The Knave of Souls - Fantasy - Sequel to The Jack of Souls

Chapter 36

EXCERPT NEEDED 

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MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S CURSE

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Caris woke from dreams of a wedding. Of her own wedding, to Harric.

The thought made her stomach hurt. It made her head ache. But she could not get it out of her mind.

Her lady mother had talked of weddings when Caris was little. She'd gushed about flowers and gowns and cakes and dancing, gods leave her. She had talked about it so often—trying to draw her little horse-touched daughter into a shared vision of her future—that Caris had asked if she could marry her horse. "That way we'd always be together," she'd said, "and run in the same fields and drink from the same streams."

Caris stood and rolled up her blankets. Today, if she had her way, she would wed Harric. No, not today. She frowned. A wedding must be held in a Noble House, not a wilderness. She remembered that much from her mother's sermons. Shrugging it off, she stuffed her blankets in Rag's saddlebags. Noble House or not, they'd marry at the first appropriate place they found. It was time.

Time to marry Harric? A tiny part of her rebelled. That's insane! What the Black Moon am I thinking?

A wave of nausea swept through her guts and her stomach convulsed. Turning, she vomited in the ferns.

The trees spun around her as the wave washed back in her belly and bunched, threatening another surge. Steadying herself against a tree, she cursed under her breath. The sickness had come on so suddenly, and now her head throbbed as if her brain were stuck in a vice. Gods take it, she'd taken ill. Could she have eaten something foul?

She had to tell Willard, but dizziness made her stop and sway over her boots. When she recovered, she struggled to recall what she'd been doing.

Tell Willard... Tell him what?

She must tell Willard that since her father was not present, that he—as her mentor—must give her hand to Harric. The dizziness cleared, and she paused. She must tell him, but he was particular about things. He would want to know who would marry them, and where it would be held, so she couldn't tell him until she knew for certain that Father Kogan could perform the ceremony.

Packing her bags, she resolved to ask Kogan at the first opportunity.

#

Harric rose with an anxious tension in his gut, and the smell of wood smoke heavy in the air. Brolli had awakened them to report that the winds had reversed themselves in the last hours before dawn.

"That's good, isn't it?" Harric said. "If it's blown back on itself, it won't have any fuel to burn. It'll go out."

Willard nodded. "Unless the reversal somehow blows it down the cliffs into our valley. If that happens we'll have to flee south before it."

"Into Bannus." Kogan said.

"You understand our urgency," said Willard. "Feed the horses and pack up. I won't bleed Molly this morning. We strike out as soon as Harric helps me arm."

The speed of their departure left little room for interaction with Caris, but Harric watched her closely for sign of the Compulsion. In the few moments they had before mounting she alternately glared at him, looked ill at the sight of him, or stared as if in a horse-touched trance.

Swallowing his worries, Harric fell in line behind Willard and rode. It wasn't as easy as it had been, because the smoke in the air made the horses skittish. "Riding into a fire," he muttered to Spook, who sat in his basket, grooming. "Should have cast your lot with a smarter man."