Ihate my life. While that had been a true statement as far back as she could remember, it’d never been more true than now.
Gisela sat on a small bench, sharpening her sword in the stable.
Alone.
Was this really her future? Cuddling Brant’s cold steel?
Her mother had offered her freedom for the contract demon. Now that she’d actually experienced freedom, Gisela better understood what she’d bartered for.
It was nothing like she’d imagined. Being surrounded by strangers in a strange land where she didn’t know customs, laws or idioms. Because in her heart, she knew she didn’t fit in with the other centaurs, and her mother would never allow her to stay in Thassalia. Gisela posed too great a threat for that. If she wasn’t under her mother’s thumb, her mother would have her killed.
She’d been in the inn earlier, watching the easy way Candara and Masakage had bantered.
That was what she wanted.
Friendship.
Ironically, she felt that whenever she was with Xaydin. “You just don’t talk enough, Brant,” she whispered to her sword. “I appreciate what a good listener you are, but our conversations are always one sided.”
And rather boring.
Funny how that had been enough before this journey started.
Not anymore.
Sighing, she sheathed her sword and propped it up against the stall. She tucked her stone and cloth into her saddlebags and got up to store them on the door of the stall where her horse was eating hay.
She leaned against the stall to watch the equine. Because she was part centaur and unicorn, she’d never really paid much attention to horses before. Being equine herself, she’d never ridden a horse before this. For that matter, horses were rare in her mother’s kingdom. They weren’t needed.
But they were beautiful animals. Graceful.
Old legends claimed that centaurs had been created when an ancient sorceress had fallen in love with her stallion. She’d craved him so much that she’d transformed herself into a half-human, half-horse so that she could be with him.
Queen Taranilla. The first centaur.
It was said that all their people came from her and her stallion.
Gisela had never really paid attention to the old tale. It’d been something troubadours sang about and poets wrote odes to.
Now though…
She understood the queen. That hunger to be with what she loved. Had the queen ever been ridiculed for those desires? What had it cost her to become a centaur?
What would it cost me to leave it?
She’d lived as a human most of her life.
Sighing, she reached out to touch the horse’s forehead. The coarse hair felt so strange and yet she liked feeling it. “You’re a good boy, aren’t you?”
The horse nickered in response.
Just as the horse raised its head to look at her, something sharp struck her across the back of her head. Nauseated, she tried to focus, but everything went dark.
“Gisela?”Xaydin entered the stable where he’d been told she was resting.
He saw their horses, along with the others who were being kept here. But there was no sign of her.
Not until he saw her sword propped against a beam.
