Caine's Law (16 page)

He kept walking. The same steady pace. Giving her plenty of time to think him over. Plenty of time to decide to get shy.

She just looked.

He could feel the tidal ebb of the herd around him in the curling shifts of breeze, the dry crisp crunch of horse teeth on fescue, the nervous jitter of a drumming hoof. The jitters rose to the occasional clatter and the chewing faded entirely away and the clean grass-sap smell curdled into a musk of sweat and piss.

Kylassi and the grooms had swung out to where the herd could see them, and were working their way out of the defile onto the ravine floor.

The breeze shifted to put the three horsemen downwind. The herd began to tighten up, like he’d known they would: now they could smell Orbek.

Horses on Home know what it means to be downwind of ogrilloi.

He stopped when he got close enough that he figured Orbek could hold both him and her in the sight.

“Hey,” he said softly. “You got a name?”

She turned her head slowly to one side, then the other. One of her eyes was brown as a doe’s, warm and sparkling; the other had a cast the grey-blue of dead winter ice. She looked at him out of each eye in turn like she was making sure they both saw the same thing.

“What’s your name?” he said, louder. “Down the village, they call you the horse-witch.”

She looked bored.

“Dammit.” He felt like an idiot. “Do you speak Westerling at all?”

Her chest rose and fell briefly: a little huff of disappointment. “Not if I don’t have to.”

“Jesus Christ.” He scowled and looked around. He could imagine the grin Orbek would be wearing about now, and it made him want to punch somebody. “Look. I don’t want any trouble. I didn’t come all this way to hang you, or arrest you, or do anything to you at all. I don’t give a rat’s ass about you. I just want my horses back.”

“All right.”

He blinked. She still looked bored.

“What do you mean, all right?”

“If they’re your horses, they’re your horses.” She made him feel, somehow, as if he was lying to her.

“Well—” He shifted his weight. “They’re my daughter’s.”

She nodded. “You don’t like horses.”

“What does liking them have to do with anything?”

“That’s what I mean.”

His scowl deepened. He shook his head and made himself unclench fists he didn’t remember making. “I have a feeling talking to you is gonna piss me off.”

She gave him her ice-blue eye. “Then don’t.”

He squinted up at her. The Automag registered weight inside the waistband holster at the small of his back. He reminded himself that she hadn’t actually given him reason to use it.

She looked over her shoulder. Something about the slope behind her was apparently a lot more interesting than he was. The big bay made a slow half pirouette; he found himself looking at her back and a quarter ton of horse ass. The bay flipped up its tail and squeezed out a turd as big as his head.

It plopped on the slope, black-green and wet and steaming faintly in the crisp air.

“And now I ask myself, why the fuck would I want to talk to a fucking horse-witch in the first place?”

“I could tell you,” she said, still seeming to be interested in something above the crest of the slope. “But you wouldn’t believe me.”

“Yeah, okay.” He glanced toward where Kylassi and the grooms were circling a small cluster of horses. He caught Kylassi’s eye and lifted his hand in a small circle of
get on with it
. “We’ll take the horses and be out of here. I’d say it was nice to meet you if it, y’know, was.”

He felt her attention return to him. He had a sense for that kind of thing: a warm tingle lit up his back like carbonated sunlight. “It’s not going to work that way.”

“Want to bet?”

He could hear the big bay’s hooves shuffling unhurriedly among the rocks. Coming toward him from behind. “Don’t turn around,” she said.

He went still. This wasn’t a freeze; just the opposite. All tension flowed out from him, and he stood relaxed and balanced and if she wanted to get frisky within his arm’s reach, that suited him right down to the road-rot between his toes. “Is there a reason why I shouldn’t?”

“Don’t look straight at him,” she said, still with that tone of patient explanation that made him want to administer a boot-leather enema. “You have predator eyes.”

“I bet you say that to all the boys.”

“On the front of your head, dumbass. Binocular vision.”

He ratcheted his head around to look up at her over his shoulder. “What?”

“Binocular vision,” she repeated absently, gazing off toward where Kylassi was cutting Hawkwing out of the small cluster. “How predators see the world.”

He was a long way short of giving a shit about details of taxonomy. “Did you just call me
dumbass
?”

From this close, weather creases around her eyes said she was probably closer to forty than thirty. Probably. “Were you being a dumbass?”

“I—” Dammit. “Maybe I was.”

“Then why are you complaining?”

He shook his head in frank disbelief. “People have
died
for trash-talking me.”

“Not lately.”

He didn’t ask what made her so sure; he had an uneasy feeling she’d tell him.

“That man.” She lifted her chin toward Kylassi, still mounted, playing out rope on the lasso around Hawkwing’s neck while the two sweating grooms, on foot, tried to get a halter on her. “He is master of the horses you want. The man you would call the trainer.”

That was another thing he wasn’t going to ask how she knew. “He works for my daughter. Maybe you’ve heard of her. The Marchioness of Harrakha. Those are her horses you stole.”

“I don’t steal.”

“Oh, right. They ran away. Three weeks’ ride. To you.”

She was still gazing thoughtfully toward Kylassi. “Have you ever been whipped?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Imagine being enslaved. Imagine being whipped. Whipped for not doing what your masters want, but they won’t tell you what they want. They just keep beating you until you figure it out for yourself.”

He stared up at her. He had a really good view of the underside of her fine straight jaw and long, gracefully muscular neck, but he wasn’t seeing with his eyes.

He was seeing a gnarled old slave wrangler in the Khulan Horde, from twenty-odd years ago: the run-up to
Last Stand at Ceraeno
. Three hundred fifty pounds of ogrillo weathered to the color of a granite cliff, one puckered eye-socket filled with old scar, in the other a lazily malevolent eye the color of dog piss. He was seeing the black lead-loaded tails of the grill’s longcat draped over a fist the size of a human head.

He was hearing the half second of flat
whooshh
that was the only warning anyone got. He was feeling the loads in those leather straps smacking breath from his lungs. He was remembering a shot across his kidneys that’d had him pissing blood three days straight.

“Yeah, that’s kind of familiar.”

She nodded, still staring over at Hawkwing struggling against the noose, her whinnies scaling up from nervous toward black panic. Carillon had come out of the herd from somewhere; the big dapple-grey danced skittishly around Kylassi and the grooms. Even from here, he could see the whites around Carillon’s nut-brown eyes.

“So what would you do?” she said softly. “What would you do if it was your mother he whipped? Your child?”

He didn’t have to think about it. “Same as I did to the one who did it to me.”

—the look in the wrangler’s one good eye when his longcat tangled around an upraised arm that he’d thought had been securely shackled: a look smashed along with the eye by the impact of a pound of rock in the other less-than-securely-shackled hand—

She nodded again. “All right.”

He was never sure exactly how it happened; later, the best he could reconstruct was that a sudden twisting lunge from Hawkwing must have shoulder-slammed one of the grooms off his feet while the other had wisely cleared the hell away from her rump as she swung around, ducking; her duck put unexpected weight on the rope Kylassi had wrapped around his fist, which yanked him half out of the saddle while both her hind legs shot
out and up in a rising donkey kick that took him on the point of the chin, while behind him Carillon had spun and leaped into the air in the biggest goddamn capriole in recorded goddamn history, and the stallion’s hooves had caught Kylassi at the base of the skull at the same instant the mare’s had hit his chin.

Kylassi’s head spun straight up into the air. The rest of him didn’t.

His gelding screamed and bolted with the stablemaster’s twitching corpse still in the saddle. A fan of blood from the stump of his neck broke into scarlet gemstones in the afternoon sun. The herd parted to let the panicked horse pass. Then it closed again.

The standing groom sat down. Hard. The other didn’t look inclined to get up.

Kylassi’s head hit the scrub and bounced.

The man looked at the severed head, and at the white-faced grooms. They were beginning to shake. Then he looked at the herd. Which now surrounded them, shoulder to shoulder.

Still and silent. Ten thousand horses. More.

Watching.

He looked up at the horse-witch. She looked down at him. He nodded down at Kylassi’s head without taking his eyes off her. “That was a friend of mine.”

“He wanted you to think so.”

“What’d he do that’s worth killing him for?”

She shrugged. “Ask the horses.”

“Oh, sure. Why didn’t I think of that? Oh, right, I remember. They’re fucking
horses
. They’ll tell me all about it.”

“Not if you don’t listen.”

He put his hands on his hips, a position from which his right could slip under the back of his tunic and draw the Automag in about the same amount of time it takes normal people to blink. “Sure. Fine. So if I listened, what would they tell me about what you just did to them?”

“To them? Nothing.”

“Oh, I get it. It was all their idea. Their cunning plan. Run all the way down here just so they could kill a guy they saw every day.”

She appeared impervious to sarcasm. “They came to be with their own kind.”

“There’s wild herds a hell of a lot closer than this one.”

“Horses in the witch-herd aren’t wild,” she said. “They’re feral.”

“I—” He stopped, squinting at her. “They—
all
of them?”

“Look.”

He looked. For the first time. At the horses, instead of around them and past them. The herd had been just … well, context. Scenery. Local color. He’d been looking for the horse-witch and he just naturally assumed that when he found her, there would be horses around. Why else would people call her the horse-witch?

Finally looking at the horses themselves, he saw scars.

He knew a thing or two about scars. He knew what a whip scar looked like. He knew the difference between the scar of a knife and the scar of an arrowhead, and the difference between both of those and scars left by spurs. He knew the scar left when the skin rips around a club-blow, and the one when the flesh itself is crushed and destroyed. And he knew the look in the eyes when the scars inside are worse.

Every horse watching him and the grooms was remembering every time they’d been whipped. Beaten. Spurred. Clubbed. They were remembering being starved into submission, or penned in the sun without water. Remembering having chains pull their faces so hard that skin ripped to the bone. Remembering being tied down, screaming, trying to get away, to fight back, to do anything at all that might make it just stop. Remembering the bottomless nightmare that was their experience of humanity. Because that’s what they did when they saw people.

Remember.

He knew what they were remembering because when he saw people, he mostly did the same. He said, very, very softly, “Holy shit …”

He looked up at the horse-witch. “I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t know.”

“They believe you.”

“What, the horses?”

She shrugged. “You’re still alive.”

“Uh. Yeah.” He gave half a nod over his shoulder at the two grooms. “You two better go wait in the village.”

They didn’t need convincing. They scrambled to their feet and started toward the rocky slope where they’d left their mounts ground-tied. Ten million pounds of horseflesh closed across their path. Shoulder to shoulder. Not threatening. Just in the way.

The grooms recoiled. They looked back at him. He looked up at the horse-witch. “Can they go?”

She squinted over the heads of the herd. “Doesn’t look like it.”

“Come on, they’re just kids. Let ’em go, huh?”

She tilted her head to watch him with her brown eye. “You don’t understand what I am.”

“Well, that’s a fucking news flash. I don’t give a shit what you are—”

“Except you do.”

“—I just want to finish the day without anybody else dying, all right? Can we do that?”

She gave him half an apologetic shrug. “Seems unlikely.”

“What gets us out of here? Come on, a clue, huh? Anything. Seriously.”

“They don’t like people,” she said. “People are what they joined the herd to get away from.”

“They seem to like you well enough.”

“I’m the horse-witch.”

“Okay, then, horse-witch, how about you witch some horses out of our fucking way?”

“That’s not what I do.”

“Another news flash.”

She leaned a little forward, bracing herself against the bay’s powerful neck, and angled her face to give him a full-on stare. “There are two things I do. Ruling these horses isn’t one of them. Look at my eyes.”

The one eye doe-brown, warm and gentle. The other milky bluish grey, cold as a glacier.

“Two things I do,” she repeated. She touched her cheek below the brown eye. “Forgiveness.” She moved the hand to the ice-milk side. “Permission.”

“Forgiveness and permission? Forgiveness and permission for what?”

“It’s not complicated. Forgiveness for everything bad that’s happened to you. Permission to be who you are. Everything else is …” She shrugged. “Else.”

He scowled up at her. He should probably just shoot her, grab the horses, and get out of here before Kylassi’s blood attracted griffins. Or something worse. Who knew what kinds of predators might be stalking the fringes of the witch-herd? But when his hand closed on the Automag’s grip, he discovered that he understood what she was talking about. A cold emptiness unfolded inside his chest, and he left the pistol where it was.