Free Marianne, the Magus & the Manticore by Sheri S. Tepper

though. I had already cried for Papa."
    "That was at your home?"
    "Yes." She picked at the edges of her salad, a spiraling rosette of unfamiliar vegetables, intricately arranged. "I was just learning to jump. Rustam already knew how, of course, and he took great care to keep me on his back. I was always afraid I was in his way, hindering him."
    "Is it something you want to do again someday?"
    "Something I dream about. I would love to ride again, if I haven't forgotten how."
    "There is some particular affinity, I am told, between adolescent girls and horses. Some girls, I should say."
    "Some, yes. I was very conscious of being... well, what can one say? Not weaker, exactly, but less able to force myself upon the unimpressionable world. Less able, that is, than Papa, or Harvey. Mama didn't seem to care. There were things the men did which I simply couldn't understand. And yet, when I rode Rustam, the barriers were gone. I felt I could go any-where, through anything, over anything. That I would be carried, as on wings."

    The look she turned on him was full of such adoring memory that he clenched both fists in his lap, fighting down the urge to make some poetic outburst: "Oh, I would be your steed, lady. I would carry you to such places you have not dreamed of...." Instead, he hid his face behind his napkin, managed to say something in a half-choked voice about Pegasus, leaving the poetry unsaid though the words sang in him like the after-sound of a plucked string, reverberating, summoning sympathetic vibrations from his loins.
    "I asked," he said in a voice deliberately dry, "because the house which we have leased while we are in the country has attached to it an excellent stable. The people who own it are vacationing in the Far East, and they left us in complete possession of their own riding horses—that is, once they learned that we are not barbarians." He choked back a laugh, remembering the oblique correspondence which had finally established this fact to the satisfaction of the Van Horsts. "I do not want you to miss the opportunity to ride with us this weekend, Marianne. I do not want to miss the opportunity to ride with you. I have invited other people, good friends, people you would enjoy. You would not need to be in the company of your brother at all. I will beg you, importune you, please. Be my guest."
    She could not refuse him. Whether it was the wine, or the thought of the horses, or the candlelight, or his own face, so full of an expression which she refused to read but could not deny, she murmured, "If you're quite sure it won't be awkward for you if Harvey behaves oddly toward me. Perhaps he won't.
    I know I'm a little silly about him, sometimes."
    "Do you think he will be unpleasant company for my other guests?"
    "He can be charming," she said offhandedly. "I think he is only really unpleasant to me."
    "Do you know why?"
    She flushed, a quick flowing of red from brow to chin which suffused her face with tension. He saw it, snarled at himself for walking with such heavy feet where he did not know the way, did not give her time to reply.
    "Ah, here come the crabs. Now we shall see if this is indeed a delicacy or merely one of those regional eccentricities which litter the pathways of a true gourmet."
    "Gourmand," she said, relieved that the subject had been changed. "I think a gourmet would not eat soft-shelled crab.
    They are supposed to be an addictive indulgence, like popcorn."
    "I wasn't warned," he said in mock horror.
    "Be warned. I will fight you for them."
    Makr Avehl could not have said whether he liked the dish or not. He ate it. More of it than he would have eaten if alone.
    He drank little wine, afraid of it for the first time in his life, of what he might say unwarily, having already said the wrong thing several times over, afraid of what he might do that would frighten his quarry.
    "Quarry?" boomed the Magus, deep inside. "I warn you again, Makr Avehl. Kinswoman." He heard it as an echo of her own