horses and the loud thumps and cracks as they panicked in their stalls. Dear Almighty, the horses!
Swiftly she pulled on her shoes and ran to the back of the barn to join Michel. He stood in the stall beside his horse, Buck, to hold him by the halter, stroking the gelding’s shoulder and murmuring in French to calm him. But in the next stall Abigail was skittishly dancing from side to side, tossing her head and trembling with anxiety.
Hurriedly plaiting her own long hair so it wouldn’t startle the horses, Jerusa glanced outside the barn’s open doorway. Though there was no rain yet, the sky was nearly dark as night, the racing clouds a flat gray-green and the wind blowing hard enough to whip the trees like grass. No wonder the horses were terrified.
“Be careful, ma chérie,” warned Michel softly without turning toward her. “That mare’s so on tenterhooks now that she’d strike at her own shadow.”
“Then that will make a pair of us,” she murmured, grateful for his concern. She’d need it. At Crescent Hill the grooms were the ones who stayed with the horses during storms, not her, but she’d overheard enough stories of the damage a frightened horse could do to be wary herself.
Slowly she inched into the stall toward Abigail. “Pretty girl,” she crooned softly. “I know you’re scared, but there’s not a thing out there that can hurt you. It’s just wind and thunder, a whole lot of noise and show that doesn’t amount to anything worth your notice.”
The mare’s ears pricked forward at Jerusa’s familiar voice.
“That’s it, girl,” she coaxed. “You know me, I’m only Rusa, and you know I wouldn’t tell you a word that’s false, would I? Pretty, pretty girl.”
With infinite care she reached for the halter, stroking the horse’s forehead as she hooked her fingers beneath the leather straps. She was surprised to see that Michel had already saddled the horse. Though the storm made it difficult to gauge the time, she wouldn’t have guessed they’d be set to leave so soon.
“There you are, Abigail. Easy as you please, pretty girl. Rusa didn’t tell tales, did she?”
From the gelding’s stall she heard Michel chuckle. “Ah, Buck, my fine fellow, perhaps you know. When will Rusa stop telling tales to me?”
“When will I stop telling tales?” she said, keeping to the same crooning tone she’d been using for the mare’s sake. There was another brief flash of lightning, another fainter rumble of thunder, and though the horse trembled and whinnied uneasily, Jerusa still held firm. Perhaps the storm would miss them, after all. “Easy, pretty girl, easy. I never started telling tales, unlike certain Frenchmen, who can’t begin to tell the truth.”
Her baby name, Rusa, had sounded exotic and foreign the way he said it, so soft and slurred and indolent that she wished she’d never let him hear it; one more thing he’d stolen from her. He laughed softly again, and though Jerusa couldn’t see his face, she could imagine his mocking smile well enough to make her cheeks grow warm.
“Ah, ma chère, I’ve never yet lied to you,” he said with amused regret, which she was certain was quite false, “yet you will never believe me.”
“Then tell me the truth. Tell me why you kissed me.”
“So easy a test, sweet Rusa, so easy!” He kept her in breathless agony while he murmured to the gelding in French. “I kissed you because we both wished it.”
“That’s not true!”
“You see how it is? I could not be more truthful, and yet you won’t believe me.”
A fresh gust of wind rushed through the doorway with a swirl of leaves, ripped from their branches, and as the mare’s nostrils flared, Jerusa caught the same scent of coming rain and salty air blown east from the sea. Abigail arched back, and Jerusa forgot answering Michel as she struggled again with the mare.
Then, from the yard outside, came a loud, sizzling crackle followed by a hiss like a hot poker in cold water, then the brittle explosion of splintering wood.
Her heart pounding, Jerusa whipped around toward the noise in time to see the last standing wall of the abandoned house burst into flames around the white ball of lightning. In an instant the dry timbers became a solid sheet of fire, the flames urged faster by the wind. As she watched, the first sparks spun through the curling smoke to the roofless henhouse, and that, too, soon grew bright with fire.
And directly to the west, next in the fire’s path, was the barn.
Michel was shouting to her, but as she turned toward his voice, Abigail plunged back and ripped herself free of Jerusa’s grasp. Frantically Jerusa lunged for the halter again, and as she did, the mare tossed her head and caught Jerusa’s side beneath her raised arm.
Almost as if it came from someone else, she heard the odd, hollow sound she made as the wind was knocked from her. In disorienting slow motion she felt herself lifted from her feet and into the air, until, with a leaden thump, she fell to the hard earthen floor of the barn. There she lay, gasping for breath, every inch of her body hurting. But as she struggled to make her lungs work again, the only air she could find was acrid with smoke, burning her eyes and nose.
“Jerusa?” shouted Michel, fighting to control Buck. “Jerusa!”
Where was the girl, anyway? Why the hell didn’t she answer? The barn was filling with smoke from the burning house, and it would be only a matter of minutes before the wind would drive the flames this way. He tore his arms free of his coat and tied it across the gelding’s white-ringed eyes.
“Come along, Buck, we’ve tarried here long enough,” he said as he led the horse from the stall. They’d have to pass directly past the fire, and he prayed the horse wouldn’t balk. “You’re a brave fellow, and I know you can do it.”
Coughing from the smoke, Michel guided the horse toward the door. Another flash of lightning, another deafening crack of thunder and he nearly lost his grip on the horse. He heard Abigail’s terrified whinny, and in the split second of lightning, he caught a glimpse of the mare alone in her stall. But where the devil was Jerusa?
“Just a few paces more, Buck, a few more,” he coaxed, and then they were out of the barn and in the yard. As swiftly as he could, he ran with the horse to a tree well beyond the fire’s reach, to the east, and tied him there. At last the first fat drops of rain were beginning to plummet from the clouds to hiss into the flames, and as Michel raced back across the yard, he prayed the rain would end the fires.
He stopped at the door of the smoke-filled barn, tying his handkerchief over his nose and mouth. The mare would be easy to find, pinned by terror in her stall. But where was the girl?
He shouted her name again, and again came no answer. Maybe she’d already fled the barn, determined like every Sparhawk to save herself first, but even as Michel considered the possibility he dismissed it. Jerusa wouldn’t do that. She’d come to care too much for that foolish mare to abandon her now. She had to be in here somewhere, hidden by the stinging, murky clouds of smoke.
Sacristi, why had he been burdened with a silly chit who’d risk her life for the sake of a secondhand horse?
He felt his way to Abigail’s stall, stroking the trembling mare’s foam-flecked neck as he covered her eyes with his coat the same way he had with the gelding.
“Where
