The gilded sheep trimming the fescue and tormentil don’t even raise their heads. Morning continues to bloom, the growing light warming the uplands, pools of sun spilling into the dark contours of the iced hills, spreading like stain. The mare moves with ease alongside clumps of bracken; dry, crumbling, pumpkin-colored hart’s-tongue fern; crisp bell heather still flowering mauve in patches; sharp, silvered gorse. Ariel gives a melancholy whinny as they pass an assembly of ponies, who silently lift their whiskered faces and watch her trot by. Ivy Tor smolders at its edges like a burning sheet of paper. Sylvia rises, pauses, rises, light on the horse’s back, feeling the long muscles of her thighs, the roll of the mare’s shoulders, the tempo of bodies in concert, the hard under the soft: bone, leather, flesh, bone. She has been living almost entirely in her head, her body fading, even shrinking with inattention. Her body has been a shape on a page. But now she feels it—real, womanly, her small breasts lifting under her sweater, her ribs high and open, her shoulders sculpted, cantilevered; her hair catching like a flag across her face. She’s tough, and strong; anguish has burned her down, a hard, brilliant gem smoking in the ashes. She rides past a hut circle enclosed by the remains of a low wall grown over with turf, older than history. Past cairns, piles of stone and mounded sod, centuries-empty graves of the long dead. Tors behind her, ahead, an earthscape of rock eaten by wind and years. She is threading up the hill, circling clockwise up the sheep track, leaving the river and the village behind, riding toward the sun, toward the Bronze Age stone row called the Beacon, the outdoor temple the locals know as “The Graveyard,” a triple row of upright granite boulders leading five hundred feet to a double burial site, two stone cists sunk into the crown of the hill. Never ride on the moors alone. She was doing it, she was almost there, giddy with independence, the green wind flavor of it, this first real ride alone, defiant—so early, so high, no one would even see her. Her riding instructor would never know she took the horse beyond the common. She was Lawrencian, the woman who rode away. She’d slipped through.