CHAPTER 4
The animal follows me for what must be four leagues by land. I’ve aimed myself for that homestead I spied a small eternity ago, and I’m entirely focused on reaching it. I pay the dastardly creature dogging me absolutely no attention, not even when I hear him drop my knife.
The vertically-challenged beast pauses behind me, as if he’s waiting for me to react.
When I don’t, he picks it up again. I know, because it isn’t more than a few breaths before my ears hear him drop it back to the dirt. Again. And again. His soft, near-silent hoof thuds speed up until I know he’s directly behind me.
I really know that he’s directly behind me because he pokes me in the back with the rounded cherrywood handle of the knife I’m mightily tempted to skin him with.
A sigh forces its way out of me. A frustrated, exasperated one. I’m saved from having to interact with him more though because a horse whinnies.
I know from vids that this is some sort of greeting among the genus Equus.
The sound of donkey teeth clamping against my knife’s handle has my teeth clenching in reaction. He comes abreast of me, ears strained forward, neck arched. The horse neighs again. Without warning, Paco rockets ahead, all four hooves making sure-footed, softly pattering clops over the ground as he propels himself toward three equine figures.
I, my land locomotion slower than his, arrive to them some microts— erm, minutes, as the humans say—after he’s made his introduction. He’s acting strangely—upper lip raised in a flehmen-like response, nose straight up in the air—before he throws himself on the ground, attempting to roll near the hooves of the trio of bewildered-looking horses tied to a hitching post.
He’d have an easier time managing his rolling if he weren’t still wearing his saddle. I’d be inclined to take it off of him, but watching him struggle is oddly satisfying.
I pass the spectacle, shaking my head as I’ve seen heroes in Western vids do when they silently express that they hold an unfavorable opinion for what they’ve witnessed.
The hitching post is just a few paces from the porch of the homestead’s shanty and I mount the steps, preparing to knock on the door and ask the homesteader if they’d like to trade one of their fine horses for a less-than-fine, poorly trained, thieving donkey of poor character.
Which reminds me… I spin, enjoying how my legs respond to my cues almost effortlessly, and exit the porch by way of a leap in favor of retrieving my knife where it was likely dropped on the ground, if my donkey hasn’t swallowed it.
The decision to retrieve my possession from the ass who stole it no doubt saves my life.
A gunshot cracks the air. Wood shrapnel explodes behind me.
The tied horses flinch and stiffen, causing their leather reins, which are wrapped around the post, to snap taut. Almost as quickly, the animals unfreeze and begin to shift uneasily, making the leather they’re wearing creak.
Paco scrambles to his feet, his excessively hairy ears swiveling in every direction before folding flat against his neck. His sides are heaving.
The moment the shot rang out I instinctively dived for the ground. I’m tucked beside the shanty steps, uncomfortably resting on what I believe I’ve identified is a boot scraper, which is a raised wrought-iron blade—thankfully dull. Carefully I edge off of it until it’s no longer digging into my torso.
I’m about to announce myself, and explain that I’m not here to hurt the homesteaders, but I don’t get the chance.
“GET LOST!” a man bellows.
“No! Please! Help us!” a woman cries—and then she screams.
Dirt flares under my nose as I exhale. What an unusual situation. And not only because that woman sounds as if she’s in distress. No, I was so distracted by my recalcitrant mount’s behavior that I missed scanning the abode I was about to enter. My inattention nearly cost me my life.
I remedy this oversight immediately, looking behind me not with my eyes, but with my senses. I’m able to see through the wooden walls and identify four biological lifeforms. Two human men, one human woman, and a small agitated spark.
One of the men is dying.
The other man, the one responsible for shooting at me, I’m certain—is positioned near the door of the home. The door is open, giving him a clear line of sight if I want to risk standing up and being shot.
The dying man is lying supine in the same room, and at his side is a kneeling woman. Inside of her body is the spark. She must be gravid. In the family way, I amend.
The tadpole-sized form she’s carrying possesses only a tiny brain, but very visible are the lit-up sectors for fear and agitation. The small body is active, rolling and moving in its watery sac.
Its mother clutches at it from the outside, cradling it with one arm, her other arm braced with her hand against the man on the floor, at a wounded point on his stomach where he’s also clutching. Her brain is pure havoc: fear, anguished misery, fury.
The dying man’s brain activity is active in the area for remorse. But also fear and fury .
The aggressor male’s brain at the door of the dwelling is… difficult to read. Oh, I recognize excitement, the thrill of challenge. But his skull contents are otherwise lit in an unsettling pattern that I’m unfamiliar with.
Not willing to stand and make myself a target, I find Paco’s electrical field, and turn my focus to his brain. Some of my people have honed this natural skill of ours so finely that they can alter emotions. All I’ve ever done underwater was control movements, and thankfully that’s the only skill I need now. I begin using extrasensory force to tap regions of his lobes. My intention is to encourage him to move to the porch. I don’t believe the aggressor male inside will shoot him. It’s more likely he’ll mistakenly assume that Paco is a rideable animal and therefore a valuable commodity.
Before I can find the spot in Paco’s head that will encourage him to walk forward, he does so of his own accord, his strange tail alternating from side to side as he agitatedly whacks his haunches. His neck lowers and his ears slowly creep forward with curiosity. His steps are soft and careful. To my surprise, he gives me a cursory snuffle and mounts the porch steps with startling agility for such a portly creature.
Serendipitously, I’m not the only one taken aback by the donkey’s ascension; the areas for surprise light up in the gunman’s brain too. And taking advantage of his distraction, I stand, bound up the steps, and tackle him.
We crash to the floor, with him cushioning my fall. That is the only benefit to landing on top of him. I don’t like his scent. I wish to be away from it as soon as possible.
However, with direct contact, I suddenly have absolute control over his brain’s motor function. I can see the areas in his head lit up for alarm, disbelief, and rage—but he can’t so much as struggle against me.
I give him a cursory look. He’s sporting black striped burgundy twill trousers, a cream-colored work shirt, and a brown vest. His riding boots are scuffed but of decent quality. His hat has been knocked off his head and it smells as strongly as he does. I rise off of him, keeping him prone on the floor by not allowing him access to his locomotive skills.
With him neutralized, I look to the other two human occupants, or try. There’s a donkey in the way, taking up much of the home’s humble kitchen. Which is wooden walls and wood board flooring. Surprising for a shanty. From my research, most have serviceable dirt floors.
“Move, Paco,” I tell the donkey.
He doesn’t. He stretches out his neck and brings his nose closer to the dying man.
The dying man is in brown canvas trousers and a flannel shirt with thin vertical stripes in a faded shade of green. He has the beginnings of a rather enviable beard.
The woman hunkered over him makes a broken sound. Sobbing, I realize, looking more closely at her.
Her hair, contained in a braid, is the color of prairie grass. That is, it’s the color of Prairie Fire, a type of brilliant-topped summer switchgrass.
Her dress, a saddle brown thing with lighter speckles, is torn clear off her shoulder, the sleeve and some of the side panel hanging down loosely, exposing a swath of collarbone and cloth-bound breast tissue. Her neck is elegant in shape but mottled in color, with dark spots, each one perhaps a finger length in span. Her face is long rather than wide, and when she throws me a wild-eyed, frightened look, I see her face is also discolored, bruised perhaps; although I’ve read about humans who have birthmarks, so perhaps she simply has one of those across half of her face.
But as I scan her, I decide that the state of her dress leads me to believe it’s more likely a bruise. Still, in all the movies, men always ask the obvious question—and thus, politely, I do too. “Are you hurt, little lady?” I ask her, adopting a respectful form of address that I’ve often heard vid heroes use with women in an effort to be chivalrous .
She hunches over, shuddering instead of answering me. Paco stretches his neck until his nose lightly grazes her back. He wuffles her braid, but she pays him no mind. Her brain activity is chaotic. It’s heavily centered in the lobe opposite of reason, so she may be in this unreachable state until she calms herself.
I glance around, mildly curious about my surroundings. We’re in a small kitchen, with newspapers neatly plastered to the walls. It’s something settlers do as a form of insulation, or so my studies have told me. Interestingly, at the lone window over the sink, the homesteaders have crenulated the bottom of the newspapers to make a decorative edge, as if it were a curtain.
How quaint.
Scattered around the wood floorboards are decorated porcelain shards. The remains of a tea set, I believe. Near the broken bits is a cast iron pan, which is an odd thing to see on the floor.
Above the stove, the newspaper clad wall is very slightly yellowed, save for the shape that would match the cast iron pan, leading me to conclude someone pulled it off the wall and somehow it was flung or dropped to the floor.
Not far from where I stand, there is a wooden table with two wooden chairs, set askew.
My attention is drawn back to the human woman when she begins whispering to the man she’s forcing her hands against.
“The pressure you’re applying,” I say, curious. “With your hands. You’re attempting to stop the flow of life from this homesteader’s wound, aren’t you?” I marvel. It’s just like the vids. Although I can smell his blood. I can’t smell the blood in the vids.
Paco’s hooves clop as he ambles over to the round table that appears to have been shoved against the wall. Items atop it mostly appear tipped over .
“My husband,” the woman starts, but she’s weeping with force. “He’s hurt.” That’s all she manages to say, her voice choked with her broken cries.
She doesn’t have to say more though. The homesteader, her husband, is injured indeed. I’m watching the light wink out in her mate’s brain.
Oh, some processes continue to run, but they’re dimming. Because he’s dead.
The woman falls over him, sobbing.
Evidently Paco feels that adding to the woman’s misery is the proper response. This is apparent when he slowly clunks closer and drags his lips over her braid—then he bites it, sucking it into his mouth.
The woman makes a sobbing protest, trying to crumple forward more on her dead mate, as if for protection.
“Get out, Paco!” I order stridently. I don’t shout the command. I’m a Yonderin, usually in perfect control of my emotions.
The woman whimpers. She’s still pressing her hands over her dead mate’s wound, as if she has a chance of saving him if only she doesn’t give up her hope and effort.
I clear my throat, and my voice comes out quieter on my second try. “Paco. Get out,” I order.
When I reach out to catch his bridle, he swings away from my hand. Not just his head but his whole front half, spinning away so fast his front hooves come right off the floor.
More surprising than his quick avoidance of my hand though is the woman’s hard flinch.
I stare at them both. Curiously, in both their brains the same area is lit. It's the part of a lobe that prepares for an attack when beaten prey accepts that they can't escape.
Having no intention of attacking either of them, I cease moving in favor of watching .
Paco recovers quicker than the human. His ear, which had stayed fixed on my position, rotates slightly, and his head cautiously turns in my direction, the white of his eye showing as he peers at me.
With almost choreographed timing, the woman nearly does the same from the opposite direction.
I ignore the donkey and address the human female, drawing on more of my vernacular skills gained by way of popular Western Traxian vids. “Well, ma’am, it was awful nice meeting you.”
Her breath hitches and she sits up higher to watch me from out of both eyes. Her arms, blood soaked, are hugging her rounded middle.
“Do you want me to leave this man alive, or dead?” I ask, waving to the mute cowboy that I have mentally pinned in place on the other side of the room.
“He… he shot Joel,” she says in an odd, disjointed way. “He said… he was hired to kill my husband and deliver me to his… his boss.” Her eyes are glossy, the color of cornflowers.
“So this is a bad man?” I say, pointing to her husband’s attacker.
Jerkily, she nods.
“Want him killed?” I ask.
More firmly now, she nods again.
I walk over to the man, who is struggling mightily now against my hold, and force him to his feet. Then I snap his neck.
He thuds to the floor, twitching.
“Th-thank you,” the woman manages, her teeth chattering. Likely from stress. Maybe shock, if I’m any judge of a human’s brain.
Turning back to her slowly, I consider her for the length of a heartbeat. “Say,” I start, a common opener among Traxian folk, per all I’ve gathered. “May I take this dead cowboy’s horse?”
The woman’s mouth gapes open, and I applaud myself for hiding my wince when a string of mucus drips out of her nose and splatters somewhere on her blood and tear-soaked dress. She doesn’t even try to brush herself clean. Humans are a dirty species; I never knew .
“Ma’am?” I prompt.
“You… what?” she asks softly. Her system is inefficiently shivering. Her pupils seem overlarge compared to earlier; I gather from her brain activity this is a fear response. Her eyes run up and down my frame, and she curls over her protruding stomach a little more. Her eyes dart up to my face—or perhaps my head.
My head… Abruptly I remember that a man is supposed to remove his hat when he’s in the presence of a lady. I rip mine off and the woman falls back against the stove, hands flying up, positioning herself so that the undersides of her forearms are between me and her, her hands splayed, fingers outstretched wide as if to ward off… something.
Frowning, I press my hat over my heart and explain slowly, “If you don’t need the dead cowboy’s horse, may I have it?” I gesture to Paco. “You can have this donkey in trade, if you’d like. He might work as a pack animal.” I narrow my eyes on him. “Although I have my doubts. If I can be frank, I believe he has a flawed character.”
She’s lowering her hands with every word out of my mouth, and although tears still stream out of her eyes, she’s not bent over sobbing over her mate anymore, so I begin to hope we’re about to engage in an authentic Traxian conversation.
But she doesn’t say anything more. I raise my brows at her. “Well? What do you say?” It occurs to me that after this statement, many of the vids I watched had the actors smile, so perhaps I should smile too. Ignoring my nerves and past failures, I grit my teeth, spread my lips as far as they’ll stretch horizontally, and peel my upper lip up to reveal my glowing smile, showing her my sharp teeth.
(I opted not to have them filed. I was advised that most Yonderin have the procedure done, but I wasn’t keen on flat grazer teeth.)
She twitches back. She also gasps a wet, tear-watery breath.
I hold still, waiting. The vids I watched always showed the hero being patient and polite with ladies. But perhaps I’m not smiling properly. Although I practiced smiling by swimming to the ocean surface at high noon and peering at my reflection in the water, I’m uncertain that I mastered it.
When I don’t move, not even to relax my cramping face, something steals over the pioneer woman’s expression. I can’t read what it is, but she’s staring at me fully now, and the difference in her attention is so distinct I feel a bolt of pride go through me, because this must mean my smile is taking effect. I’m making an impression.
“What are you?” she asks.
This was so different from the simple yes I expected her to grant me, I accidentally let my smile fall. In doing so, a sigh of relief slips out of me and I surreptitiously drag my knuckles over my sore cheeks, trying to fix the damage the smiling caused. “I’m a Yonderin.”
She’s staring at me. “One of those… alien mermen?”
I open my mouth to correct her, but I’m aware it’s how her people see my kind here on her planet. It’s simplest to agree. Expedient. “Yes, ma’am. Now about the horse—”
She stares at me even more. “You just want the horse?”
Has she not been listening? I try not to be insulted and attempt to stifle my dismay as I reply. “Yes.” I congratulate myself on the level of patience I manage to convey in the word.
She blinks up at me rapidly. And for the first time, her tear production slows. “You don’t want… anything else?”
I’m beginning to suspect she might be of lower intelligence than I first assumed, in which case she may not be able to cognitively work through even a simple request like I’ve made—I shake my head. “Do you think I need anything else here?”
She edges back from me, saying quickly, “No! Take the horse!”
Relieved, I tip my forehead to her in the way that I studied, and fit my hat back on my sweaty forehead. I wouldn’t have believed that it was possible for this planet to suck moisture straight out of my pores, let alone that I had anything left in my body to evaporate—yet here we are. “Then I thank you, ma’am. ”
I turn around and walk out.
Paco doesn’t follow me. He’s found a colorful fluted container on a table and he’s pulling white and yellow-topped weeds out of it, eating them.
I leave him to it. This good woman can keep him.
Metal spurs affixed to my boots make tinking sounds as I cross the wooden floor, exit the door, and clomp down her porch. But I stop as the three horses tied to the hitching post come into view, because I realize I should have asked for more information.
Clamping down on my impatience, my spurs going tink! tink! tink! as I make my way back into the little house, I find the woman folded over her dead mate, her face pressed to his slackened shoulder. She’s weeping again.
“Ma’am?” I ask, feeling like I’m interrupting.
She bolts upright. Or into an upright sitting position rather, seemingly struggling under the weight of her unwieldy belly. She sucks in another one of her watery breaths. If I didn’t know she was human, I’d think she had gills. With a sound like that, water should surely be filtering out of them. If she’s going to keep inhaling like this, she could use gills, which are a much more effective breathing system than the one she’s been born with.
Since she hasn’t said anything, I tamp down my instinct to do as I please, which is acceptable where I’m from but not here. I try to act as one of her people would act: civilly. “Which horse?”
Her brows, pinched with some emotion, become more pinched. “What?”
I force patience into my tone. “Which horse is the dead man’s?”
Her gaze strays to her mate’s, so I clarify, “The other dead man’s?”
Her mouth drops open and her gaze swings up to mine. It seems to take effort for her to force words out, and I wonder if her throat has been damaged somehow. “The chestnut. ”
“Thank you,” I tell her, and turn to go. But then I stop and swing around to her again. “I’m sorry to bother you again, ma’am, but what color is—”
“Red!” she snaps.
I blink at the shift in her tone. It seems… sharp. “Ma’am, have I upset you?”
I don’t know how to classify the noise she makes, but she erupts to her feet at last. She’s shorter than I am, although that’s a common disparity even between human men and women—the latter of the species is typically slightly smaller. She’s much smaller than I am though, my eye telling me she’s five heads, five and a half at most. Her dress is stained with an alarming amount of blood.
Her shoes clack hard on the floor as she storms to me—and then she looks up at my face as I’m staring intently down at her, and she shrinks back, her whole manner changing as she edges around me, eyes wide.
Mystified by her unusual behavior—nothing I’ve ever caught on a Traxian vid although I’ve watched an extensive amount—I follow her.
Behind me, I hear the clopping hooves of my former mount. Paco is brazen enough to shove into my side, and since we’ve both reached the doorway at the same time, we find ourselves momentarily stuck. One of us needs to back up, and I wait politely for him to do so.
Instead of doing that and allowing me to exit first, the animal pushes hard against me with his narrow shoulders—then his excessively wide girth.
The fool doesn’t stop. He forces us both through the door, extruding us together as his excessively wide stomach crushes into my back and scrapes on the other side of the door.
When we’ve successfully made it through, I huff down at him in disapproval, but he ignores me, pacing back and forth on the porch, not using the steps to go down like he used them to get up in the first place .
I step past him and take them easily with my C-legs, then walk over to the woman, stopping a few feet away from her when she starts to shy away from me much like the closest hitched horse does.
“It’s this one,” she says quietly. The horse is not red, not like I know the color. It’s duller. Like dirt. And dark as a Rhincodon’s liver.
“Thank you,” I tell her. Then I push my hands into my pockets and rock back on my boot heels. “I confess I was hoping it was the middle one.”
“That’s a buttermilk,” she says dully.
“Oh.” Its coat is the metallic, glowing sandy white of the shore at low tide, when the moon is overhead.
“He’s my husband’s,” she gasps out, doubling over and sinking to a crouched position on the ground, attempting to hug her knees. Impossible around her swollen belly.
Uncomfortable, I gaze down at her for a moment before looking back to the fine-colored horse. “Well, since he’s dead, can I have his horse?”
This works as an incredible pause on her tears. Her neck cranes back and she gazes up at me in what I am sure I can identify as astonishment.
I point to the horses. “May I trade you the dead man’s chestnut for your dead husband’s buttermilk?”
She explodes into sobs even worse than the ones she was suffering inside when she was bent over her mate’s body.
Unsure how to deal with her if she can’t act like a normal person, I back away from her. My former mount makes a plaintive honking noise, and I’m almost relieved to turn my attention to him.
To my confusion, he's still on the porch. “What is it?” I ask him. “And what are you still doing up there?”
He stops pacing and honks at me. When I do nothing, he shifts, looking agitated. The porch boards creak with his weight as he picks up his hooves and trots from one side of the structure to the other .
“Don’t you want down?” I ask him, stymied. I hate to state the obvious but… “Then you should… get down.”
He doesn't.
Strange. He’s acting as if he can’t. His tail whips at his hindquarters in agitation.
“Why not use the stairs you used in the first place?” I ask him, curious.
“He’s SCARED!” the woman behind me explodes, making me jump.
Her shout makes all the equines jump too.
Forehead furrowing, I transfer my consternated gaze from her to Paco. “Why?”
“It’s too far down!” the woman says with a surprising amount of passion. “Now that you’ve let him go up there, you have to show him how to get down. And if you don’t scare him when you do it,” she adds, “if you take the time to show him how to use the stairs to get off the porch, he’ll never forget how to get down by himself. Donkeys are really smart. But if you’re mean, you’ll ruin him. He’ll get scared of going down stairs for the rest of his life.”
Transferring my puzzled frown from the donkey to the woman, I nearly ask, What will happen if I leave him to figure this out on his own?
Before I can say anything, she shakes her head. “If you don’t help him and he jumps, he could break his legs—which means he dies. He instinctively knows that. Since he’s probably never used stairs before, it’s scary for him and he’s not going to be able to go down. You shouldn’t have let him up the steps in the first place.”
Stunned at the amount of words that have burst from her, I turn and look back on her, surprised when she shies away from me further. Her brain tells me she’s growing more afraid. I keep my voice very calm. Easy. “Technically, he didn’t ask for my permission. Past experience tells me that had I told him not to attempt it, he would have disregarded my order. How much do you think he weighs? ”
Straightening, eyeing me with caution, the woman ventures a guess, her gaze flitting to Paco who is snorting and stamping his hooves on the porch. “Five hundred pounds? Six? He’s the chunkiest donkey I’ve ever seen. In case you didn’t know, his neck crest being thick like that? It isn’t good. You shouldn’t overfeed him.”
“I didn’t know,” I tell her. “And I didn’t overfeed him.” I move for Paco, surprised when he walks to my hand. I don’t catch his bridle like he’s evidently expecting—just before I reach him, he throws his head to the side, away from my fingers.
Which is fine. I drop my arm and catch him around his breast bone and around his hindquarters, preparing to lift him off the porch.
“You can’t pick him up! You’re going to give yourself a hernia—” the woman starts to call out, but I’ve already raised the animal and I’m carefully setting him on the ground before she can finish sharing her opinion.
I raise my eyes to hers, releasing the suddenly still animal and standing to my full height, dusting off my hands and arms. “Well, I thank you again for the hospitable trade. I’ve debated if I should offer to help you bury the dead men, but I really should be on my way. I need to find lodging for the night, unless you would rent me a room?”
Something in what I say seems to upset her; her eyes begin their leaking again. Which is a shame. She causes me less discomfort when she keeps herself under control. “You need a place to stay?”
“Yes,” I confirm, moving around Paco, who has dropped his muzzle to my boot, where I feel his flat grazer’s teeth testing the width of my foot. “Stop it,” I warn.
The woman’s head jerks back. “What did you say?”
“I told him to stop tasting my boot.” I motion for the donkey. “Meet Paco. He’s a smartass.”
As if to prove it, he snakes forward to allow his nose to better follow my boot and closes his teeth over it until my toe sensors send warning signals to my brain .
Biting my boot is keeping him still, so I let him gnaw on my foot through the leather and reach for the saddlebags on his side and begin to empty my few possessions. Spare bullets for the pistol I wear in my hip holster, a spare shirt, jeans, socks, and what’s left of my money.
Unfortunately, purchasing Paco cost me half of what I had. I give the animal a sour look and jerk my boot from his squeezing lips and testing teeth. Resisting the urge to growl at him, I step back.
I move for the chestnut horse, casting a last glance at the buttermilk, appreciating his soft cream color. Since the woman didn’t say I could swap horses, I assume that her reply is otherwise a no. As I approach the animal’s rump, I stroke my hand over its hip. 6 = 6 is branded here, on its left side.
A “Scab” brand. Specifically a “Scab Six.”
My initial research about this planet took a dive into ranch brands. Brands with an equal sign are known as Scab brands because the two burned lines often heal together, forming a thick single scab.
When brands are by definition identifiable, the Scab brand stands out. Pondering this, I open the chestnut’s saddlebag, about to deposit my things inside… and stop.
“What’s wrong?” the woman says, standing beyond my elbow.
“There’s a common form of tender in here,” I tell her. “A lot of it, I think.”
A jerky movement catches my eye and I glance over at her. But as my attention shifts, she freezes. She’s staring at me, indecision written all over her face.
“I assume you can accurately count the local tender?” I ask.
My announcement or my question slows her tears, which settles something in me. “Local tender?” she asks.
I tip my head to indicate the saddlebag, my arms full of my things. “The local money. Can you count it? I’ve done extensive studying, but I’m afraid I don’t understand it.” I throw a scowl at Paco. “The livery stable tried to help me, but I left there more confused than when I started.”
Something flutters over the woman’s face. “You asked the livery stable to help you with your money?”
I nod. “When I paid for him.” I jerk my head at Paco. “I told the livery man manning the barn that I wasn’t confident in my skills and asked him to confirm if I’d counted the tender correctly. He informed me that I hadn’t and made the adjustment, but when I asked him to explain it to me, I left more confused than ever.”
To my surprise, the woman takes a step toward me. When she glances down at her feet, it’s clear she’s surprised herself too. She raises her head and meets me square in the eye. “Back up and I’ll look.”
I do as she says.
Slowly, watching me warily, she scoots around me and peeks into the saddlebag.
What she sees makes her hands fall from her middle. “Oh my GOSH!”
“Is it a great deal like I thought?” I ask, thinking I’ve guessed correctly but needing to confirm.
“There’s got to be—” She breaks off and turns to look back at me, eyes assessing.
I nod to the chestnut. “Is the other saddlebag empty? I’d like to put away my things.”
“Umm,” she says, staring up at me. “Let me check.”
While she does that, the horse shifts its weight onto its other hip, raising one of its rear hooves and pressing down on its toe. I appreciate its obvious placidity.
Beside me, my holster jerks hard.
Paco’s shaggy head is against my hip and his mouth is firmly locked around the butt of my holstered weapon. He’s trying to pry it off of me .
“Paco, stop.” When this does nothing to deter him, I try reasoning with logic. “If you accidentally trigger that, you’ll harm yourself or someone else. That’s not a wise thing to do.”
He jerks on it again, and I have a look into his bioframework, seeing inside his brain. The area for mischief and curiosity is lit up like it’s on fire.
“It was food,” the woman says, and I look up from inside Paco’s skull activity to find her with her arms full. “I pulled it out so you can put your clothes in. What food won’t fit back inside might fit into the side with the… money.”
Something hopeful crosses her gaze when she says that word. But then she glances down at my side, to my gun, which is visible again only because Paco has dropped his head in favor of reattaching his mouth to my boot.
Pulling away from him, I move for the chestnut’s emptied saddlebag, fill it with my things, and move around the animal to examine what foodstuffs the woman is holding. I shrug at it and explain, “I don’t know what foods I like to eat here, but if you’d fit the most filling options into the pack for me, I’d be obliged. Then I’ll be on my way.”
She looks down at the wrapped bundles in her arms. And then she raises her gaze to mine, like she’s… measuring me, I think. “Would you like to…” A tear slips down her cheek, and I tense, not prepared for her to start crying again. “Like to stay here? With… us?”
I feel the skin on either side of my nose bunch in distaste. “With dead bodies?”
“No,” she chokes out, and then she turns and busies herself with filling the money saddlebag with the food items that she can fit into it. One round item doesn’t fit, and she holds it between her hands when she turns back to look up at me again. Biting her lip, she gestures at her stomach. “With me and our—our… my baby.” Her eyes pool with yet more saline-scented liquid .
“For how long?” I ask, glancing up at the sky, noting the position of the sun. “I’d really prefer to find lodging before dark—”
“You could marry me,” she blurts.