Son of a b***h had almost made him turn an ankle again. The field was aptly named. Behind him, Siscalus let out a rolling snort, echoing his thoughts; there had really been no reason to put a farm here, and even though he no longer lived there, trying to deal with it was still frustrating. He had toiled on these fields for so long that he knew them inside and out, or so he'd thought, until he'd damned near broken his ankle.

The sun was hot enough that the air around him smelled thickly of dried grass, and here and there the whiff of cow patty. Ayle squinted towards the house that sat in the middle of all of the fields, sunbleached and barren -- abandoned -- and felt nothing. Maybe it was because there was the steady presence of Siscalus in his mind, a presence as strong and unwavering as steel. The buck stood silent behind him, gaze direct, ears fanned out: it was impossible to tell what he thought. It usually was. Ayle looked at the hand he'd worked deep into the dark fur at Siscalus's neck, his long fingers gently stroking the fur, and thought about things like loss, and movement, and war.

Maeve and Will Talbot were talking about war with the wolves. He was ready. He was ready enough that he ached at night, ready enough that the days had stretched out immeasurably long, that the nights spent a-tumble in bed with one of the Swan girls no longer tired him.

In time, the buck nosed the back of his neck, and then turned away, wheeling around back towards Palisade. It would be a long ride. It was nothing like riding a horse, whose steady gallop was a thing mitigated by the hips: riding a Guardian was all about bounding, leaping, sitting hunched over the deer's neck and feeling muscles contract and bunch.

***

Then again, Maeve has never been a horsewoman, either, and so she is already at a disadvantage. Things did not come instinctively, as she had hoped; she is not already astride and confident as the Wardens in old engravings.

Another woman might have felt self-conscious or silly for the fact that she'd waited until she was three miles away from the Swan and in a deserted street to sling a leg over Finnavair's side, gathering her bombazine skirts to her waist so that the split ones she wore beneath, hidden away, could do the job they were meant to do. But Maeve is Maeve. She is not embarrassed, and if challenged would boldly assert that she is merely attempting to conduct her affairs away from the distractions of the whorehouse.

Finnavair's ribs between her thighs, untouched by a saddle, are slick and difficult for purchase. Maeve feels herself slipping to and fro, clutching at the spot where reins would be. And then Finnavair, whose frustrated snortings have clearly conveyed her disapproval with Maeve's technique, rises abruptly to her forelegs and unleashes a gentle kick. It is just enough to send Maeve pointedly off her back side, and the deer, now free, wheels to survey her where she lays in the dust, stunned and bruised.

"You abominable little beast," she hisses finally, but Finnavair doesn't need the bond to sense the delight behind it. What Maeve--fearsome, controlling, unyielding Maeve--has long needed is someone as hard as she is, to crack the whip that she herself is too accustomed to cracking.

She hauls herself back to her feet, and snatches Finnavair by the muzzle. At first the movement seems fierce, angry; but she merely glances about to be sure the alley is still empty.

In a rare show of approval, she kisses the deer's nose.

***

They do not often show affection -- their love affair is a tightly restrained one -- but as they sit together in his flat, Talbot cannot resist the urge to lean over and plant a peck of a kiss on the side of Cesambre's muzzle. This startles the deer, who allows herself a delighted little chuckle. Her hooves click on the floor of Talbot's flat as she circles the table to face him. "What brought that on, Captain?"

Talbot looks up from his breakfast and frowns at her, which earns him the Guardian equivalent of a smile. In these moments, Cesambre reminds him of his sister, eager to please and girlish in a way that seems perfectly natural, even though Cesambre has hooves and a muzzle. "I cannot show affection?"

"I didn't think you were the type to be affectionate to the ladies," she teases him. "Maeve is still offended that you won't sample the finest of the Swan's wares. She's offered at least a dozen times." While she is alone with her chosen, Cesambre is talkative; she is so quiet and almost withdrawn at other times that Talbot finds himself relishing her every word, more satisfying than the breakfast spread before him.

"Well," he says, harrumphing, "the farm boy is making up for me."

"Do you think she'll ever find out?" Cesambre asks, lightly, her green eyes alight. "If she can find the time to spare a thought from the wolves," she adds, musingly, watching Talbot spear a sausage on his knife and sink his teeth into it. She waits for him to swallow, watching his throat bob as he does so.

"I think it would take me bringing Elias in and doing something indecent before her to get it through her skull," he murmurs, sitting back in his chair with an air of sudden, smug satisfaction. Cesambre beams. The Guardian has become an entirely satisfactory co-conspirator.

***

"Conspiracy! Using my own Guardian against me is cheating!"

Janet is laughing, clambering out of her hiding place beneath the straw in the stable, and a grinning Petra has her arm wrapped around Lily's nose as she so often used to stand with Spokelse--friendly, affectionate. Lily is sprightly, her ears fanned up in excitement.

"You got to establish the rules upfront," Petra says airily, and behind her Spokelse, who has sat out the game of Hide-n-Seek with a demure shake of her head and an indulgent nuzzle to her Chosen, snorts. She manages to make even that sound faintly dignified.

"I was trusting your honor," says Janet, shaking the straw from her skirts. "Now I know you're a villain and a scoundrel. And Lily! My own Guardian! Traitorous wretch!" But she reaches out to fondly stroke the deer's ears, and Lily responds by closing her eyes in satisfaction and wriggling away from Petra's hand.

"You see how fickle her loyalties are," Spokelse says mildly, with a sound as close as she gets to a laugh.

"Well she ain't my Guardian. This was a... a..."

"Temporary?" suggests Janet.

"Yeah, a temporary arrangement." Petra laughs, the gap in her teeth beneath the ugly scar flashing. "Let's have another round. No cheating this time."

"No, no. I have a better idea." Janet leans down conspiratorially, and her face is flushed and almost pretty, with the joy of a break from the stress of being Maeve's right-hand servant, with the greater joy of seeing laughter in a girl normally so brooding, so fierce, so unchildlike; of knowing she put that laughter there by something as simple as the suggestion of a game.

"I've got a better idea. Let's go out and play tag instead, and as punishment for betraying me Lily can be It first." Petra's grin is enough for excited agreement, and she claps her hands.

With a dramatic flourish, Janet flings open the stable door. "One, two, three--Go!"

***

"One, two, three--Go!"

She sits hunched over the deer's back and can feel the very second when Iskierka makes the decision to acquiesce to her request. The doe's muscles bunch under her dark coat and she gives a scream like a wounded fox, all throaty and high-pitched. A moment later the two are off, racing across the green lawns of the Talbot estate, Iskierka's hooves making divots in the grass that the groundskeeper will have words with Lord Talbot over.

These are the riding lawns, and there are jumps set up so that Richard Talbot, when he wishes, can ride one of his horses and put them through their paces. This is the same thing, Jessica thinks, as a laugh is torn out of her, uttered into the wind. She is putting the deer through her paces. Maeve has lit a fire underneath her -- as much as one can be lit under someone so sensitive -- and she has taken a vested interesting in seeing what Iskierka can do.

The Guardian leaps higher and farther than any horse she has ridden, and Jessica is a moderately accomplished equestrian. When they land after the last jump, the deer's flanks heaving, weight shifting, Jessica sits back and runs a hand through her hair. Bound up in a plait at the crown of her head, it has all come undone. She has likely shed hairpins the length and breadth of the lawn.

Eventually her breathless, girlish laugh subsides. The more she thinks about it, the more ridiculous she feels. Her hands knot into the ruff at the base of Iskierka's neck, and a frisson passes through the deer as she does so -- perhaps some inkling of nervousness passed down through the bond that they share.

Will does not go flouncing around with Cesambre, and Finnavair, it seems, does not allow herself to be ridden; she can't imagine stately Maeve sitting astride a Guardian. If she knew of Ayle and Siscalus's bond she might not feel so bad, but her glimpses of him are few and far between and done from behind convenient things to hide behind. He has the same affect on her he does on other young girls.

In the shadow of the forest at the edge of the lawns, the trees stand silent and dark as the evening sets in. In between their great trunks wink fireflies, ghost lights, that suddenly pour ice water down her spine. Iskierka stomps a hoof, shaking herself after the sudden run, and Jessica sits as if carved from stone, watching.

"Iskierka," she says, and her voice sounds young and small, "do you think we will fight?"

The doe flicks an ear back at her, and stomps a hoof. That can only be an answer. That implies the question was understood.

She does not know whether to feel fear or relief.

***

Suddenly, relief.

Agnes is perched on Samhain's back, and she's given up attempting to ride elegantly side-saddle on the realization that firstly she had no saddle, and secondly that no one is watching. She's tucked up her skirts to sit astride, and after a dizzying moment of terrifying freedom, realizes she is relieved by the change: by the security of her seat, by the ease with which she predicts Samhain's movements by the changes in pressure against her knees. And most of all, by the sudden sense that she is an adventurer, in a way that a woman seated demurely side-saddle can never be, lovely though she is.

She is an accomplished horsewoman, but on Samhain's back the skills that are required to keep one's seat on a feisty mare seem distant and inapplicable.

The night is drawing near an end--the sky is tinged a sickly grey--and it is the magic hour of fog and creeping breezes, when the dew is distilling on the silvered grass and the owls sweep silently overhead to rest out the day. Agnes's favourite hour: the hour best suited to her tastes. An hour of gloomy morbidity tinged with the promise of excitement in a new day.

She'd left the house near midnight, slipping out through the window for maximum drama even though her parents could not have cared less if their daughter went for midnight romps. They inhabit a convenient, wealthy realm free of dangers, an insulated and above all safe place, and their complacency has bred in their daughter her craving for danger.

But as she turns Samhain--with a thought, not reins--towards the manor, she realizes abruptly how far away it is, and how dotted the estate is with copses full of long shadows.

Thrill rises in her. Samhain's eyes gleam like banked embers in the hollows of his skull.

The lands that had once been dull and dangerless from the back of the horse seemed now full of adventure and the eyes of wolves, from a Guardian's back. Only a fool finds glamor in fear. And she is a fool.

***

She is a fool, she thinks, as she sits in her sitting room -- for what else is there to do there? -- with her forgotten sewing on her lap. As any good lady of breeding must do during a mourning period, she has been working on an altar cloth. For the last three weeks she has been sewing in blue trim.

It has been entirely boring. All she has done in this time is sew and sit, and it is a wonder her corset has stayed so tightly laced, for the days have melded together into one long blur of eating, receiving what few visitors the manor gets, occasional walks in the gardens with Loras, and suffering the unending days of loneliness and forced time spent with her ladies.

By custom her period of mourning has ended. In a sudden fit she throws the embroidery hoop across the room, where it hits the bureau with an embarassingly small crash. A moment later she has gathered up her heavy skirts and flung herself down the stairs in search of Loras. Her girls, all plain, round-faced things from the north, her homeland (she does not trust the girls from Palisade), start up behind her, but are left behind.

She finds him in the summer garden, straining his neck up to eat the low-hanging pears on the tree. He starts when he sees her, perhaps unfamiliar with the fire in her eyes. He came to her (or did she come to him?) in the midst of the depression after Lord Falconcrest died. She had found herself in the Wardwood at night, in the middle of a rainstorm, with her hair loose around her shoulders and astride a snorting horse.

Now she sinks down on the bench next to her buck, and Loras regards her with calm golden eyes, chewing thoughtfully, the way deer always seem to do.

"I have been a fool," she says, hoarsely, "and to think I was here while the Masquerade was going on, here, in this godforsaken spit of land!"

Rumors fly as they always do, and she heard about the Masquerade, heard that the Fae had come back. Heard that Queen Anne had taken the responsibility onto her shoulders. She is young. Falconcrest is not young, but she is not much older, and to sit idly by-- to have shoulders unbent with responsibility--

Loras continues chewing, but after a moment his warm breath huffs against her ear. It smells of pears. He stands before her, stalwart, as if to protect her from everything outside. Ears fanned out, feet placed primly together, he is always there. Unchanging. Accepting.

Not a single thought is given to her late husband. He is in his grave. He is gone.

Gone!

She suddenly looks up at him with anger in her eyes. "You must take me outside," she demands, which earns her a rolling snort. "We are going to Palisade. We are going to the Swan. I will do what I should have been doing."

Her tone brooks no argument, though there is a thin thread of fear there; she has been here so long all of her time may have been wasted; the flyer that made its way all the way out here, to the manor, sits yellowing in a drawer.