Chapter 1 Nadia #2
"Given what I've been told about your methods," he said, with the particular tone of a man stating an observable fact rather than making a point, "that seems unlikely."
I opened my mouth. Closed it.
But he’d already turned back to the horses, completely missing my impersonation of a goldfish.
Bastard, I thought. And then, against my will: Fair.
I stopped beside the dark bay. She pinned her ears immediately—I was an unwelcome development in her evening, and she'd clocked it faster than most people did.
I held out the back of my hand, anyway. Let them come to you, my uncle's voice, decades old and still insufferably correct, rang in my head.
And she considered it with the expression of someone being asked to consume a giant pile of shit.
She turned her nose toward Lorenzo, stamping her foot.
"Her name is Sugar," he said.
I frowned at him. At the horse. Back at him. "You named a horse Sugar?"
"I named her when she was a sweet foal." Those hazel eyes didn't so much as flicker. "She's had time to develop a personality since then."
"That's one word for it," I said under my breath as I considered the animal. Sugar, who was studying the middle distance with the focused intensity of an animal with opinions, ignored me completely. "She doesn't seem to like me."
"She doesn't like most people," he said.
"She'll tolerate you or she won't. Either way, she's the better horse for this terrain, so she’s what you get.
" He said it the way he apparently said everything—as a simple fact, take it or leave it, with no particular investment in whether I found it comfortable or not.
I stared at Sugar, and the giant she-beast of an animal looked right through me.
"Fantastic," I muttered. "Looking forward to it."
"Have you ridden before?" he asked.
"Yes," I said begrudgingly. I had ridden before. A few times. With my uncle. I even managed to stay seated.
Once.
He studied me like a man checking a calculation he already knew should have worked, only to find the answer wrong. "How often?"
"Enough." That was a total lie, but in my line of work, I didn’t do travel. I’d had access to my shadows since I was a baby. Why would I ever in a million years consider a reality in which I wouldn’t have them?
I didn’t journey to places. I arrived. And now I would spend the next few weeks on horseback trying not to die… again.
"That's not an answer." I wouldn’t call the statement a bark, but it was close.
I gave him an unrepentant smile and a shrug, knowing somehow that he could see through my bullshit. "It's the answer I got."
He held my gaze for exactly two seconds—the same two seconds he'd used to assess me when I'd cleared the shadow, unhurried and complete—and then he turned back to his grey without another word.
Which was somehow worse than if he'd pushed it.
He knows, said something unhelpful in the back of my mind. He already knows.
I sobered, the bravado I didn’t feel sliding right off my face.
"I'll manage, okay?" I told his back.
He didn’t look back at me exactly, but he did turn his head, that stupidly hot jawline catching the gray light like it had been placed there specifically to ruin my morning.
"I know you will," he said, which wasn’t the same thing as saying it would go well, and we both knew it.
Insufferable man.
The Divide was beginning its slow crawl toward morning—the night market fully packed up now, the couple above the stables having apparently reached some kind of exhausted armistice that involved way too much moaning.
Through the surface shadows, I could still feel the neighborhood: a drunk finding his way home with more optimism than direction, a witch banking her shop's hearth fire for the night, three cats doing whatever cats did when they thought no one was watching.
The Divide was the only place in Veyntheir where every manner of creature that didn't fit neatly into the daylight world's categories could exist without looking over our shoulders every five minutes.
Sacred and inconvenient enough that the Crown had never bothered to fully claim it, which meant it had ended up claimed by everyone else instead.
The result was roughly what you'd expect: lawless, layered, alive in the particular way of places that had never been told what they were supposed to be.
I liked it here. I liked most places I could leave quickly, and the Divide had exits in every shadow.
But for the next few weeks, I’d only have two horses and a man with a schedule.
Lorenzo had produced the document from his pocket again. He unfolded it, reviewed something, folded it back with the same three creases, and returned it to his coat.
"That document," I said. "What is it?"
The corners of his eyes tightened a fraction as if he was equally interested and irritated at the question. "A route map."
Oh, now I had to see this thing. "May I see it?" I asked sweetly—or as sweetly as I could manage.
He held it out without a word, but his reluctance for me to get my grubby hands on his pristine map was obvious.
I took it, unfolded it, and then I just stared. This thing was detailed, annotated, color-coded, with a schedule inset in the corner that had contingency notes in a margin so small I'd have needed a magnifying glass to read them if my eyes weren’t as keen as they were.
"There's a color-coding system," I said, stating the obvious.
"Terrain and threat assessment."
"There's a schedule with contingencies for the contingencies."
"Obviously." He said it without looking at me, adjusting Sugar's girth strap like the conversation didn't require his full attention—which was somehow more irritating than if he'd been dismissive. "Are you going to be a problem with the schedule?"