over the path, a brilliant flash of red in the gray day.

It reminded me, with the familiar stab of pain it always brought, of my mother.

She rarely spoke of her childhood, and she had gone to great lengths to remedy her provincial past. The only signs she ever gave of missing her home were the names she chose for her daughters and the hours she spent in her garden, tending the mountain rose she’d brought with her. Rowan, Aspen, and Juniper, she’d called us. Her little mountain trees, growing in the fertile soil of the lowlands.

She had named me Rowan seventeen years ago today.

“When will your father return?” Avery asked me, stooping to scoop up a ball of sleet. He heaved it at a nearby rowan tree, his timing, as always, bitterly ironic.