We fall into a rhythm.

Draw.

Set.

Breathe.

Philippe calls it anchor, like a priest blessing a word into importance. I call it don’t shake like a leaf, which is less elegant but more honest. The bow—his bow, stolen from whatever secret corner of boyhood he keeps for himself—pulls the muscles in my shoulder into confession.

My fingers are not used to this kind of work. They are used to pens and door handles and the soft violence of opening too many messages. The string snaps my skin anyway, impatient with excuses.

“Ouch,” I hiss under my breath.

Philippe turns on me like a tiny commander hearing a cannon.

We’re behind the old hawthorn, where the world smells like wet leaves and early morning and the kind of soil that’s never had to survive concrete. The target Philippe dragged here leans against a post in the uneven gold of the field. The red circle painted in its center looks too modern to belong, which makes me love it more. A small, childish defiance in a landscape built on rules.

The dew has soaked my shoes. My toes are numb and I don’t care.

“Again,” Philippe murmurs, and his voice is suddenly gentle—so gentle it squeezes something in my chest.

This is the part that keeps ruining me: I feel likes he loves me… He keeps glancing at me like he’s afraid I’ll vanish if he blinks too long.

I raise the bow again.

Philippe has named the arrows like pets. He insisted. The red-fletched one is Courage. The green one is Le Fromage, which I refused to ask about until he forced me to.

“My cat,” he said, as if confessing treason. “He lives under my bed.”

“Your cat is named Cheese?”

“Le Fromage,” he corrected, offended. “He is more than a simple cheese.”

I would have laughed harder if my throat hadn’t tightened so fast.

Now I choose Courage while Philippe watches my hands like a tutor.

“Not like that,” he whispers, and steps close enough to tap my elbow with two fingers. “You’re strangling it. Like it owes you money.”

“It does,” I mutter, adjusting.

He makes a sound of approval, the kind a child makes when he feels useful. And it hits me—sharp and stupid—how badly I want him to exist outside my dreams. How unfair it is that I have lived an entire life without a little brother, and my brain invented the sweetest one and then has the audacity to call it fiction.

“Listen,” Philippe says, and his seriousness doesn’t match his size. “Do not look at the arrow.”

I blink. “Then what do I look at?”

He lifts his chin, proud of his own wisdom. “Look at me.”

“Why?”

“Because,” he says slowly, as if repeating something he heard once and decided was sacred, “the body lies less than the bow.”

My mouth goes soft. “That’s… actually good.”

He beams like I gave him a medal. “I know.”

I look at him.

He is all cheekbones and stubbornness and hair that cannot be convinced by ribbon, shoulders that will someday broaden into a man’s and still carry a boy’s wild heart underneath. His eyes are too earnest for this world. He nods once—tiny, ceremonial.

I draw.

My shoulder complains. My wrist wants to drift. I make it obey.

I breathe out.

The arrow leaves like a clean sentence.

It lands with a muted bite, not loud, but deep enough to feel in my bones—and it kisses the gold just inside the center.

For one heartbeat, I don’t understand what I’ve done.

Then joy detonates.

Philippe’s face goes incandescent. Mine tries to split with a laugh.

We don’t cheer.

We almost do. We explode and swallow it back down in the same instant, both of us clapping hands over our mouths like criminals. His laughter punches into my palm, muffled and wild. I make a sound that isn’t a word at all.

“Saints,” he breathes against my fingers, vibrating with it. “You did it.”

“I did it,” I whisper, like it’s something I need to say so the world can’t take it back.

“Promising apprentice-master,” Philippe says reverently, bestowing the invented title again as if it’s an official rank.

I lower my hands. “That’s not a real rank.”

“It is now,” he says, without hesitation. “I made it.”

“You can’t just make ranks.”

He looks at me like I’ve said something deeply unkind. “I can make as many ranks as you need.”

Something in my throat tries to become tears.

I stab it down with a smile and bump his shoulder with mine. “Then let me try Prudence.”

He digs through the quiver with exaggerated care, like choosing a sacrament. “No,” he says gravely. “Not Prudence.”

He plucks out the green-fletched arrow and spins it with a flourish.

“Le Fromage demands justice.”

“Le Fromage is going to end up in the hedge,” I warn.

“Le Fromage always ends up in the hedge,” Philippe says proudly. “And yet he returns with honor.”

I can’t help it—I laugh, small and bright, and it feels like I’m stealing oxygen.

I loose Le Fromage.

It thuds into the red like a spoiled cat flinging itself onto a table.

Philippe whoops, then slaps both hands over his mouth, scandalized by his own joy. We grin until our faces are stupid.

We keep going.

Between shots, between whispered triumphs and exaggerated sneaking, my body does something rude: it remembers another rhythm. Hand wraps. Coach Park’s knuckle on my elbow. Feet under you. Wide enough to live, close enough to move.

Annabel’s bones feel lighter than mine back home. Or maybe I’m lighter inside them. My breath sits higher in my chest, corset and propriety trying to keep it contained, but the ribs still know when to lift. I am wearing a body taught to be displayed and asking it to be used.

It answers.

We pause when two washerwomen cut the far path, baskets of linen hooked over their arms, heads bent together in the kind of talk that oils a day. Philippe freezes mid-motion, arrow half-nocked, as if stillness alone can turn us invisible.

“Saints,” he whispers, eyes huge.

“Quiet,” I whisper back.

We step back into the shadow behind the hawthorn, tuck bow and quiver among leaves that smell like unripe quince and summer. The women pass with the soft hush of skirts and learned patience. One of them glances our way—then looks away again, politely not-seeing, the way servants pretend to the dignity their betters forget to grant them.

We hold our breath until silence stitches itself closed.

“We need a code,” I whisper.

Philippe’s eyes glitter. “Like the quince?”

“We already used the quince,” I whisper, pleased with my own wickedness. “Something else. Something boring. Something no one will think is interesting.”

He thinks with his whole jaw.

Then, triumphant: “Pass me the butter.”

I bite my lip so I don’t laugh, he still a kid. “Perfect. And a gesture.”

He wrinkles his nose, searching, then touches the top of his ear with two fingers—quick, forgettable. “Like this.”

We practice, solemn as conspirators.

“Pass me the butter,” I murmur, tapping my ear.

“Any sentence with butter will be accepted,” Philippe whispers, devout.

We are the worst spies and the happiest.

He insists we return to the line. “One last volley,” he says, which becomes three, which becomes five because joy is greedy and Philippe has never in his life wanted less of anything.

On the sixth, the string snaps my inner arm hard enough to make me hiss. A welt blooms immediately, honest as a bruise.

Philippe turns ferocious again. “Who hit you?”

“You,” I say, laughing despite myself. “With… the bow.”

“I will duel the bow,” he declares, solemn and ridiculous. “At dawn. On the terrace.”

“I will attend,” I say gravely. “In mourning.”

He grins so wide it’s unfair.

We finally break when the day begins to remember it belongs to other people too. The kitchen yard will soon smell like broth and onions. The castle will wake fully, polite and watched.

“We should go,” I whisper. “Before… butter melts.”

He taps his ear reflexively, startles at his own obedience, then beams like he’s just been knighted.

“Tomorrow?” he whispers, suddenly softer.

My chest squeezes. “I’m not sure about tomorrow… I will find you, okay?” I promise, even though I don’t know how promises work here.

We stash the bows in the hawthorn’s green ribs, drape the quiver with a net of leaves that looks like accident instead of intention. Philippe lifts the straw butt an inch to hide where Le Fromage bit the red. I decide not to ask where he learned to disguise evidence and ruffle his hair instead.

He swats my hand away and stands taller to pretend he’s taller.

We walk back along the path behind the espalier, shoulder to shoulder, too pleased with ourselves to remember to be careful about being pleased. Philippe moseys because he cannot do any other kind of walking; I keep my stride small because skirts lie if you let them.

At the garden’s corner, he peels off toward the laundry door to wash boy from his hands.

I climb the north stair to remember how to be Annabel.

Before the turn, he skids back, nearly demolishing a terra-cotta pot and its serious rosemary.

“Annabel,” he says, too formal on purpose, eyes glittering, breath bright. “I never knew that you are really good at being bad.”

I smile because love is careful and because he makes it easy. “I’m working on being excellent.”

He salutes so magnificently he almost falls.

Then he vanishes down the corridor—scuffed shoes, intent, sugar-knife grin.

I am halfway up the stone steps when the back of my neck prickles.

The dew on the grass holds shapes. We stepped lightly—but not lightly enough to avoid leaving ourselves behind. Two sets of prints, small and slippered, crosshatching the morning. A heel slid, careless with happiness. The straw butt bears a fresh bite, gold showing like a wound. A hawthorn leaf bent in a way it was not a moment before.

I do not see anyone.

The garden keeps breathing. The bee chooses a better flower. The day puts on its face.

And I go inside with a welt under my sleeve and a smuggled grin under my ribs, thinking of arrows and the way they tell the truth if your weight does.

The bath chamber is steaming when I return, slippers damp with dew, pulse still jittering from stolen victory.

Elise is waiting.

She is not cross—she is not built for it—but her mouth tucks at the corners in the way of a woman forced to love trouble.

“Your gown,” she says, lifting one brow at the dark smear of grass on my hem. “Shall I guess at saints you wrestled?”

“Saint Rosemary,” I answer innocently, dropping my cloak over the chair. “We quarreled. I won.”

Her laugh is quick and quiet. “Mademoiselle Annabel returns to me bold as a man-at-arms. Perhaps I should fetch armor instead of soap.”

The tub is brass, wide as a small boat, set near a tall window latticed with pale glass. Steam curls into the sun, blurring edges soft. Elise pours lavender water from a copper ewer, and the scent rises like hands smoothing my hair.

Then her fingers still.

“What is this?” she asks.

I glance down at my arm. The bowstring’s kiss has purpling teeth now.

“It is… physics,” I say, forgetting myself.

Elise blinks. “What is that…?”

“It’s… nothing. It is the bow. The bow bit me.”

“Ah,” she says, with the patient tone reserved for noblewomen and toddlers. “The bow.”

She reaches into her apron and produces a small jar. The salve smells of comfrey and something bitter, like truth.

“Men say the sword is honest,” Elise mutters, smoothing cool over heat. “I prefer herbs. They tell the truth and then fix it after.”

I sink into the water with a sigh that feels too modern and too relieved. For a while, there is only washing: Elise’s careful hands, the warm pull of steam, the hush of a room built for bodies that never work too hard.

I close my eyes.

And then, of course, Elise speaks, because silence in a castle is never truly alone.

“They say the river has been restless,” she begins, light as gossip carried in the hem of a dress. “The bargemen complain. Too many tolls. Too many cutpurses who believe the road belongs to them. Lord Guillaume sent men to patrol, but…” She clicks her tongue. “Bandits sprout faster than weeds.”

“Bandits?” I echo.

My mind immediately becomes reckless.

“And the town beyond the river?” I ask. “The one with… the market.”

Her hands pause briefly at my wrist, then resume. “Lysange,” she says. “Not far—far enough. Traders come from the south. Dyed cloth, saffron, glass. The square is lively even at dawn. Too lively, say some.”

Her voice dips into a conspiratorial hush.

“There are whispers of dice games. Taverns where the wine is watered less than it should be. Men who follow ladies in the dark.”

My pulse lifts, hungry and stupid.

“Have you gone?” I ask.

“Me?” Elise laughs, startled. “I’m really busy here, Mademoiselle Annabel, so I can’t go far. I never past the church fairs. But I hear. Servants always hear. The laundresses gossip like sparrows. And the steward’s boy…” She lowers her voice. “He swears he saw a traveling troupe last week. Players! With painted masks and drums.”

A troupe.

A market.

A town with life pressed into stone and smoke.

It twists happily in me, like a bird waking.

“Elise,” I say, glancing over my shoulder, hair dripping into my back. “If I wished to go… what would I need to prepare?”

Elise freezes, as if I have asked how to become a comet.

“Go?” she repeats. “To Lysange? Mademoiselle—”

She breathes in, choosing words that won’t get her killed.

“You would need permission,” she says carefully. “At least one brother. Or a proper escort. A lady of your standing cannot simply walk out the gate with her cloak and her courage. It would be… unsafe.”

“Unsafe,” I repeat, and it tastes like challenge.

“Not only unsafe,” Elise adds, wringing the cloth slowly. “Improper. If you appeared in the market without escort, tongues would wag faster than geese. Your mother would—”

She stops herself, but her eyes widen enough to finish the sentence.

“It is not done,” she concludes.

I sink deeper, water lapping my chin. “Then what is done?”

Elise hesitates, then answers anyway, because she is loyal and because she can’t help herself when I look at her like a problem begging for a solution.

“A lady may choose,” she says. “When she comes of age, she may appoint a man of her household—one sworn to her family—to serve as her guard in such matters. To ride at her side. To carry her colors at fêtes. To defend her name, should any man test it.”

My heart trips.

“A knight,” I say slowly, tasting the word like it has weight.

“A sworn blade,” Elise corrects gently, because in this place words are law. “He remains himself, of course, but his duty is to you.”

I frown. “Like… property.”

Elise’s mouth tightens. “Not property. Protection.”

She softens, just slightly.

“But you, Mademoiselle… you never chose. You almost never leave the château. There was no need, because your mother always take you to the temple.”

Annabel—quiet, obedient, nearly invisible—never asked to ride to market, never asked to see the world beyond walls. Of course she never claimed a guard.

“And if I wanted to?” I press.