I am a fool. Still.
Pride. It always came back to pride.
By now you think I’d have learned.
She glanced over at him, lips quirked. “What? Afraid I’ll fall off the horse?”
“Should I be?”
“Oh, probably.” She pressed the flat of her hand against her forehead. “My sinuses feel like they’re full of lead. But we need to get farther away from the road before I fall down.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Not your fault.”
“No. Before…” He gestured behind them. “I didn’t know what you were doing. I should have realized Brenner hadn’t just decided to murder you in the middle of the afternoon. I made it harder. I’m sorry.”
To his surprise, she laughed. “Don’t worry about it. There’salways a good chance that Brenner will decide to murder me in the middle of the afternoon.”
“I resent that, darlin’,” said the assassin, riding up on the other side. “The middle of the afternoon’s when I like a nap. I’d at least wait ‘til evening.”
“Well, I’d hate to interrupt anap.”
Caliban shook his head in disbelief. Slate grinned at him, then sneezed again, and then Learned Edmund called that the game trail they had been following had just vanished into a tangle of branches and mud and Caliban rode ahead to see what, if anything, he could do to help.
Riding through the woods was even worse than riding along the road. Slate got so used to having branches slap her in the face that she stopped even flinching. It was too early for mosquitoes, which was a small blessing, but just the right time for frequent rains. Water dripped off leaves and found its way unerringly down the back of her neck, no matter how many layers of clothes she wore, and her feet were so cold so much of the time that she started to wonder if she was wearing her socks wrong.
Don’t be stupid. They’re socks. There’s only the one option.
Still …
They had to lead the horses much of the way. Caliban led them, but even the tireless knight wasn’t used to this sort of travel. He held them on a mostly straight course, and that was all that anyone could hope for.
The horses were actually another set of problems. Slate was used to simply handing the reins to a stableboy or the farmer’sson and walking off. Apparently, there was a lot more to keeping horses around than that.
You had to take their tack off and rub them down and check their hooves and their legs and feed them and water them and make sure they were tied to something where they’d be comfortable and not break their necks trying to run in the middle of the night. And then you had to rub the tack down, and fix bits and put oil on other bits, and by the time you were done, over an hour had elapsed when you weren’t eating and weren’t sleeping and weren’t getting any closer to your goal at all.
Then in the morning you had to get up and do it all over again, pulling saddles on and bridles and shoving things in horses’ mouths and tightening straps and then the horses would puff their bellies out so that you didn’t tighten it very tight, except that if you fell for that, Brenner generally slid off the horse an hour later, and there’d be a lot of swearing and brandishing of knives.
Mules were worse. Mules were like horses who couldplan.
Caliban dealt with the animals with his usual patience, but there were seven of them, and that was a lot of horseflesh to be tending every evening. Slate started helping, which required him showing her a lot of things, usually three or four times.
She never did figure out what a horse’s hoof was supposed to look like, but that was okay, because it never actually looked like that anyway.
That aside, she actually found that she liked Caliban a lot better when they were taking care of the horses. He didn’t mope, he didn’t overthink, and there was almost no way for the conversation to segue dangerously. “Is this a rock in this hoof?” did not lead gracefully to “So, you over killing all those people yet?”
And he spoke to the horses the same way that he had spoken to Learned Edmund, in the gentle, trustworthy voice.
“Good girl,” he said to Brenner’s mare. “Come on…easy, easy… good girl. Such a pretty girl you are.” And the horse would let him check each leg for swelling, lift each hoof, quieter under his hands than she had ever been under Brenner’s.
Slate couldn’t blame her. There was something about that voice.I’d let him check my feet, too, if he talked like that to me.
Hell, I’d let him check a lot more than myfeet.
Which was idiocy, of course. Caliban was polite. He was always polite. And when they touched—as it was nearly impossible not to touch sometimes—it was impersonal. She could imagine him treating an elderly nun exactly the same way.
She wondered if the hypothetical elderly nun would be as vaguely annoyed by it as she was.
