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soften her edges and make her see the error of her ways.”
    “How
can you be so sure of that?”
    “Because that is what happened with her mother, and she is her mother’s daughter. I said my wife had a fiery spirit, yet truth be told, she was a harridan when we did first meet, full of rage and pride, with a vicious tongue that could and did slice deep. Yet love changed her completely.”
    It was hard, truly hard, to keep from scoffing, yet Wulfric still remarked, “You assume she will love me. What if she does not?”
    Nigel chuckled at that, further confoundinghim, until he said, “There is naught that I can see wrong with you—far from it. Or do you tell me that you have difficulty with women?” At Wulfric’s flush, he added, “I thought not. And my daughter will be no different, given time, once you are the center of her life. Verily, I would trust no other than Guy’s son to have the care of my eldest, for if you are at all like your father, I know you will do right by her.”
    And that ended Wulfric’s last hope of getting Nigel to void the contract. He
was
going to be stuck with the she-devil, because he was his father’s son, because he was not a churlish knight as some men were, because he did not beat those weaker than he as many men did, because his father had taught him differently.
    He was understandably bitter, not wanting to be the trainer of his own wife, as it seemed he would have to be. Some of that came through in his next remark, if not in the tone, which he kept carefully neutral.
    “Yet I must deal with her in the interim, Lord Nigel, before this hopeful change occurs. She ignores your orders. What makes you think she will obey mine?”
    “Because she knows how far she can transgress with me and not suffer for it, yet with you she will not have that advantage. She is not foolish, my boy, far from it. She is merely … strange in her attitude, and in what she views as important—at this time. But what she finds important now will change once she settles into marriage.”
    The father was optimistic. Wulfric was not.

Six
    Jhone had a
devil of a time tracking her sister down. Milisant might have gone up the stairs leading to the north tower chamber they shared, but as Jhone had suspected, instead of going there she had traversed the corridor to the west tower stairs, which would bring her back down and out of the keep entirely. And Dunburh was no small place to find her easily when she cared not to be found.
    She did find her finally, in the stable, making friends with Wulfric de Thorpe’s black stallion. It was not one of the huge destriers bred and used in battle for their viciousness and willingness to trample anything in their path. Destriers did not make good traveling mounts specifically because of their lethal dispositions, and so any knight with access to a friendlier horse would reserve his destrier just for battle. But it was still a large animal, and being a stallion, had not looked very friendly—until now.
    “You are not trying to turn him against his owner, are you?” Jhone asked her sister uneasily as she approached the stall.
    “I thought about it.”
    That surly reply had Jhone smiling. “But changed your mind?”
    “Aye. I would not see the stallion hurt, which is no doubt what would happen if that bastard suddenly could not control him. It
is
his tendency to lash out and cause pain, as I learned firsthand.”
    “That was long ago, Mili,” Jhone reminded her gently. “He was only a boy then, not fully a man as he is now. Surely he has changed—”
    Milisant’s head snapped up, her eyes filling with golden heat as she cut in, “You saw for yourself out there on the path. He
would
have struck me if you had not stepped forward when you did.”
    “But he did not know ’twas you.”
    “How much smaller am I than he, no matter
what
he thought me?”
    Jhone could hardly refute that, so she remarked instead, “I was there to see his horror when he did realize just