Oh god, I don’t want to die…
There was a shadow next to her. The paladin’s horse was pulling alongside hers, neck to haunches, then neck to knee. She could see his hand, practically next to her face, as he groped forward.
If you think you’re reaching over and pulling me off this horse in mid-run, you’re even farther out of your mind than I think you are…
He might have been out of his mind, but apparently not that far. The hand passed her, swung down, and there was a sizzle of wet leather as he grabbed the flapping reins.
If Slate had somehow managed to get the reins, she would undoubtedly have hauled back on them with all her strength, and the horse would have bucked or reared or gone over or all three at once. But Caliban had a somewhat better notion of the stopping distance of a horse on a wet riverbed, and the two horses went pounding along together, side by side, until the desperate run dropped down to a gallop, and the gallop fell to a canter, and the canter became a kind of stiff-legged bouncing trot, and then the horses had stopped and he slid off and Slate fell off and he caught her.
It occurred to Slate, a few minutes later, that she was clinging to a knight in the middle of a rainstorm, her cheek full of wet chainmail, which wasn’t very comfortable, and that she appeared to be sobbing uncontrollably. She wasn’t actually sure. It was too wet to tell if there were tears. She might have been laughing instead.
Caliban was holding her upright. He still had his sword in one hand, and the pommel was digging painfully into her shoulder, but she didn’t care, because she wasn’t dead.
He was saying something, over and over, that she couldn’t make out—it might even have been the demon muttering, for all she knew—but the rumble in his chest was soothing.
The thunder rattled. She was glad of it, because it meant he couldn’t hear her, either. She had a horrible suspicion that whatshewas saying, over and over, was, “Oh my god, I don’t want to die.”
She wrestled herself under control at last, partly out of pride, and partly because the horses were moving restlessly and bumping into them both. She finally got her feet under her.
Carefully, possibly even reluctantly, Caliban released his hold and stepped back. She looked up. Rain sluiced down both their faces. Was he crying too? How could you tell?
He leaned down, and shouted, next to her ear, “We have to get out of here before it floods!”
Ah. Good thinking.Now that Slate looked down, the water did seem to be swirling perilously close to the tops of her feet. She nodded to Caliban, who took the tangle of reins in one hand and Slate’s hand in the other and led them all squelching upstream, looking for a place to climb out.
The rain was still coming down in hard sheets. Visibility was nonexistent. But they found one at last, on the opposite bank, and none too soon. The water was threatening to come in over the tops of Slate’s boots. The horses, already panicky and exhausted, were slipping and snorting and pulling at the reins.
She let go of his hand and dragged herself up the slope. The knight and the horses followed.
Her vision was better than his in the dark, and once they were under the trees, she took the lead. There wasn’t a great deal of cover, but she found a fallen tree at last. It had crashed through the canopy and been overgrown by a spreading pine tree.
It formed a wall on two sides and at least a suggestion of ceiling, and the ground underneath was damp rather than sodden.
It’ll do.
There was no real point in trying to start a fire. She crawled into the hollow and pulled her knees up to her chest.
Caliban tied the horses, draping their saddle blankets over them as best he could, then crawled in after Slate.
It was pitch black under the tree. Slate could just see make out the outline of the horses, black against grey, and that was all.
Squish. Squish.
What the hell …?
In the next flash of lightning, she caught a glimpse of Caliban trying to wring out his cloak.
“Well,” he said, after a minute, “it’s not dry, but it’s what we’ve got.”
With some grumbling and a few curses, and the removal of some armor and his sword, they managed to huddle together under the cloak. It stank of wet horse, but it was wool, so it held warmth in, and that made up for a lot of wet horse.
She sneezed anyway.
His sigh seemed to come from his toes.
“Sorry,” she muttered, and sneezed again. The smell of rosemary was threaded in and around the wet horse.
He dug into a pocket and pulled out a handkerchief.
