“You don’t need a longbow, and it would take months, maybe years, of work before you could draw it. This is a hunter’s bow. It will bring down a deer or a rabbit easily enough, and it won’t take up as much room when you’re not using it.”

The bow’s grip felt strangely comforting in my hand. The only weapon I had ever handled was my father’s sword, and never with his permission. My father drew the line at arming his daughters, and my mother hadn’t lived long enough to argue the matter. She would have known how to shoot, I realized, tracing the leather of the grip with my thumb. Any mountain girl knew how to kill and skin a rabbit. That was considered a useful skill, unlike reading, as Avery had been quick to point out. I tightened my hold.

The Huntress found me a quiver, bowstring, archer’s glove and guard, and a whetstone before leading me back to the surface. I tried not to trip over the spear on the steps, but the butt clanged a few times, emphasizing just how much more quietly the Huntress moved than I did. I watched her boots in the spaces between clangs.

Something was different.

No.

Everything was different.

I had awakened to find her gone, with only the wolf pup keeping me company. Her chambers were larger than mine, but not as large as some of the abandoned rooms of state I’d wandered through on the days I’d spent alone here. She made her bed in a sea of furs, and the usual hunting tapestries hung on the walls, but the room still had the feel of a servant’s quarters despite its size. It was only as I was leaving, dressed in the clean, dry clothes she’d laid beside the bed for me that I realized where I was. This was the room above the stables, where the master of horse might have lived, or the mistress of the hunt. It provided easy access to the stalls below and overlooked the courtyard, giving the occupant a full view of the castle’s comings and goings, but it was not the sort of room a chieftain’s daughter might have lived in. The more I thought I learned about the Huntress, the less I knew.

She had not spoken of my brush with death again. I’d wandered down to the kitchen, my heart lodged too fully in my throat to eat, only to find her waiting in her hunting leathers. Neither of us acknowledged the tenderness she’d shown me the night before.

“Put these on,” she told me now in the courtyard, handing me the gloves and guard. “We’ll start with the bow.”