She did not run the way a young lady of the ton ran. At fourteen, she had been told by a particularly disapproving governess thata lady never ran. She had nodded gravely. And on every occasion in the eleven years since, she had run anyway.
She ran now.
She lifted her skirts with both hands and ran across the meadow in a slanting course that took her not toward her arrow but past her arrow and toward the lake. Behind her, she distantly heard Cassian’s deep voice say, “Alice,” in a tone of slowly dawning comprehension.
She kept running.
She reached the willow at the lake’s edge, bent, and picked up her arrow. She did not stop. She ran the four paces to the small wooden landing.
She arrived at the landing at the same time as Cassian, who had crossed the meadow from the foot of the orchard on the other side. He had grabbed her by the wrist before she could complete the turn.
“Alice.”
“Your Grace.”
“What exactly are you doing?”
“I am winning, Your Grace.”
“You are not winning. Your arrow is in your hand. You are required to return to the starting point.”
“I am required to return faster than you.”
“Yes.”
“Then I shall require that you take longer than I do.”
She turned in his light grip with a bright laugh. She had decided, in the fast calculation of the last six seconds, on a very particular form of cheating. So with her free hand, she snatched the arrow he was holding and threw it into the lake.
It made a small, clean, satisfying splash, six feet out in perhaps two feet of water, and floated.
It floated very visibly on the still bright surface of the lake in the precise spot where any man wishing to retrieve it would be required to walk in and get it.
Cassian looked at the lake. Then looked at her. Then looked back at the lake. “Alice.”
“Your Grace.”
“That is my arrow.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“In the lake.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
He looked at her for a moment longer. Then he picked her up.
She did not, until the moment he had her off her feet, understand what he was doing. He had wrapped both hands around her waist, lifted her with an easy, thoughtless strength, and carried her, kicking and laughing the loud unselfconscious laugh she had been laughing in drawing rooms across London for twenty-five years and would be laughing in his house for many more, the four paces across the wooden landing and the two more paces off the end of it into the shallow water.
She landed in perhaps twelve inches of water on her fee, in a bright shock of cold that climbed from her ankles to the back of her neck in a single instant.
Cassian was standing in the water at her elbow, still holding her. He was perfectly dry above the knees.
“You—”
“You threw my arrow in the lake, Alice.”
“That is no reason?—”
