Catalyst_ A Tale of the Barque Cats - Anne McCaffrey [9]
The other horses crowded close to the tagged mare, touching noses, shaking heads, and for all the world looking as if they were conferring.
Another mare with a white face blazed with black stepped forward as if looking for her own treat. Janina obliged her while Jared tagged her. This time there was no fuss. The mare flicked the ear afterward as if testing it, then returned to the herd, having finished her apple. The work went quickly after that, as the horses had evidently decided that the tags were a small price to pay for the treats, and each could hardly wait for a turn.
Jared chuckled, patting the last brown and white neck with a strong hand, its back laced with little white scars that were no doubt souvenirs from former, less cooperative patients. “Have you ever seen such unhorsey cooperation from wild creatures?” he asked.
“You say Varley claims he doesn’t know where they came from, but wherever it was, they seem to have been gentled already,” she said.
He nodded, looking as puzzled as she felt, and they gathered their gear and began striding back toward the tracker, which they’d left at some distance to avoid spooking their patients. “There are six more over the next ridge, according to Varley’s last siting. I think we’ve earned a spot of lunch before we move along to them, don’t you?” Jared asked, and Janina realized she was indeed quite hungry. “There’s no hurry and there’s quite a nice café in Locksley. We can eat there if you like or they’ll pack us a picnic to take along.”
“A picnic sounds lovely,” she said, then, fearing he would realize she was angling for time alone with him, she added, “I mean, that would be most efficient and we could have it in a field where the pintos could become accustomed to us while we ate.” Furthermore, the horses would be unlikely to spread gossip if they caught her gaze lingering too long on the handsome Dr. Vlast. Nor would they mention to anyone if in some small way he—She should put that right out of her head. But she couldn’t help feeling as if the gravity had suddenly lightened when he grinned warmly down at her.
“That’s what I’d prefer as well,” he said.
The breeze freshened as they strode along, and Janina found it at first cooling and then chilling in spite of their brisk pace. The scent of smoke mixed with the other woodsy smells of Sherwood, and in spite of the cozy, homey, warm things that smoke indicated on a place like Sherwood, the smell made Janina uneasy. One seldom smelled smoke on shipboard, and if one did, it was not a good thing.
When they reached the tracker, the monitor showed Chessie had shifted position slightly, and though her tail tip twitched now and then, she was otherwise sleeping soundly. Chessie was fine, Janina thought. She was the one with the problem.
Locksley was a typical frontier settlement—a single circular main street with businesses around the outer diameter and along the spokes branching out into the residential district beyond, where the roads became fewer, leading off into the countryside where horse farms such as Varley’s occupied square miles of fields. The businesses along each spoke were separated into malls according to the sort of wares they sold. There was a food mall; a hardware and repair mall; a clothing, shoes, and fripperies mall; a children’s mall; a housewares mall; and a livestock mall containing feed, horse tack, and home veterinary supplies. She’d heard new settlers express wonderment at the strange arrangement of their town, but the prefab wedges that formed around towns had been the shape carried most easily in the early round-hulled ships. Some of the houses had been delivered that way too, but other, humbler and more primitive dwellings were made of native organic