Chapter 13
THIRTEEN
Three days after their journey to the market, Rhaezon sat at the kitchen table, his plate half-eaten, and his fork moving food from one side to the other in a pattern that served no nutritional purpose. Davn sat across from him, reading something on his data tablet with unhurried focus.
Rhaezon glanced down the corridor. Empty.
He looked back at his plate. Pushed a piece of roasted grain bread to the left. Moved it back. Picked up his fork and set it down again.
"What's taking her so long?" The words came out before he could catch them, low and rough, directed at the bread.
Davn's eyes lifted from his tablet. One pale brow rose a fraction. The black stripes along his jaw shifted as something that might have been amusement crossed his face, though with Davn it was always difficult to confirm.
"You're extra grumpy this morning."
"I'm not grumpy." Rhaezon stabbed a piece of cured meat. It skidded across the plate. He stabbed it again. "I have things to discuss. Plans. There are plans that need discussing and I'm —"
"Grumpy," Davn repeated, and returned to his tablet.
Rhaezon ate the meat. It tasted like nothing.
He had been awake since before dawn — this was not unusual.
What was unusual was the reason. He had lain in his bed, staring at the ceiling, running through a proposal in his mind with the same tactical precision he applied to extraction operations.
Entry point. Justification. Contingency responses.
He had prepared for every objection she might raise and several she probably wouldn't think of.
He had rehearsed his opening line four times and discarded three versions for being too long.
The idea was simple. She needed to learn to ride a kethral.
Independently. Without him behind her, without his arms around her, without his hand on her waist and her back against his chest and the torture of her fingers resting on top of his while his scales betrayed him in broad daylight.
She needed her own mount, her own competence, her own escape route if the estate was ever compromised while he was elsewhere.
This was security. This was practical. This was something a responsible protector arranged for someone in his care.
Footsteps echoed in the corridor.
He straightened. His fork clattered against the plate rim. Davn's eyes flicked up again, then back down, his that thing again.
November appeared in the kitchen doorway wearing the deep amber tunic from the packages he'd arranged — the one that turned her brown eyes into something he had to look away from and then immediately look back at.
Her hair was up in its usual arrangement, already loosening, that one strand freed across her temple.
She'd rolled the sleeves to her elbows. Her forearms were bare, the faint pale scars from years of animal work catching the morning light.
"Good morn—"
"I want to teach you to ride."
The words left him like a door blown open. Too fast. Too loud for the kitchen. November stopped mid-step, her greeting hanging unfinished in the air between them.
He pressed forward before the silence could settle.
"A kethral. On your own. You'll need the skill if we're ever separated — the estate covers significant terrain, and the plateau drops sharply on three sides.
If there's an emergency and I'm not — if you needed to move quickly and I was handling a perimeter threat or if Davn and I were both engaged elsewhere, you would need independent mobility.
The kethral are faster than anything on foot, but their gait is fundamentally different from your Earth horses, so your existing equine training will actually work against you initially, which means we need to start correcting your muscle memory now rather than later, because four weeks is not —"
He stopped.
He was babbling. He, Rhaezon Vaethari, who measured words the way a soldier measured ammunition, was babbling. At a woman standing in a kitchen doorway who had barely stepped into the room.
November's lips parted. She blinked at him once, twice, a third time. Then something shifted in her face — surprise dissolving into warmth, warmth cresting into a smile that spread across her features like the sunrise clearing a ridge.
He stood. Pushed back from the table and prepared a breakfast plate for her before he started babbling again.
"I'd like that very much. Thank you, Rhaezon."
His name in her mouth. The tightness in his chest arrived on schedule, sharp and specific, but underneath it something loosened.
Something that had been coiled for the past three days, since the cobblestones, since her palms on his chest and the two seconds where neither of them moved and the world contracted to a space roughly six inches wide.
"Good. I'll get the training paddock prepared. Faelor can help me adjust the shorter saddle and —" He was walking toward the door. He was still holding her plate. He stopped in the doorway, looked down at the plate in his hand, turned around, and set it on the table in front of her empty chair.
"Eat first," he said, and left.
Behind him, Davn's eyebrows rose above the edge of his tablet. The half-smile that accompanied them was small and knowing and directed at no one in particular.
Rhaezon did not see it. He was already halfway to the stables.
The training paddock occupied a flat stretch of ground between the main stable block and the lower pasture fence.
Rhaezon had Faelor rake it smooth and remove the three stones that could trip a stumbling kethral, then checked the fence rails himself, twice, then adjusted the training saddle's stirrups to November's leg length using measurements he had apparently memorized without deciding to.
Faelor watched this process with wide-eyed fascination. He had never seen his lord personally check fence posts.
"That'll be fine, Faelor."
The stable hand vanished, recognizing a dismissal when he heard it.
Rhaezon led the bay kethral — Torren, the most patient of the estate's mounts — into the paddock and waited. The twin suns sat low enough that the paddock held shadow on one side and warm gold on the other. Torren stamped one of his middle legs and swung his heavy tail in a slow, contented arc.
November came around the corner of the stable block adjusting her sleeves, and the kethral turned all its attention to her.
"Hey there." She approached with her hand extended, palm up, letting Torren take her scent. The kethral's long ears swiveled forward — both of them, full attention; it had decided something interesting was happening. His broad head dropped and he pushed his nose into her palm.
"He remembers you." Rhaezon cleared his throat. "From the stables."
"Of course he does. We had a conversation about his dinner the other day." She scratched behind Torren's ear and the kethral leaned into it with seven hundred kilos of unsubtle enthusiasm. "Didn't we, handsome?"
Rhaezon looked away. Looked back. Cleared his throat again.
"Right. Mount from the left, same as your horses. Foot in the stirrup, hand on the pommel, swing up. The saddle's wider than what you're used to — the six-legged frame requires a broader seat."
She mounted cleanly. Good balance, good instincts, showing she had done this a thousand times on a different animal. She settled into the saddle and gathered the reins the way she would have gathered horse reins — fingers threaded between the leather strips, wrists locked, elbows bent.
"Loosen your wrists," he said. "A horse moves in four beats. A kethral moves in six. The extra two legs create a lateral roll through the spine that you have to absorb through your seat and your hands simultaneously. If your wrists are locked you'll fight the motion instead of following it."
She loosened her wrists. Torren stepped forward.
The kethral's gait caught her immediately — the rolling, wavelike motion that traveled from haunches to shoulders in a rhythm that had nothing in common with any horse she'd ridden.
Her body fired every instinct it had. Her knees gripped.
Her shoulders braced. Her hands pulled back on the reins in the precise correction that would steady a cantering mare and instead drove Torren into a confused sideways shuffle that bunched all six legs underneath him.
"No — release your knees. You're cueing him to compress. Let your legs hang. The contact comes from your calves, not your thighs."
She adjusted. Torren moved forward again. The lateral roll hit and her hips fought it — posting upward when the motion was sideways, rising when she should have been swaying. Years of muscle memory shouting the wrong instructions.
"Think of it as…" he searched for the right comparison, "water. Moving water. You're sitting in a current. You don't push against a current. You let it carry you."
"Easy for you to say." She bounced through another stride and Torren flicked one ear back in mild reproach. "You grew up on these."
"I did not. I learned at thirty-seven."
She glanced over her shoulder at him. The distraction cost her two strides of balance and she grabbed the pommel.
"Eyes forward." He stepped closer. Torren was walking a wide circle now, his gait steady and patient, and November was fighting every step of it with the beautifully trained reflexes of a woman who had spent twenty years learning an entirely different language of motion.
"Your hips are the problem. You're bracing against the lateral movement. Drop your right hip."
She dropped it. Overcorrected. Her weight shifted too far and she grabbed the pommel again.