The Towers of the Sunset - L. E. Modesitt [81]
“I’ll protect you as I see fit, as I have done at the Duke’s command.”
Creslin ignores the byplay. Instead, he looks at the horse, wondering which role to take, and finally he swings into the saddle. His legs protest, and he sways more than he would like, grasping the horse’s mane with one hand to steady himself while the whirling in his head subsides. His abilities are still there, but not the strength.
“Are you all right?” asks the redhead.
“As long as we don’t ride too far.” He looks down at the herder girl. “Good-bye, Mathilde.”
“Good-bye, your honor.”
Her face is still turned toward the narrow lane long after the horses descend toward the main road; that he knows.
As he becomes more comfortable on the charger, far larger than the mountain ponies on which he learned to ride, even larger than the trader’s gelding, he turns toward the redhead. She is the only woman in the troop, he has discovered. “Why did you come after me?”
The man glares at him, but Creslin watches the lady. She seems vaguely familiar, yet when he tries to dredge his memories, bright pin-lights flicker before his eyes.
“You really . . .” Her words drop off as she glances at Florin’s dark countenance. “Perhaps you should tell us how you got here,” she suggests, and her horse edges fractionally closer to his.
Creslin would shrug, but he needs his energy, particularly if the ride is going to be long, as he thinks it will be. “If I began with the beginning, I would run out of time before we reached the interesting parts.”
The rain begins to fall in cold drops, but Creslin lets it strike him where it will, not wanting to spend effort in keeping it from him. Besides, compared to the blizzards of Westwind, the rain is not cold.
“. . . too good a horseman for a wizard, if you ask me.”
“. . . riding without a jacket in this . . . doesn’t even look cold.”
Creslin ignores the whispers carried to him by the wind. “I left my homeland in the west—”
“Why?” Her question is direct but not cutting.
He shrugs, and his shoulder twinges. He purses his lips before he answers. “To avoid an arranged marriage.”
“Was the idea so distasteful that you crossed the Easthorns?”
He does not correct her misperception of the distance he has traveled; instead, he concentrates on staying in the saddle, a problem he has not had since he first rode bareback. “Yes,” he finally answers. “Customs there . . . are rather different . . . from here. Male initiative is . . . discouraged.”
He has to concentrate on remaining in the saddle, using the chill of the rain on his face to contain the burning within. How many hills they climb and descend, he cannot say, nor whether he has said more than “yes” or “no” to the infrequent questions of the lady. All he knows is that the rain has begun to fall in heavy sheets and that the saddle is moving under him.
Then he knows not even that.
When he wakes for the first time, his eyes refuse to focus and the flames within him burn like the fires behind Fairhaven, like the sun on Freyja, like the rocks of the low desert behind the southern rim of the Easthorns.
“Easy, easy . . .” A liquid is spooned into his mouth before his thoughts reel back into darkness.
The second time he awakens, his eyes focus, if dimly, and he sees that the room is pitch-dark except for a low lamp on the wall. Again the liquid is spooned into his mouth before he relapses into darkness.
XLIX
CRESUN’S EYES FINALLY open onto a dimness, verging on dark, in a high-ceilinged room lit by a single oil lamp mounted on a wood-paneled wall. His legs ache, and a muffled hammer pounds on his skull.
He lies back on the soft, cotton-covered pillows. His eyes glance from the heavy velvet hangings across the narrow casement window to a small table beneath the leaded panes. The dark gray outside indicates that it is past twilight. Two wooden armchairs, each upholstered in dark brocade, flank the table, on which rests a small brass oil lamp, unlit. The interior