The Mark of the Horse Lord by Rosemary Sutcliff

Author:Rosemary Sutcliff [Sutcliff, Rosemary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473505940
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1964-12-31T14:00:00+00:00

12

GOLDEN PLOVER’S FEATHER

WHEN IT CAME to getting away by oneself for a while, Phaedrus decided, the Lord of the Dalriads was in much the same case as a gladiator with his town leave stopped. All the past two days up here in the hill horse-runs, watching Sinnoch’s leggy two-year-olds in the first stages of their breaking, the Companions had been with him, friends and bodyguard in one, alert and willing to go anywhere and do anything as a knot of hounds at heel, and as difficult to get rid of.

In the end he had simply gone to the garbage pits – at least they let him go there alone – and from there strolled round by the back ways of Sinnoch’s steading to the stable huts, and bidden Brys, whom he found there playing knuckle-bones with three other charioteers, to bring out the dun colt for him.

‘Do I ride with you?’ the boy had asked.

And Phaedrus had said, ‘Neither you nor anyone. If Conory or any other of the Companions ask where I am gone or seek to follow me, tell them I’ve gone to find better company than theirs.’

And he mounted and clattered off by the lower gate where they brought the colts up to the practice yards. They would probably think that he had gone off after some girl glimpsed yesterday in one of the herdsmen’s bothies. Well, they’d not be surprised. The Horse Lord’s month-old marriage had been only a form, and nobody would be fool enough to think there was anything in it to keep him from going after other girls, or that the Queen would care or even notice if he did.

She had not changed since the night he brought her back to the Dun, with Conory carrying the red mare’s-skin mask on the point of his spear. The torn defence, whatever it was, was whole again, and she still seemed like some cold thing magicked into human-seeming that the Dark People might have left behind in the stealing of the real Murna away. Once he had said to her, ‘If I strike you with cold iron, will you fly up through the smoke-hole, or turn back into a log of wood?’

And she had said in a tone of complete indifference, ‘Try it, and see.’

He had been half minded to do it, too. But in the end – he had not quite dared to, in case what he had said in angry jest, was true . . . And yet there had been the moment when she kissed him back, even while she felt for his dagger. That had not been a clay-cold changeling’s kiss. And sometimes he wondered if the real Murna were there inside her all the while, looking out at him as he had so often looked out at the world through the eye-slits of a gladiator’s helmet. Well, it was not anything to him, either way; he simply visited the Queen’s Place as seldom as might be, and thought about her very little the rest of the time.

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