Reiver

If it’’s good enough for Parliament, Dervorgilla figures it’s good enough for her. Unfortunately, the Birmingham Guard may not agree with her point of view.

The thick smell of horse, hay and creeping damp reminded Dervorgilla of home, but in a larger way. At home, they had one stall and a few boxes with doors half-missing and packed with everything from the plough and harnesses to farming tools to... she’d never looked in the sacks, to be honest. She half-suspected they’d be full of rats. Okay eating, if the winter was bad. But here there were stalls vanishing away from her into the darkness, and the quiet movements of sleepy horses was magnified and echoed a hundred times over. None of them were empty, and not filled with tools, either.

Dark shapes loomed behind the wooden doors. One horse, a big pale furred brute, was giving her the evil eye from two stalls down, and Dervorgilla stuck her tongue out at it.

“Odart? Odart?”

The gentle patter of rain on the roof, at least, was familiar and comforting. It didn’t care how big the roof it was falling on was, it just splitter splattered down.

Dervorgilla took a few tentative steps further into the stable, eyes peeled. When no-one leaped out and summarily tried to murder her, she took a deep breath and strode further into the warm, horsey darkness. But quietly.

“Odart?” She called out as loudly as she dared, and curious heads turned to face her as she passed. She was probably the most interesting thing that had happened to them in a while, poor things. A city was no place for horses. Nowhere to run around, and no real work to do. Only doing what humans were too lazy to do, pulling carriages to and fro, not like at home. They were needed, there, not just something for when you couldn’t be bothered to pull on some solid shoes and walk down the road. A gobbet of spittle landed in the hay.

Something pulled on her sleeve, and she flinched away. Heart hammering, she waited for the blow, or the exclamation of misplaced accusation. Her sleeve grew damp.

Dervorgilla turned and sighed with relief. It wasn’t that what she was doing was wrong, but some people might have argued it was illegal - the distinction between the two, and that it existed at all, seemed beyond stupid to her - but the horse lipping her sleeve didn’t seem likely to make any judgements about her beyond whether her sleeve was tasty. A gentle tug freed it from the horse’s mouth, and Dervorgilla gave the animal a stroke down its nose. 

“You’re beautiful, aren’t you? Hello.” The horse whickered and pushed its head against Dervorgilla’s arm. She’d always liked animals; got along with them better than humans. And they liked her back, which was nice, and not in the same way Carlin Leavens had liked her, at least up until he’d tried to follow her into the woods and wound up in a bramble patch. And then slid down a small ravine and into a flooded brook, because the idiot couldn’t find his way out of a wet paper bag with a map and someone giving him directions. 

Three stalls down, a familiar - and rather jealous - bray drew her attention further into the stable’s shadowed interior. Odart, white blaze almost glowing in the dimness, gave her a reproachful stare. Dervorgilla hugged him, and he drooled down her back, possibly in revenge, possibly because he was happy to see her. The lick across the face when she drew back was definitely happiness.

“I’m happy to see you too. You’re such a good boy, yes you are. Good boy, Odart.” She grabbed the rope halter hanging by his stall door and slipped it over his head. Odart’s ears flicked as she unlatched the door; the horses around them were beginning to stir. The horse who had grabbed her sleeve earlier was craning its neck over its stall door and watching her with intelligent eyes. It was a beautiful horse, possibly a bay, although in the darkness all she could really be sure of that it wasn’t a white horse, and it gave a forlorn whicker as Dervorgilla led Odart quietly past it.

Dervorgilla looked back at it. There were a few other horses awake now, watching her and Odart. The big draught-horse gave her a whiskery nudge, his nostrils flaring as a gust of wind carried the smell of rain and the outdoors to them. And the stink of the city, too. Far too many humans cooped up all together. It was no place for a horse, just empty work without meaning, providing no use to anyone. Back home they needed horses. Respected horses. It was a good farmer who could afford a horse, and a poor farmer who lost one, and getting poorer by the day.

Dervorgilla listened as the rain grew louder against the roof, and thought about her dad. It was for a good cause. And if it was legal for Parliament...

Ten minutes later, the rain was coming down so thick Dervorgilla could barely see Odart behind her when she stepped out into the courtyard, let alone the six other horses straggling along on leads behind him. The sound of their hooves clopping against the stone was drowned by the rain, and when she glanced back all she got was a vague impression of flattened ears and wetness.

“Come on then,” Dervorgilla said encouragingly, pulling on the horses’ lead reins. “You’ll like my home much better than here.”

A flash of lightning painted the courtyard in searing whiteness, cutting through the rain like a hot knife through butter. Dervorgilla tensed, but the horses seemed supremely unperturbed. One of them in the front, a big gelding wearing three long socks, lifted its tail and began depositing a parting gift on the cobbles.

It was the thunder that did it.

The sound grumbled and growled over the stonework, and the horses reacted like any sensible prey animal would react when something growled in the darkness. Anything that made a noise that loud had to be big, they probably figured, and the best thing to do in that circumstance is not be the slowest thing there. Odart bit a passing mare hard, causing her to veer sharply around Dervorgilla, but a different horse apparently judged that between the skinny human girl and the other fleeing horses it would take its chance trying to knock down the biped and slammed into Dervorgilla. She did her best to dodge it, and mostly succeeded. Sharp hooves and bared teeth barrelled straight past, causing nothing more than a raised heart rate, but the heavy warm body they were attached to was harder to miss.

Dervorgilla felt a momentary warmth, a solidness, and then nothing was solid anymore. She was flying through the air, already wet enough that for a single delirious, half-concussed moment she wondered if she was the rain, and then solidity reentered her life, at speed and in the form of a water trough. Pain bit into her hips, her shoulders, her back. In fact, pretty much everything seemed to hurt to one degree or another, but luckily she didn’t need to dwell on that painful fact for long. A darkness deeper and more complete than the night swallowed her, even as the sounds of panicked shouts began filtering in at the edges of her fading consciousness.

***

“I ain’t no reiver!” Dervorgilla scowled at the well-dressed man in front of her, trying to ignore the pain in her back and on one side of her head.

“Really now? Because you certainly look like one. Stealing horses in the middle of the night—“

“Not stealing! I was rescuing him! They stole Odart first!”

Dervorgilla didn’t like the way he looked at her. It was the same sort of look her dad gave to a crop that had gotten cutworms and he was trying to decide if it was worth the hassle of saving or if he should just move into a different field and sow fresh. This look had added disdain. Looked like the way she’d heard the soldiers talk about Viktor. Like he wasn’t worth anything at all.

“I wasn’t stealing him.”

“And the other horses? I believe there were six?”

“They prob’ly stole them, too,” Dervorgilla pouted and hunkered down in her seat. She hadn’t wanted to sit, really, but her head was killing her and her legs weren’t sure they were up to staying vertical. Her back was suggesting she was going to regret slouching in the very immediate future. Pain was already spreading nasty, aching tendrils along her arms and across her shoulders. The back of her shirt felt unpleasantly damp.

“Parliament does not steal horses, young... woman.” Dervorgilla would have liked to imagine he’d nearly called her a lady, but suspected it was probably something else with more colour. Politeness was making his teeth clench. “And people do not steal from Parliament.”

“Wasn’t stealing.”

“And yet, here you are. Well, most of you, at least.” He grinned nastily at her, and the side of her head gave a painful throb. Dervorgilla scowled more fiercely, and hoped her gritted teeth added to the general vibe of the scowl rather than giving away how much she really wanted to scream. Her back was making pointed comments on her posture, the hardness of the chair, the roughness of her shirt and it wanted to know if breathing really required quite so much movement.

“Never let it be said that Victor Christian isn’t a merciful man,” he said, shuffling a few papers on his desk.

“You total—“

“Or you could see if Parliament would be inclined to more mercy for a not-reiver? I doubt they’d be able to reattach your ear, but you’re free to take your chances otherwise. Yes?”

Dervorgilla paled. “No.”

“I didn’t think so. I didn’t think so.” He grinned like a fox in a henhouse. “Luckily for you, the Captain of the Birmingham Guard believes you could be useful.”

Dervorgilla stared at him blankly. She could feel the other shoe waiting to drop, the carrot-shaped stick waiting to follow the stick-shaped stick. Or maybe it was just going to be a bigger stick.

“You should be grateful, you know. We’re even letting you keep that devil horse of yours. Didn’t your mother teach you manners?”

“If I see the Captain, I’ll be sure to thank him.” Dervorgilla took some pleasure in watching his blood pressure rise. His face took on a rosy hue. She wondered what she’d said to annoy him, and  hoped she’d get a chance in the future to say it again.

“I’m the Captain.”

“But you don’t have a boat.”

He approached beetroot. Maybe she should have called it a ship; old Mr Helmsdown had said people could get worked up about that. She didn’t know why.

“Or a ship.” 

It didn’t seem to help.

“Just get out. And take that beast with you. I’ll send someone to contact you when we need you.” 

Dervorgilla peeled herself out of the chair, gritting her teeth until they ached to stop herself wincing. She refused to show weakness in front of him. Her head throbbed in time to her heartbeat.

She was nearly out the door when Victor spoke again.

“And don’t even think about leaving the city. You hear me, reiver?”

“I’m not a reiver.”

“Your impaired hearing betrays you,” he sneered, and she stamped away, fuming. At least Odart wouldn’t care about everything, but the missing ear was going to be hard to explain to her parents when she got home. She refused to think it might be an ‘if’. It wouldn’t be much of a rescue if she didn’t make it home, after all. She just needed to prove to everyone that she wasn’t some good for nothing horse-thief.