I’m not feeling talkative.
As I slip out from my hiding place with his pack, the chestnut gets mincy again. His flaring nostrils pull at the air—and I can tell when he catches my scent. He eases some, sensing I’m no threat in spite of my odd costume. Or perhaps he’s smelled me before from the village and remembers me.
Merc takes his pack, ties it on one side, and mounts with a fluid movement. His control over the animal between his legs is immediate and he extends a hand down to me. I can feel his eyes on me, intense and commanding. Like I’m little different from the horse.
I don’t like any of this.
I don’t want to ride this stolen animal.
I really don’t want Merc’s help up.
But there’s no way with the mud and no stirrup offered and this being the first time I’ve ever gone astride that I can get my body where it needs to be on the horse. With an odd disassociation, I watch my own hand extend to his. The instant contact is made, I flush under my blue veil.
And then I’m flying.
Merc hoists me onto the chestnut’s rump with what seems like no effort, and I nearly forget to split my legs. The saddle is large and comparted for travel, so there’s a place for me behind the contours of the seat, the leather shelf big enough for a bedroll to be tied on. I brace myself to feel unsteady—
The instant I’m in place, I feel as if I’ve come home.
As unnatural as this should have been, especially as the horse shies from the extra weight it’s been asked to carry too far down its spine, I settle and relax. Oddly, the palm of my right hand tingles as if something should be in it.
The reins. I should be holding… reins…
And that’s when it happens.
An image takes over, erasing everything around me.
I’m plunging into the ocean again, that memory of something that never happened returning to me. Except this time, the sequence of the dive runs in reverse. I am sucking out of the entry into the cresting salt water—and landing on the bare back of a sorrel horse that’s hooving through the surf and kicking up waves of white spray.
I’m laughing, and the sun is on my face, and my hair is streaming behind me like a flag unfurled. There are no reins in my hands, but rather I hold on to the base of the mane, and in spite of the speed, I am as secure in my seat as if in a solid chair.
I am not hiding. I am free—
“It’s not so bad, then.” The dry voice brings me back. “And all you have to do is hang on.”
The hilt of Merc’s broadsword is right in my face, but that doesn’t last. As he sets us off at a trot, his battle-hardened hand reaches back and unholsters the weapon from under his surcoat, the metal-on-metal shift ringing close to my ears. I expect him to sit it at his hip.
He keeps it in his palm and down at his side, a reminder of what we are going to face along the way.
We’re heading in the same direction the mayor and his sons were traveling, and I glance back over my shoulder. The bound twosome are sitting immobile where we left them, not even trying to get free, and I picture tethered goats, which seems mean.
“Do you really think someone will come along?” I say. “Before nightfall?”
“Doesn’t matter to me, one way or another.” He glances back toward me, his scarred profile cutting through the backdrop of red-and-orange trees. “Now where thehelldid you go.”
The rhythmic beat of the hooves beneath us seems loud, as does the soft squeaking of the saddle, and I have known all this before: the sensation of the shifting gait of the horse, the swishing of the tail, the way the landscape moves by at a quick rate. As I probe the wheres and whens of the image, a headache blocks me from going any further from the cantering down a coastline I’ve never seen before and the lithe dive that submerges me in the ocean’s warm, salty embrace.
That I have never swum in before—
“Wheredid you go?”
The repeated demand refocuses me.
As I struggle to answer him, the headache fades like a guard dog no longer triggered by a trespasser.
“I had to hide.” I look around his heavy upper arm at the well-trodden thoroughfare ahead. “We must have left a trail of sludge out of the moat because a village patrol came searching the forest.”
Lying comes at a physical cost. At least for me. Did Merc’s throat feel tight back there when he was first reassuring the mayor? Did his lungs burn as he told them they were not going to be robbed?
