He shrugged. “It’ll be grey by the time we’re out of the city anyway.”
The Captain of the Guard had come out to see them off, probably fearing that if he didn’t, he’d come out later to find one of them standing atop the corpses of the other three. Possibly brandishing a severed head in each hand.
Not that that’s an unreasonable fear, mind you. I’ll put my money on Brenner, with Caliban at an outside chance. I just hope I get a shot at the Learned Edmund first.
She eyed a spot between the scholar’s shoulder blades longingly. He’d apparently decided that the knight was the only person he was going to talk to. Brenner found this a relief. Slate just found it obnoxious.
A groom handed her the reins to a horse, and vanished before she could say something like, “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?”
Caliban went over and spoke to the Captain quietly for a moment. They both vanished inside the building.
Slate looked at her horse. It was large and brown and had a black nose. It glanced at her, then gazed off in the distance in resignation.
Her mother had arranged for riding lessons for her approximately a thousand years ago, because courtesans catering to the nobility were catering to themountednobility, and sometimes you needed to go out for a ride with a patron. Whatever her faults, Slate’s mother had certainly done her best to groom her daughter for a better life, which had involved endless rounds of lessons. As a result, Slate could dance reasonably well, read beautifully, and play the harp badly.
And ride.
Theoretically.
It didn’t come up a lot in the city. You called carriages, or you walked, but you neverrodeanywhere. When she left the city, she went by stage. She hadn’t actually been on a horse since she was eleven.
Slate rubbed her damp palms on her trousers and gazed up.
There was certainly alotof horse there.
Slate had remembered that horses had been very, very large when she was a girl, but she had secretly hoped that this was because she had been so small by comparison. Unfortunately, either horses had grown or she hadn’t.
Caliban re-emerged, wearing an undyed tabard over his armor.There was no device on it. The Captain of the Guard was behind him, looking more unhappy than usual, and judging by the way the paladin was stalking away, the Captain had managed to offend him somehow.
Granted, that’s not a hard thing to do. I’m amazed he’s even talking to me after last night.
Slate tried to get a foot into the stirrup, just about managed it, and then realized immediately that the stirrups were so long that it was only going to get her partway up the horse, and she’d have to scrabble at the thing’s back like she was climbing a wall.
Would it stand for that? How patient was a horse, anyway?
She tried again. The horse took a step to the side once she had a foot in the stirrup, sending her hopping after it with her legs at an angle that she hadn’t achieved in recent memory.
God, I hate being short.
She looked around to see how everyone else was doing. Caliban, naturally, was sitting on his horse, looking ready to pose for an illuminated manuscript. Brenner, who had never been on a horse in his life, had taken out his dagger and was showing it meaningfully to his mount. The horse did not look impressed.
Learned Edmund was checking the packs on his mules. He looked over at her and then away. Slate gritted her teeth and reached for the saddle. She’d bloody well climb the horse with a grappling hook if that’s what it took.
This would be much easier if horses came with rain gutters. You give me a good rain gutter, I can be in the window in under a minute.
Horses did not come with windows either.
Before she could make another abortive attempt at mounting, Caliban dismounted and appeared on the other side of the horse,doing something to the complicated welter of snaps and buckles that she vaguely recalled was “tack.” Slate figured that it was probably too much to hope that he was lowering a ladder.
He came around the other side, ducking under the horse’s head with a murmured word, and did the same thing on this side. Glory be, it seemed to involve shortening the stirrups.
While that will undoubtedly be much more comfortable once I’m on the horse, I still don’t know how I’m going to get up there in the first place…
The knight finished what he was doing, turned to her, and dropped to one knee as if he was offering fealty. Slate recoiled, then saw that he was actually offering her his interlaced hands as a mounting block.
“Ohthankyougod,” she said, stepping into his hands.
“Not a god, just a paladin,” he muttered, then belied his irritated tone by waiting patiently while she used his shoulder as a stepladder and ascended the heights of Mt. Equine.
