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and seemed to blow right through her. Shivering, she pulled her cloak closer about her shoulders and studied the clouds on the horizon. There was weather coming, unless she was mistaken. A farmer, and a farmer’s daughter, always knew how to read weather sign. So much depended on the whims of forces they could neither understand nor change.
    Somewhere, a raven croaked. The idea that Mountbatten was some sort of demon had once again begun to seem reasonable, in this stark and windswept landscape and with rain hanging in the air. Every time Isla closed her eyes, or paused in her labors for even a minute, she saw a vision of his hands. Not hands—claws. His obsidian-dark gaze came clearly in her mind’s eye, too, and equally unbidden, tongues of fire flickering in their depths.
    She shivered again. Isla knew, even if Rowena didn’t, why Mountbatten wanted to marry her. As lovely as Rowena was, Isla doubted that her sister’s charms entered into the equation at all. Whether he’d been married before or only kept the women locked up in his tower, the duke had an unsavory reputation when it came to matters of the heart. Or wallet, Isla thought with chagrin. The rumor was—and Isla had reason to believe the person who’d told her, one of her father’s oldest retainers—that Mountbatten had married each woman in turn and remained married for about six months before having her killed. In both cases, her death had been ruled a tragic accident. And then he’d inherited what was, in both cases, a sizeable tract of land.
    Mountbatten would marry Rowena, perhaps enjoy her charms—if he even liked women, which Isla was beginning to doubt—and then help her meet with the same kind of tragic, unforeseen accident as his previous wives. Who, Isla was sure, had also been both young and pretty.
    Isla sat down under one old, failing tree and wrapped her arms around her knees to keep warm. Low to the ground like this, hidden by the patchwork of frost heaves and ruts that covered the once-orchard, she was invisible to view. Isla wanted to be invisible right now, needed to be. She needed time to think, really
think
about the series of ideas that she’d allowed to form in her mind. About the plan that, even now, she was refusing to admit that she had.
    Rowena had always been going to marry Rudolph; at least in Rowena’s mind, and in Isla’s, too. As to what Isla herself was going to do with her life, she hadn’t put all that much thought into the idea. Her options were, and always had been, limited. She was no one’s dream of graceful, retiring femininity and few suitors had darkened her doors. No suitable suitors, anyway. She’d pretended indifference, but inside where no one could see her heart had ached. Isla was a woman like any other. She wanted, no, craved love. To be needed. To be the object of unquenchable and unconquerable passion and to feel that same passion in return. That men rejected her cut her to the quick; she covered her hurt with caustic observations and absorbed herself in her reading, and her work.
    What use was she, really? To anyone? The bitter truth was that the only person who truly cared for Isla was Isla. No one would be brokenhearted to see her go; to see her die. Not like if Rowena left, abandoning Rudolph. Rudolph would mourn her for the rest of his life.
    Letting Rowena go to her doom, simply because Isla cherished some vague hope of some day being happy…was supremely selfish. And Isla had, she was forced to admit, lived a selfish life. She’d catered to her own tastes and interests, making herself the kind of child of which fathers despaired. Leaving Rowena to suffer. For all her pretense of being so hard-bitten and worldly, Isla had fought against the realities of her life just as hard as hard as Rowena was fighting now. Rowena, whose only crime was being lovely. Isla felt a sudden, intense stab of pain and drew a sharp intake of breath.
    The same raven, or maybe its mate, croaked again.
    Far away,