Page 47 of A Song of Ash and Moonlight

For an instant, I couldn’t even see the stable. I saw the hazy redand black of my anger, and I let out a sharp cry and jumped to my feet, reeling, unbalanced, and swung my staff around hard, intending to crack him on the shoulder with it—but he was fast and dodged me. And so it went for an hour, us circling each other and swiping at each other, his staff clipping me nearly every time. Mine mostly hit air, and sometimes the leather targets, but never him, never his broad back or his thick thighs, never his grinning, bearded face.

I swung and struck and darted and spun myself into exhaustion, but I wouldn’t give up; I couldn’t. As I fought this huge bear of a man I couldn’t possibly defeat, my mind whirled frantically, full of distractions. Yvaine, sick in her palace, possibly dying. Mara, fighting monsters in the Mist. Gemma, writing to people I’d sworn to hate for the rest of my life. Father, brooding in his rooms, most likely attempting to drink away all the knowledge we’d learned over the past few weeks. The firebird, and the Warden, and the Three-Eyed Crown, currently on its way to the capital in the care of Gareth. And what would his investigations unearth? And what would Gemma and Great-Aunt Felicity discover as they rooted around in Mother’s ancestry? What new problems would soon be mine to solve?

And what in the name of all the gods would I say to Ryder once we were finished sparring?

With my head so full, I couldn’t think well enough to aim at anything, and my arms were so wobbly I could barely hold up my staff. I thought I saw Ryder moving in the corner of my vision, and I spun around and let my staff fly—but it only hit one of the targets. It made contact with a deafeningsmack, which I felt all the way up my arms and into my teeth. The feeling was too good; it shook my thoughts loose a bit, hurt my bones enough to distract me from myself. My palms were burning; I’d have blisters in the morning. But I didn’t care. I swung, and I swung, frantic and clumsy, beating the target so hard itbegan spinning wildly from the rafters.

“Farrin,” said Ryder quietly from behind me, and it was then that I realized I was crying, that it was hard to breathe.

Mortified, I tossed the staff away, heard it clatter against the hay-strewn floor. I started to leave, but Ryder stopped me before I could get very far. He came around and barred my way, his hands raised, his posture careful, deferent, and I crashed into him without thinking, curled my fingers into his tunic, and held on as tight as I could. I didn’t understand why I was crying, other than the fact that everything, everywhere, was wrong in some way, and I didn’t know how to mend any of it.

“I’m sorry,” I sobbed, furious with myself. “Here you are, scared to death for your sister, and I’m being absolutely rotten. Rotten person, rotten sparring partner.” Angrily, I wiped my face. “I don’twantto be crying. Gods, what you must think of me.”

I tried again to leave him, but Ryder held on to me. “Please don’t go,” he said quietly into my hair. “You’re in no state to go anywhere. Stay here with me. All right? Just for a few minutes.”

I leaned my forehead against his chest, too tired to resist his steadiness. “I’m horrified. I’m so embarrassed.”

“Don’t be. You should have seen me earlier. You witnessed only the tail end of it. I’ve been a mess for days.”

“You’re being kind. Thank you, but…” I shook my head and placed my hands flat against him, ready to push him away. “I should go. I’m sorry for saying what I said earlier. Clearly you were wrong. I’ve no secret softness. I’m thorns through and through. You should stay far away, and I…I should go.”

“Please don’t.”

His voice gentled to something impossibly tender, so at odds with his scruffy face, his stature like a prowling lion, that I couldn’t help but look at him. When I did, I lost my breath a little, because he was gazing down at me as if I was dear to him, as if the sight of mecrying in his arms was agony. Brow furrowed, eyes soft. He touched the damp strands of hair that clung to my neck; he brushed my cheek with the backs of his fingers. Then he leaned down to press his forehead to mine. He closed his eyes, and his jaw worked as if he was struggling deeply with something.

“Farrin,” he said at last, low and rough. “Farrin, Farrin.” He smoothed his thumb against my cheek, shook his head a little, and opened his eyes—a sudden shot of fierce blue. “May I kiss you?”

The question was outrageous. That I was even standing here at Ravenswood, that I was holding on to Ryder Bask and letting him hold me, that I was evenconsideringhis request, was ridiculous enough to warrant serious reflection and a prompt visit to Madam Moreen, our family’s healer.

“Why would you want to,” I whispered, “after how I’ve behaved?”

He laughed quietly. “You’re too hard on yourself.”

I shook my head. I told myself to let go of his shirt, to walk away, but I couldn’t make my body obey. “Please let me apologize.”

“You’ve already done that. I accept.”

I blew out a frustrated breath. “Ryder—”

“Please, Farrin. Will you answer my question?” He touched my face again with the backs of his fingers, his words still lingering in the air—May I kiss you?—and I couldn’t help myself. I blamed the adrenaline, my exhaustion, my guilt. I blamed how nice it felt to be held, how handsome Ryder looked in the warm lantern light. I leaned into him—the son of my father’s enemy, the man I’d sworn from childhood to hate—and I whispered, “Yes.”

He gave me a gentle smile, so soft and sweet that it made me ache. He let out a breath—an anxious one, I thought, a little unsteady, as if this huge, fearsome man were nervous to touch me—and then he cupped my face in his hands, leaned down, and kissed me.

I’d been kissed before, but only twice: once by Gareth at sixteen,on the disastrous night when we had decided to try what everyone already thought we were doing, and once at one of Gemma’s parties, when I’d angrily downed three glasses of wine in the span of five minutes and then flirted with an Aidurran woman whose name I couldn’t even remember. We’d kissed for a very pleasant—albeit hazy—few minutes under the stairs, after which I’d gotten sick all over her very pretty beaded silk slippers. She’d been exceedingly kind about it; she’d found Gilroy, who’d found Hetty, who had taken me to bed, and that was the last I’d seen of her, for which I was grateful. I wasn’t sure I could have borne the humiliation of apologizing to her for ruining what was most certainly an expensive pair of shoes.

The experience of kissing Ryder, though, was entirely different. Gareth had been nervous, and so had I; we had both immediately sensed the wrongness of our little experiment but had pressed on anyway. And the Aidurran woman I remembered only in pieces: her hand on my waist, the rose notes of her perfume.

But Ryder held me with a sure strength that I knew would sear itself into my mind forever. At first his kisses were soft, even a little cautious, but his palms were warm on my cheeks, and the feeling of his taller, larger body looming over mine left my knees wobbly: his head bowing low to kiss me, his big hands holding me as gently as if I were one of his wilded birds. I felt enveloped by him, a precious creature being sheltered in the embrace of a mountain. The feeling was so overwhelming, so new and surprising, that I let out a soft cry against his mouth and pressed closer to him, desperate for more.

His arms came around me at once, and mine slid around his neck, and I pressed up against him, my heartbeat like thunder in my ears. He groaned, and the rough, masculine sound was fuel to my fire. Heat flooded my body. I whimpered in frustration, not knowing what I wanted, and I shifted shyly against him, unthinking and clumsy. That unlocked something in him; he easily lifted me into his arms,an exhilarating sensation that scratched at the corner of my mind. Obviously I’d not once in my life been held by Ryder Bask, and yet with his arms around me, his grip strong and steady, my chest pressed to his, I felt a twinge of recognition, of familiarity.

But then our kisses grew deeper, his tongue opening my mouth; his ardor was intoxicating, insistent, and all rational thought disappeared. I curled my fingers into his tunic and clung to him, and let him have me. The shock of it all, the unexpected pleasure, left me breathless. He started kissing my jaw, my neck, and I tilted my head back and held him to me, threaded my fingers through his thick dark hair. We were moving; then we weren’t. He’d found a bale of hay to sit on, which for some reason seemed wildly funny to me, but then I was in his lap, his arms holding me tight against him, and I felt him hot and hard between my legs, and then nothing was funny anymore.

I gasped and flinched a little, wholly unused to anything that was happening and feeling suddenly embarrassed and exposed. A sort of panic unfolded in my chest, and even though I loved the feeling of his hair between my fingers, even though the sheer bulk of him beneath me made me ache between my legs, I went stiff. All the beautiful open parts of me that had blossomed in his arms closed up tight.

“Ryder,” I whispered. “Wait.”

He stopped at once. He pulled back, released my hips, and looked at me in concern, breathing hard, his face flushed. He reached up as if to touch my face and then hesitated.

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