[…]
One day at the harvest-time, Sir Kit came to the village where the maiden Summer lived, and she was alone in the village with the babies. She sat outside spinning while the littlest children played at her feet. Sir Kit saw her and thought it would be a fine thing to have her for his new mistress, for he had tired of his previous women and wished for a new one.
Sir Isaac preferred the solitude of his own land, land ruled by Derek the Hale, a fair and admirable ruler, although Sir Isaac feared him greatly. He preferred being alone, due to being orphaned mostly from a young age. In a freak horse-riding accident that had killed his mother, his older brother had seen fit to ride off into war, where he was cruelly slaughtered by Lord Argent, along with his comrades. Thus, Sir Isaac vowed to avenge their deaths, this desire exacerbated lately by the death of his own father, a cruel and vicious beast, hell-bent on ruining Isaac’s adulthood, as well as his childhood.
And on this fateful day, Sir Isaac found himself leading his own horse, Buttons, through the woods on the suburbs of Derek the Hale’s land, when he experienced the most uncomfortable sensations, a foreboding sense that something was about to go wrong. Someone somewhere was about to get hurt, and wielding his sword and mounting Buttons, he vowed to change that, prevent the event before it could even occur.
At first Summer thought that Sir Kit was merely passing through the village — the wide road did wind through their humble collection of huts and cottages. But he slowed, and dismounted his horse, throwing the reins over the limb of a nearby tree, and she quickly realised that he came with mischief aforethought.
Sir Kit had come neither in shining armour nor elegant garb, but rather the clothing of a man full of arrogance and certainty of his place in the world: at the top. Summer hastily whispered to the little children to go within-doors, the larger carrying the smallest. The biggest children, still too little to work the fields, peered with huge eyes over the low stone wall on which the maiden sat.
She refused to acknowledge the presence of Sir Kit otherwise, continuing to spin as though his shadow across her hands was no more than a cloud passing by the sun. The loutish young lord deeply resented such behaviour, especially from one beneath him, and he kicked her spinning from her hands to the dust and dragged her up by her wrist.