“Tara told me...” I began, managing to meet his eyes, feeling like a stranger. Twin discs of steel looked back, his nostrils flaring at the smell of my stimulated unease. “...You freed Fly.” I did not know what stating the obvious would gain me with him, but I didn't know what else to say. He didn't respond, either, leaving me to search further. His silence was the only confirmation he gave. “I... Thank you. But what are you going to do now, Jay?”
He shrugged, his shoulders ever a casual, unruffled pair of hackles. “Better me than you out here, that's all. You wouldn't have lasted a day.”
“I was locked in a closet,” I reminded him. “I couldn't have done the deed to get myself thrown out.”
To that, he reverted to his ways of silence, giving me nothing. He could never admit to doing something strictly for me, certainly not for the compromising possibility that he cared.
“Well, whatever it is, I'm coming with you,” I said.
“No.”
“You don't get to say no, Jay. You lost any measly scrap of authority you held over my head the moment you walked out on me for the rest of the world. Namely: five minutes ago.”
“You have a good thing here with Tara.”
“Nobody has a good thing anywhere. If I have to start from scratch, I'd rather it be with you.”
“Great.”
“Yeah, no offense, Jay, but I'd rather it be with you,” I revised wryly in conjunction with his attitude. Scarcely reunited for two minutes, and we were already bickering like the good old days. Fine with me. I knew how to handle him giving me a hard time. “A horse hasn't gotten me off its back for three years, Jay. You'll be hard pressed to do what they can't even do. So don't bother wasting your breath,” I finished, pushing past him to start off. It may have been a pointless command, in hindsight – Jay never wasted his breath – but it served its purpose well enough.
Without another word, Jay picked up where he had left off, strolling after me. I only ought to be thankful he was a man of few words, I thought, or else he might have had a great deal more to say about it. I kicked a piece of debris out of my way, wrapping my arms about myself
“So, where are we going?” I repeated after he had caught up and fallen into step beside me. He may not have volunteered any welcome, still, but his signature long, lanky strides were not exceeding the range of my own, so I took the accommodation as an encouraging sign.
“Didn't even grab your coat,” he uttered in a disapproving fashion. “Honestly, Willow, where do you expect? We're going back.”
“Back?”
“You won't get far on skin and bones. Sometimes I wonder if you have any common sense at all. Then I remember: you only have horse sense.”
With that, he grasped me again by the nape of my neck and steered me back around toward camp. The very same land we had just traversed looked completely different from this angle.
“Do you think Fly will be alright?” I inquired with fresh concern, the issue of charming my way back into Jay's company already dismissed from my mind.
“Just get your coat, Willow,” he said, and the matter of our coexistence was reborn.
He waited outside the gates while I retrieved my coat and other few belongings, but I was too accustomed to getting my way with him to have the presence of mind to appreciate this extension of loyalty. Maybe loyalty was all it had ever been, and all those years I had naively – and with great self-gratification – misconstrued it as always getting my way with him.
It was all the same to me, though, as I exited those gates a second time and joined him for earnest, already taking him for granted again even as he took me as I was.
It would always be Jay and me. There was too much security in that to pause for appreciation. When something was a given, pausing to speculate could only open the doorway to changing its dynamic. So I didn't.
We fell into step aside one another and pushed off once again into the wilderness. I was already glad I had my coat. Memories from our early days of scavenging for work came back to me, and I revisited the notion of joining the circus, or the gypsies, or inventing the means for one of the two. I could scarcely navigate the tricky parts of The Shardscape, though, let alone perform great feats of tight wire or trapeze prowess, and I possessed no musical ability beyond the lullabies I sometimes caught myself singing to the horses.
In all likelihood, we would drift into another camp that dealt in equine business and find ourselves doing exactly the same thing that we had just left behind. It was all we had going for us.
Between the commencement of our journey and that inevitable end game, however, mucking stalls would surely begin to gain in appeal pertaining to a means of survival again. For, looking out over the hazardous darkness that dipped and dived and rose all around us, it was clear we had a long, cruel hike ahead of us.
Four –
I dreamed of horses galloping over the Shardscape. They spilled across the broken land in a great flock of unity, powerful and sweeping, an aerial view giving me the impression of an ocean-like wave rippling over the ruined face of the earth. The foam of this wave was done in the dull gray, brown, and charcoal manes of the creatures, billowing in the wind of their passing. And as a wave carves smooth its path, so did the horses wash away the debris with their passage. It was left cut to the quick and sanded down, a barren wasteland polished by their hooves, the ruins converted to plains.
The stallion that drove the herd was a frothy white beauty. Rare was the horse that was actually white beyond an illusion; an underlying feature of gray skin typically canceled the sentiment out and rendered the classification gray. But this one, with its albino pink skin and blue eyes, was officially and undeniably white clear through to his soul. He was fantastic, and caught the eye of my dream awareness like an angelic beacon. He drove the other horses off the edge of the stage that hosted the dream, so that it was just him and me, and I focused in on his rippling form, regaining my own feet in the dream and following him across the Shardscape.
The herd, at that point, was nowhere to be seen, even as I was returned to a distance-gleaning position upon the ground. The stallion was a mere lone drifter, picking his way over the destruction. But his ribs were nowhere near showing, and his fair coat was immaculate. Where was he going, this mysterious untouched creature, and from whence had he come? Intrigue pulled me after him, accompanied by a sense of perseverance that only dreams could inspire. Was I taking up a position in his wake only to follow him to the edges of the earth? It didn't matter.
His hooves clopped over the wreckage, sure-footed and confident in their direction.
I became so absorbed in following the stallion himself that I lost track of the landscape, until suddenly I realized we were traveling no longer through ruined cities but the wrecked chasms of what I could only guess had once been the legendary Grand Canyon. The brightly painted walls of the canyon, like crumbled layers and layers of petrified fall leaves in every shade imaginable, bowed and erupted around us, a wrecked battleground as vast and many-sided as I had ever seen. Surely there had never been one so colorful, either, even covered in the blood of people and animals alike. Only the death of summer was ever so colorful.
Noticing my pursuit, the stallion strutted a tight half-circle to regard me. He looked curious, more than alarmed to discover my presence, but all the same I trailed to a halt to eliminate the possibility of posing a threat.
I smiled at him, replete with an irrational happiness just for getting to look upon him. Dreams will do that – turn things into irrational fantasies.
But even as I stood there on irrationally good terms with the beautiful creature, something else frightened him. His ears perked toward something behind me, and he blew once through his nostrils before growing antsy and turning to trot away.
I glanced behind me to see what had scared him off, but there was only the long, winding throat of the canyon, occasionally interrupted by a fallen shelf or gaping crack.
When I turned back to appreciate th
e last few moments of the stallion's company, he was galloping into the distance, his tail like a great white flag, kicking up dust with his heels as he went.
*
I woke to a woman in a faded camouflage uniform shaking me awake. Immediately, I knew she had been the one to scare the stallion away. Groggy eyes wide, I sat up, trying to put together what was happening. It took a moment to remember that Jay and I were traveling cross-country, which explained why I awakened among the rubble, but it did not explain the woman that loomed over me. She wore a leather waist-cincher with numerous varieties of knives sheathed into it, as well as various bands about her limbs and large brown patches sewn into her faded uniform.
“Get up,” she ordered, and I couldn't help but feel her voice sounded vaguely familiar.
Struggling up, I caught my balance on the uneven ground and blinked at the twilit world to get my bearings. It was hard to get your bearings when everything was in a disarray, though. Jay was up and leaning casually against a pitched slab of concrete, unperturbed. Another uniformed figure aside from the woman stood at attention, in case he was required. The look on his face was indifferent, while the woman's smooth features showed more purpose. Where I knew I earned every bit of my nickname upon awakening, she looked remarkably pulled together for that early in the morning, her caramel skin pulled taut by a sleek black bun. She smelled slightly of starch, a last effort lent toward the respectability of her uniform, no doubt. Indeed, the only toll of life evident across her person was the faded hue of the well-worn garment, the jaded lilt of her eyes, and the dirt under her nails. Everything else was professional to a T.
“You two have been following us,” the woman stated, clearly intending to draw some guilty truth out of us.
“We–” I began to deny, confused, but ended with a questioning glance at Jay. Were we following them?
Clearly, Jay's disinclined nature to talk had already established me as the culprit for interrogation. Nobody looked to him for answers, which I found funny, since he was really the respective leader of the two of us.
“Um,” I said. “I don't know where we're going.”
“Don't you,” she speculated doubtfully. Her eyes were unyielding dark piercers. She was a harder woman even than Tara, from the looks of it. Taller, too. “Nobody casts out across this wilderness without a target or some semblance of destination. It's suicide.”
“Oh, and I suppose that means if we happen to come within ten miles of your location you absolutely must be the focus of our attention,” I retorted, grumpy that early in the morning. People thought they were so important. I had never had the greatest opinion of them.
Jay shook his head at my antics in the background and pushed himself away from his slab to intervene after all. “We're just looking for work, ma'am. You left a trail to follow that beat blindly blazing our own.”
I glared at him, feeling slighted for not having been informed. “We are following them?”
He spared me only a long-suffering flick of his attention. I suppose I should have been flattered.
“Are you some manner of tracker, sir?” the woman asked him. “We don't leave trails, if we can help it.”
“That's hard, with the number of horses you've got.”
She looked at him a moment, gauging her response. “Indeed.”
Horses? Suddenly, I thought I remembered where I knew her voice from. I had heard it, locked away in my temporary holding cell during the raid.
“You're the one who raided us,” I concluded, drawing her gaze back to me.
“You from Tara Casting's camp?”
I nodded. “Were.”
“Trimming down her staff, then,” she made a conclusion of her own. “Swift of her. Well, if you're the first two to go, then we certainly have no need of you.” She turned to leave then, apparently satisfied we weren't a duo of throat-slitters haunting her company's shadow. The starched fabric of her uniform swished slightly with her steps.
I glanced to Jay; of the two of us, he had proven the best at securing us positions with potential employers in the past. But he did not appear much motivated to pursue this particular opportunity.
“Wait,” I piped up, halting the military woman at the edge of our nestled little campsite. “I can pack a mean cart of manure. And Jay can do anything. Escort us as far as one day's journey? Just let us piggy-back on some of the mounts? We know the horses anyway, and we'll be out of your hair after one day.” I hoped to gain more, of course, but even if additional bartering did not pan out, one day on horseback would boost our progress tremendously.
She glanced between us, considering. I wondered how customary it was for them to take on stragglers like us, hoping it was their way to take pity on civilians.
“One day can make a world of difference,” I put in; hopefully the icing on my charity cake.
“I take it you two were not the first to go because you couldn't ride worth squat?” she wanted to make sure.
“Please,” Jay said wryly. “You don't squat on a horse.”
“Or anywhere near them, unless you're keen on getting trampled during a spook,” I put in, aiming to boost our credibility. “It's all in the waist. Bend, don't squat.”
It was hard to say if it was amusement or mere acceptance that crossed over her face, but either way it seemed a favorable sign. “One day,” she granted. “But you answer to me – Lieutenant Sonya – and you pack manure as well as Private Damon over here can pack a punch. And trust me, you don't want to learn how well he can pack a punch, so you just do as you're told and stay out of the way, and we can do our small part and part on good terms. Are we agreed?”
I nodded, and the ducking of Jay's head served well enough.
“Good. Then fall in. We have a lot of ground to cover in a day. Count yourselves lucky.”
*
The dreams had frequented my unconscious doorstep ever since the day Jay found me in the ravine that marked my debut as a horse whisperer. It was as if that day had gone to my head, tattooing a fantasy in my mind. It was gratifying to create similar scenarios, to envision myself and the horses in a whole new light.
Jay had not spoken to me of the incident as he had witnessed it that day, but I knew he could testify to it.
“Jay, did you see that?” I had breathed, incredulous, as he pulled me out of the chasm.
“I saw it,” he confirmed, but he looked none too pleased by the phenomenon. If anything, there was concern on his face, but really even that was an ambitious assumption.
I had been charmed for days, until the incident caught up with me and left me shaken. Jay had watched me carefully, measuring my reaction to the horses that I knew, calculating the experimental nature of reintroducing myself to them. Intrigue easily conquered the scare, and soon I was developing my new gift with the horses.
He did not like to go out of his way to acknowledge it, either because it had manifested in a way that scared him or because he was not inclined to grant me a glorified rung above him in the world of horses – or maybe simply in the same manner that he didn't like to talk about anything – but it was enough for me to know that he knew. That we shared my secret heightened our bond.
It was a bond first hatched by dumping manure on one another in the stalls, being there for each other's first fall, competing over who could tame horses fastest and teach their own the most tricks, and riding double together to keep warm during the cold months. The only thing we didn't ever do was go for rolls in the hay. The thought was somehow preposterous.
I wondered, as we joined the raider group, if Jay knew I had more up my sleeve than to settle for a mere one-day piggy-back ride, that I contrived to use that unspoken gift of mine in our favor among them. I also wondered if it was better to clue him into the plan, or if he would only disapprove given the chance.
Pulling my coat tighter in the twilight chill, I lengthened my strides to keep up with the military duo. Unlike Jay, they did nothing to accommodate my shorter frame. They meant business, and w
e were not going to slow them down. My stomach growled, and I rubbed it sympathetically.
Yet, even with their focused trudging, it took longer to reach their camp than I anticipated. Sonya must have had the eye of a paranoid hawk to catch onto us trailing in her wake. I was impressed; also broached by the notion that I was perhaps grossly out of my element in the modern wilderness.
Squirrels scattered as we tromped on their dens. Even the occasional bird flew out of some odd cubbyhole. Glass crunched like snow beneath the Lieutenant's boots.
When I was beginning to wonder if this camp of theirs even existed, we wound about a dune, crested a lip, and saw it. It was nestled at the bottom of the slope, a neat, ambling collection of horses and their camouflage keepers. In a moment of irony, it occurred to me that, had I not insisted on Fly's incompetence in the ranks of this group, I would have been reunited with him that day. I may even have found a way to steal him back. As it was, I could only hope he was finding his way out there. Maybe he would wander back to the place he knew and end up in Tara's possession again, and all along it was reckless and premature of me to leave in such a hurry.
Jay nudged me in the back, and only then did I realize I had paused to take it all in and never come back out of the line of brooding. I picked up the pace again, and we skittered down the slope and into the midst of the Raiders.
The deep, throaty sounds of horses nickering met us as Jay and I were recognized by some of the animals. I could not help but break into a smile as their fondness touched me, as a small piece of how things had been before the raid disrupted them returned to me. Those animals were my friends. They had been my purpose in life for awhile.
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