“Promise me!” He watched Doron closely. “By the God!”
“By Vkandis Sunlord, I promise. Now get out of here!”
Tomar touched hand to forehead in a salute, reined Keesha around, and rode out of the grove. Looking back over his shoulder one last time, he saw his cousin standing by the fire, his own hand lifted in farewell.
Totally drained, Doron fell to his knees, his body feeling as though he’d been badly beaten, his mind stretched to a thinness he’d never experienced before. It had been a long time since he’d used his powers, and he was amazed he still knew how to cast and hold an illusion that strong.
The grove lay silent now. No neighing horses, no crashing in the brush and trees. Ferrin and the rest of the band would be returning before long. He stood, knees shaking, and slipped off into the darkness. Wouldn’t be good if they found him sitting by the fire as if nothing had happened.
He sat down beneath a tree, crossed arms on knees, and stared into the darkness. Tomar. The cousin he thought he’d lost all those years ago. Could be, if life proved different from what it was now, he just might take a journey north. He’d heard about Valdemar . . . how couldn’t he, living so close to the border.
Life was change.
And Tomar had given him good reason to think about a different existence. His bandit companions . . . well, they’d survive somehow. Right now, so would he, with them in place of the mother and father he’d lost.
But he had family in Valdemar.
Life was not only change, it was choices to be made.
He heard rustling in the brush and stood. Ferrin and the three others were cautiously returning to the clearing now that the “danger” had passed. He drew a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and slipped back into the clearing to wait for them.
Interview with a Companion
Ben Ohlander was born in South Dakota and grew up in Colorado and North Carolina. After completing high school, he enlisted in the Marines before attending college in Ohio. Upon graduation, he was commissioned as an officer in the Army Reserve. He has been mobilized three times and is currently serving in Afghanistan. In the intervals between deployments he works as a software consultant for IBM and writes as time permits. He lives in southwest Ohio with his wife, three stepsons, two cats, and a mechanical parrot named Max. The cats are generally tolerant of his writing and encourage all of their “staff” to have outside interests.
Dave Matthews (no relation) pulled his aging Chrysler off the two-lane road to consult his map. Kentucky was full of twisty roads anyway, and Lexington more so. Horse farms predated roads here, and cutting up perfectly good bluegrass to put in a straight right-of-way was not only pedestrian, it was downright tacky.
The Google map was pretty clear, five miles north on 88th, across four miles, left turn at Mountebank, one and half miles past the bridge, near the old barn. Come alone. Okay, he was there.
He dug into the aging knapsack that combined computer bag and lunch sack and pulled out the digital recorder. It took him a few seconds to figure out where the batteries went and another several minutes to read the instructions. That, of course, was only after trial and error failed.
“June 12th. Here at Tri-Bridge to meet a source with inside information on purging techniques used by jockey to make weight.” He played it back and listened to himself. Not newsy enough.. He turned the recorder back on. “Here at Tri-Bridge to get the skinny on the jockey-purging scandal.” Snap. Much better.
The meeting out here in the middle of nowhere seemed perfectly rational for a source with inside information . . . even if “middle of nowhere” was maybe twenty-five minutes from downtown Lexington. The scene fit . . . but no one who looked like a source. No one at all, in fact.
He looked back toward the old barn, some fifty yards away, and on the far side of the white rail fences that were required in horse country. There was a girl working in the barn, but no sign of anyone who fit the profile of a source.
He checked her out. She looked slim enough, with the youngish-colt look of so many of the women in this part of Kentucky. He tried to guess how many millihelens she was, but from the distance he could tell little other than she was slim and lithe. Given his last date had been sometime last year, that was enough to launch a navy of six or seven hundred ships right there.
Still no source.
He checked his watch. He was still a minute or so early, but he thought there ought to be some sign. This was his first source, but he was pretty sure they were supposed to be on time.
He looked back the way he’d come. Nothing there and nothing on the opposite side of the road except a shiny white horse. The horse was heavier than the whippetlike thoroughbreds they were breeding up these days, not a racer at all . . . maybe a show-horse done all in white.
A show horse standing on the far side beside a split rail fence in central Kentucky. Not odd. A show horse standing next to a golf bag in central Kentucky. Very odd.
The horse stared at him, ears perked forward, brown eyes on his. Their eyes met through the streaky windshield.
He took a second look at the golf bag. Okay, definitely odd. A horse and a golf bag standing by the side of the road. Sounded like the lead in for a joke.
He opened the car door and looked down. The driver’s side swung over a small drainage ditch that ran alongside the road. He stepped across the ditch and walked around to the front of the car to peer up and down the road. He glanced at his watch, then tipped his baseball cap back on his head.
In the distance, a crop duster puttered, biplane momentarily silhouetted against the sky.
The horse stood calmly looking at him, then dipped his head into the golf bag, and nosed his way between the woods sticking out, each with its own embossed horseshoe cover. When his head came up Dave saw a golden apple between solid, shiny white teeth. Dave blinked. Horses with big yellow choppers, he had seen. These were the sort of teeth usually bought on credit.
The horse crunched the apple thoughtfully, still looking at Dave. It was, he thought, an uncommonly odd feeling, being stared at by a horse.
He looked back at the barn. The girl, obviously mucking out, had a large wheelbarrow full of fun that she pushed around the side of the barn and out of sight. He glanced back at the road, then stared at the horse as it dipped its head into the bag again, rooted between some irons, then came up with a carrot, which it chewed like a cigar. The green stalk flopped back and forth.
A cricket chirped. He flexed his feet, listening to his tennis shoes squeak.
He stared at the horse.
The horse stared at him.
The biplane puttered just on the horizon, dropping a long cloud of pesticide.
“Hot day,” he said to the horse.
“What the f . . .”, Dave spun around. “Who said that?”
Dave whipped his head around. The horse stared at him . . . then slowly and deliberately winked. The eyes, the ones he had thought were brown, now shone a bright, sapphire blue.
Dave took two shuffle steps backward, startled beyond thought. The second ended in profanity as he stepped into the little ditch alongside the road and went down knee deep. His new recorder, bought for the occasion, went “glunk” in the only water for thirty feet in any direction.
“What the f . . .” he repeated, stepping out of the ditch and into the road. Had there been any traffic, he would have been in someone’s on-coming lane.
“What the . . .”
Dave shook his head and began looking for a portable loudspeaker, feeling now that he’d been badly put on. Some jerk out there with a camera, filming him for a sucker, and conning him into talking to a horse.
