I was backing awkwardly out of the way, wondering grimly how many miles my shoes would survive, when your hand appeared in my vision. It remained there, cracked and callused, red knuckled in the cold, until I realized you were waiting for me to take it.
I had noticed by then the way you held yourself away from me, as if yourbody was a grenade with the pin half pulled. I wondered when you had last touched someone you did not intend to kill, if you even remembered how.
Yet still: There was your hand, waiting.
I eyed it. “Are you sure you—”
“Yes.”
I eyed the gelding, who was rolling the bit in his jaw with a sound like bones in a meat grinder. “And you’re surehe—”
“Yes.”
“Why? I thought you despised bards and scribes. ‘Carrion birds,’ I think you called them.”
You did not answer. Your hand did not waver.
I took it. I set one foot in the stirrup, and you hauled me up as if I weighed nothing at all. You settled me in the saddle in front of you, where one of the furs had been folded over the low pommel, so that my thighs lay over yours, my back against your chest. Your arms reached easily around me for the reins, which you hardly seemed to need. The long muscles of your legs tensed in some secret language spoken only between you and the gelding, and he turned northward.
And for the first time since I had lost the book, everything feltright.It was like an out-of-tune instrument finally ringing true, a poorly told tale finally making sense.
I was so overcome by it all—by the wild, fresh smell of the air and the heat of your body around mine, by the implausible fact that I was riding out on the last quest of Sir Una Everlasting, the Red Knight, in the name of Yvanne the First—that I almost didn’t hear you when you finally answered my question.
“Because it was not God’s voice I heard in my dream, boy,” you said, and I felt your breath on the fine hairs at the back of my neck. “It was yours.”
6
I MADE Adismaying discovery that day: A journey which takes only a few paragraphs in a book takes considerably longer on horseback. Especially if the horse is old enough to draw a pension, and the woods are thick enough that there are no straight or obvious routes, but only slim game trails that weave and curl among the trees.
After a long day spent either clinging grimly to the horse—who was not actually a horse, but a clever device for flaying the insides of one’s thighs—or limping grimly alongside it, we had not even reached the edge of the Queen’s Wood. I lay on my back that night, shivering and aching beneath my bad-smelling fur, trying not to whimper every time I moved my legs.
You rose before dawn the next morning to saddle the gelding, who scrubbed his jaw affectionately against your shoulder, apparently unbothered by a full day’s hard travel bearing two riders. I approached, bowleggedly, and did not quite dodge the edge of his hoof as it descended on my left foot. By the time I was done cursing him and all his ancestors in the foulest language of the 2nd Battalion, you were mounted and waiting.
You reached out your hand. I took it. We rode on.
You seemed content to pass the hours in knightly silence, speaking only to suggest one of us walk for a while, but I found myself fidgeting after the first quarter hour. Eventually I gestured down at the gelding. “What’s his name?”
Perhaps I would write it down in the book; perhaps with a little patriotic editing he could be transformed from what he was (a mean fossil) into what he ought to have been (a proud warhorse).
“He’s no pet,” you answered, as if you didn’t feed him grain from your palm every evening. And then, in gruff apology, “He doesn’t mean any real harm.”
“Truly?” I could already feel my left foot ballooning gruesomely in my boot. “I have convincing evidence to the contrary.”
“As do I.” I made a doubtful noise, and felt you shrug behind me. “You’re still breathing.”
“Oh,” I said.
Another hour or two passed. My vertebrae jostled against one another. The trees repeated themselves. I had the slightly hysterical thought that you might be riding in circles, just to torment me.
“How far is it to the Northern Fallows?”
“Far.”
“How far to the edge of the wood?”
“Less far.”
Was it blasphemous, I wondered, to swear at a saint? What if they hadn’t been sainted yet? Instead, I observed, with forced cheer, “I’ve never seen anyone with hair quite like yours. That strange color—where does it come from?”
