“That doesn’t look good,” Brenner said.
They all studied the sky. Lightning flickered off in the distance.
“I’d say we should take shelter,” said Learned Edmund, “but we’re near the Vagrant Hills right here, and I hate to leave the road.” Caliban grunted.
“What’re the Vagrant Hills?” asked Slate.
The knight looked around. “Forests and low hills, more or less. We don’t want to wander into them.”
“Why not?”
“You know how magic makes you sneeze?”
“Sure.”
“We’d probably have to tie you to the saddle.”
“Lovely.”
They watched raindrops make craters in the dust. Thunder growled around them, and a cool wind slithered between the trees.
“Maybe we can find something close to the road,” said Slate, kicking her horse forward. “Keep an eye out.”
They got about a quarter mile down the road without spotting anything likely, and the sky opened up with a cataclysmic ripping sound.
Everyone was instantly wet to the skin. Slate’s hair plastered itself to the back of her neck.
“Damn.”
“We should have oilcloth cloaks in the bags somewhere,” Caliban said, shouting a little to be heard over the rain.
“We’re going to have to get off the road,” Brenner called. “We can’t just sit through this.”
The Learned Edmund opened his mouth to say something—possibly to protest leaving the road at all—and a crack of lightning hit the ground less than a hundred yards away. Thunder smashed around them, not just a sound but a physical weight that rang in Slate’s brain and bowels as well as her ears.
Her horse bolted.
Slate was so blinded by the jagged afterimages of the lightning that at first she thought she’d simply fallen off the horse and that the sickening lurch was an after-effect of the thunder. But then a spray of pine needles smacked her in the face and she fell forward, and she realized that the horse was moving under her.
In a stumbling run.
Through the dripping forest.
Ohmygodohmygod
Its ears were flat against its head. The forest was a wall of black cut-outs, given brief, flickering depth by lightning.
Can horses even run in forests? Will it hit a tree? Is it about to fall down? Am I about to fall off?
She flung herself as flat along its back as she could, clinging to the reins and the saddle and the mane, her legs wrapped around the horse’s belly, which she realized, rather too late, it might be taking as a signal to keep running.
Too late now. If I let go, I’ll fall off. At high speed.
The world slewed at an angle. The horse put its hindquarters down and skidded down a slope full of wet bracken.
It occurred to Slate that, suicide mission aside, she was almost certainly going to dieright nowbecause no horse could runthrough dark wet woods without slipping or putting its foot in a hole or breaking a leg in some fashion.
And this caused her to make quite an unexpected discovery—namely that she didn’t want to die.
