Water droplets on her lashes magnified and distorted the light, but there he was, in the rushing river with her, pressing her safe to his chest. He gazed down at her with dark, brilliant blue eyes, eyes not like suns but perhaps like moons. His lips were tinged blue too, drained by the cold river into which he’d thrust them both. Her own trembling fingers reached up to touch his cheek. Rough stubble sandpapered beneath her fingertips.
“I saved you,” Emory said.
And Ama believed him.
The King’s Steed
They had to take off all their clothes. Soaked clean through, Ama was as frozen as she had been hot in the night. Wildly awake, tremulous with cold, Ama felt her dream leaving her now, quickly, and the orb with it. She clawed at the memory, trying to grasp it, desperate to, but the harder she flung her mind in the direction of the dream the faster it fled, disintegrating like honey in tea until it left nothing but the sweet taste, and then that was gone as well.
There was apparently no time for modesty. Emory stood Ama on her feet near the remaining embers of the fire and stripped her bare, whipping off the belt, the pants slumping to the dirt, yanking the dripping shirt off over her head. Reynard watched with disinterested curiosity as Emory rubbed Ama dry with the coarse wool blanket; he started with her arms, rubbed her breasts, the hard, pink nubs of her nipples, her stomach, her buttocks, the fire of red hair between her legs, her legs themselves.
Her long hair transformed a patch of dirt behind her into mud. She could have wrung the wetness from it, but it was as if she were a baby, unable to care for these things herself. Emory twisted her hair like a rope around his hand and squeezed it from wet to damp. Then he wrapped her tight in the horse blanket, itchy from fur but comforting in its animal smell, and set to drying himself.
Ama watched, arms pinned beneath the blanket, as Emory loosened the shirt ties at the throat and bunched its hem in his hands, pulling it up and over his head. She watched him kick free of his waterlogged boots, as he peeled out of his pants. She saw how the parts of him that were often exposed—his face, his hands, his forearms—were burnished by the sun, but the rest of him was pale—the thick triangular muscles of his legs, his chest, peppered with fine black hairs, and the thick meat of him, a fleshy tusk, white like ivory in the bed of curled black hair.
He saw her watching him, and he stopped, naked, square. He invited her gaze. At last her eyes flicked up to his, and then away. Emory smiled and took up the damp blanket he had used to dry Ama. He rubbed it over his legs and crotch and chest. Then he tied it skirtlike around his waist, threw another few pieces of wood on the embers, and stoked them back to flame.
They had some hot drink, boiled over the fire in a well-used pot pulled from one of Emory’s saddlebags. They nibbled dry meat, which Ama found difficult to chew but Emory ripped through easily with his teeth. Reynard was hobbled down by the river so that he could drink and wander a bit, but never far.
As the day warmed and Ama dried, she found herself feeling stronger. The meat did her good, dry and tough though it was; and the drink, bitter and hot, felt as good in the cup between her hands as it did in her stomach.
Emory took care of everything; he brewed the drink, he tended the horse, he handed bite after bite of meat into Ama’s hands. He had decided that they would spend this day at rest. Tomorrow would be soon enough to take up their journey.
Ama knew that he was anxious to return to his home, and she was grateful to him for giving her this extra day. She had known him less than two suns, and already she owed him her life twice over! She shuddered to think of what it must have been like before he had come for her—the life she could not remember, when the dragon had ruled her.
Emory had not pressed her memory yet; when she had told him that she could recall naught of that time, he took her at her word. “No need to look back,” he said, and she caught a darkness in his expression, which caused her to wonder what terrible things he had faced in the dragon’s lair, before he smiled again. “We have such a lovely road ahead.”
Ama had nodded, but secretly, she did not agree. For what was a person without a past? Was there really nothing behind her? The farthest back she could recall was yesterday, waking on Emory’s lap upon Reynard’s back, the gentle rocking of the trail.
A life of one day. Ama sipped her drink. Well, that was one thing she knew about herself—she liked this bitter brew.
And another thing: she preferred warmth to cold.
And another: she could not swim.
Emory had laid their clothes out on some rocks in the sun, near the river, to dry. By the time the sun was high above them, the cloth was starting to flap in the breeze. Emory walked down to the boulders and shook out the clothes, turned them.
“If it were summer, these would be dry already,” Emory said. “But it is closer to winter than summer now, and the best we can hope for is mostly dry, I think. Our own bodies’ heat will have to finish the job.” He looked warm enough in just the blanket, Ama thought, and she liked the way his thigh split open the skirt of it when he walked. She liked the whiteness of his legs and the dusky gold of his arms and neck. She liked the loose dark curls around his face. She remembered his ivory tusk and flushed, thinking about it.
To distract herself and disguise what she’d been thinking, Ama said, “Tell me about your horse.”
“About Reynard?” Emory looked over at his steed, who looked decidedly un-steed-like right now, his weight heavy on one hip, his long dark tail flicking benignly at imagined flies. “He’s a good horse,” Emory said, as if that was all there was to know.
“Has he always been yours?” Ama asked.
“As long as he’s been alive,” Emory answered. “I watched him born six summers past.”
“Oh!” said Ama, imagining that. “It must have been special to see such a thing.”
“Gory and bloody, it was,” Emory answered. “Ridiculous, the size of babies when they slip from their mother’s slits.” Then he seemed to remember who he was talking to—a lady—for he blustered, “But yes, of course, birth is a miracle.”
Ama laughed. The sound of it surprised her, and her eyes widened. The laughter felt good, like a shaft of light.
Emory grinned. “That’s the way,” he said. And then he continued. “I named him Reynard because I thought it was the kind of name a king’s horse should have. I was a grunty lad of twelve, what did I know? But it’s a good name, still, I think. A serviceable name.”
“Very serviceable,” Ama agreed. “And did you train him yourself?”
“Not myself, though I helped,” Emory said. “The marshal, Stephen of Harding, he oversees the care and training of all our mounts. But it was well known that I would have Reynard as my horse, as I was coming of age, and as the stallion that fathered him was my father’s steed.”
“Oh!” said Ama. “Your father? Tell me about him, as well.”
“I wish it were that you could know him for yourself, as you will come to know my mother,” Emory said, and his voice grew husky, “but he is gone from this world.”
“I’m sorry,” said Ama. “How very sad for you.”
Emory accepted her words with a nod. A moment passed as he steadied his voice and sniffed back what might have become tears.