“I don’t know.” I turned my face up to the sky, letting the freezing rain slap my cheeks and sting my lips. Better rain against my lips than Avery, I thought, remembering Aspen’s parting words. At least he, too, was miserable. Only the same worry that had spurred me to accept his invitation could have pried him from his family’s hunting lodge, where he could be drinking a frothing horn of ale by the massive hearth with his cronies and, more than likely, accompanied by a few of the less reputable village women. I’d only been inside once, and I had a vivid recollection of the stag’s head mounted above the hearth, its antlers blackened by smoke, staring at me out of empty eyes.

I did not want to share the deer’s fate, cooped up with the Lockland clan, half-dressed children with the same insolent blue eyes as the man beside me tugging on my skirts and demanding to be put to the breast.

I met those eyes by accident. There was a defensive, wary look to them that vanished the moment he saw me looking.

He did not ask to marry you either, a nasty little voice in the back of my mind reminded me. Avery was as bound to his father’s ambition as I was to mine, and now both of them were somewhere in the mountains, hunting for furs to ship overseas, my father’s disgrace not so total that he did not still have a few contacts eager for the exotic pelts of the north, Avery’s father not so immune to the allure of promised wealth that he was willing to put his son’s desires before his own personal gains.

So here we were, a pact made in flesh and blood, while the foothills of the mountains hugged the village like an anxious mother, unwilling to let her offspring stray too far into the light of progress.

A sliver of unease wormed its way into my heart.

Avery knew as well as I did that the hunting trip could take more than a month, but as the days stretched past the provisions the men had packed, he had taken to blaming my father for the delay.

“When we are married,” he said, hurling another sleet ball into the trees, “I will not keep you waiting.”

I didn’t know if it was a promise or a threat. Coming from Avery, it could have been either.

“When we are married,” I said, making a sleet ball of my own to throw into the dark, wet woods, “you will not make promises you cannot keep.”

Avery laughed. He had a boyish, contagious laugh that somewhat spoiled my desire to hate him. His eyes flicked toward me again, and he hesitated. I had the impression he was weighing whether or not to call a truce.

“Do you know why my family is called Lockland?” he said.