The wooden daisy was in Cordelia's pocket when she walked into the dining room.
She had not meant to bring it. She had not meant to keep it at all — had told herself, the night she found it on the fence post, that she would throw it into the fire and forget the golden-haired stable boy who had carved it and the way his laughter had floated through the paddock like something that did not belong in a world of skulls and iron eyes and princes who did not accept refusal.
She had not thrown it into the fire. She had put it in her jewellery box. Then under her pillow. Then in her pocket, where it had lived for the past six weeks, her fingers finding it at odd moments — during breakfast, during lessons, during the long, restless evenings when she sat at her window and watched the stables and pretended she was watching the horses.
She was never watching the horses.
