The Dust of 100 Dogs - A. S. King [20]
On their final pass, Oliver’s man looked sure to win, nearly spearing Mairead in the chest. Instead, she caught the handle of his pike and pushed him back and off balance. He pulled unevenly on the reins, making his horse trip up on itself. In that brief moment, Mairead stabbed him in the neck with her pike. She dug her heels into the horse and galloped back toward the bridge.
Emer wished she were still on top of the castle so she could see where her mother was going. Mairead was riding the long way round, through the thick forest at the bottom of the knoll, and avoided the soldiers still on the road. She disappeared to the east.
A sound rose to the west—the sound of a hundred horses, Emer thought. She pivoted in her tunnel and peeked toward the crossroads. Over the edge of the hill rose twenty or so familiar horses, each with two men. Some of the men dismounted and ran behind the castle to the front of the burning church, looking for their families and leveling soldiers. The riders continued on, hoping to wipe out the hundred or so Cromwellian soldiers still fighting between the blown bridge and the knoll. Emer recognized her brother as he dismounted, and said her Uncle Martin’s name aloud. Padraig looked directly at their secret hiding place, but didn’t go to see if she was there. Instead, he stared up at the burning castle and the smoldering cottage beside it.
Emer watched as Padraig scanned the dead bodies for their parents, and then quietly hid himself behind the burning building. He looked again in her direction, but she was too scared to give him a signal or move. He rose and, picking up a stray pike, ran foolishly into a crowd of soldiers. Emer pinched her eyes shut and never saw him again.
It was cold in the tunnel. Emer felt hungry. It was only then, over an hour after she’d abandoned the castle, that she realized she’d left her gift from old Mrs. Tobin behind, and also the emergency bag she’d secretly stitched for a week and the food she was to fill it with when the time came. Just as Padraig had teased, she was too young and stupid to know how to survive on her own, and she cried about being hungry and dumb. She tried to think of what Padraig would say—and then realized that every one of her happy thoughts had just gone up in flames with everything else she ever knew.
The psychologist my mother sent me to was a nice guy, I guess. He was about six foot three with a soft, rounded plump in the middle, and he wore a pair of round-framed glasses that he would occasionally push up with his middle finger.
My first visit was the slowest fifty minutes I ever lived through. I didn’t want to say too much, so I let him ask the usual questions between bouts of silence.
“Why do you think you’re here?”
“Because my mother is worried about me.” Short and sweet—try not to show too much angst while already popping his fingernails off, one by one, with an awl.
“Why?”
“Because she wants me to be a doctor.”
“And you don’t want that?”
“No.”
“What do you want to be?” he asked, realizing how condescending he sounded a second too late. “I mean, what are you interested in?”
“Lots of stuff.”
“Like what?”
I talked about my favorite classes (history and advanced chemistry), but didn’t name any one thing. Then I said, “I know what I want to do. I just want to do it, that’s all. I don’t want to talk about it for months and months before I do it.”
“But you can’t just go to college without planning,” he said quite seriously. “You have to talk about it with someone.”
“It’s not college.”
He smiled at me. He had trustworthy eyes, a brown sort of hazel with a twinkle. They nearly made me want to stop seeing myself whipping him with his own severed forearm. “Let’s talk about school for a minute.”
“What about it?”
“Your mother says you do very well.”
“I do. It’s easy.”
“So, you’re bored, then?”
“Yeah. You could say that.” I looked around his disheveled office. “What’s that?”
He turned around to see what I was looking