Free Lark Rising (Guardians of Tarnec) by Sandra Waugh

saw that the pressure pinning me was Rune. He lay over me, his great forelegs pawing at the dirt as he worked to keep himself from crushing me, to bring himself upright. His great haunches flexed and pulled, and then he was up, standing over my limp body, with his muzzle against my cheek, nudging at me. And the dream man was striding back down to the ridge, sheathing the sword he’d just wiped against the grass, glaring at Rune and coming to pause by my head, staring hard down at my face for a moment with an unfathomable expression.Abruptly, he reached an arm back in a wide sweep and sent his palm slamming down hard into my shoulder.
    I gave a great gasp of breath, felt my lungs fill with cool air, and I was suddenly looking up into his painfully beautiful face.
    My shoulder ached.
    “Your breath was knocked from you,” he said, as a curt and by no means apologetic explanation for his action.
    I didn’t speak, disoriented and dumbfounded. Three moments ago he’d stabbed his sword down on me. Now he’d brought my breath back.
    And for no purpose. There was no attempt to include me in conversation. He was turned, staring at Rune now with incredulity. He opened his mouth as if to ask the horse a question, and then shut it, lips clamped tightly over whatever thought he’d had.
    “Get up.” He ordered that of me without looking.
    I stayed motionless, and he swore again angrily: beautiful voice, beautiful face, beautiful smile—hostility piercing all, like little stabs from his sword. How old—nineteen years or twenty, perhaps? His anger aged him.
    “Get up!” he demanded again, still without looking at me. He was busy with something tucked into his belt. A cloth.
    I did not wait for a third command. I sat up and pushed into the grass to rise, then groaned as pain seared through my ankle. “I cannot—”
    “Don’t say a word!” He whirled on me, exclaiming with fury, “I
will
kill you if you do.”
    My eyes were wide, waiting for him to take his sword. Heturned back, the anger now making him clumsy. He fumbled, not for the sword but for the cloth, finally pulling it free with another oath. He turned back in my direction. “I said to get up!”
    But I was frozen in place, unblinking. To my right I heard Rune pawing at the sod.
    The dream man caught, then fought my gaze. Whipping his head away, he muttered something under his breath. Then he reached down and, taking the cloth, wrapped the thing around my eyes and knotted it at the back of my head. The moonlight disappeared. Rune snorted. A leather braid was lashed around my wrists next. It was not his belt, I noted with odd detail. It was too thin, too cutting.
    Not gently, he pulled my arm to drag me up, and I yelped at the warm shock of his touch, dangling there in his strong grip, caught by the force of it. Maybe my ankle was broken and the dark and the unbalance made me dizzy, but his touch was what truly stunned—an energy both delicious to my senses and fraught with a terrible pain.
    “What—?” The man was ready to shake me into standing straight; his hand trembled with the impending force of it. But suddenly he stopped. He must have looked at my foot, for I sensed him stoop over. Then he straightened. In a heartbeat, I was off the ground and tossed over his shoulder like a sack of barley. My hood fell over my head. The pack I wore slipped and banged against his back, but he didn’t flinch. The young man merely brushed my cloak away from his face, gathering it along in his grip, and started to walk.
    I wish that I could say I struggled. Or that I argued. I wish, even, that I could say it was my Merith upbringing that inspired some sort of silent dignity in the face of trauma. But there was nothing noble in my action; I merely lost consciousness. I remember sensing from his grip a piercing anguish, and a fleeting glimpse of a cup of spilled wine—remnants of some terrible story. Then exhaustion, pain, hunger, fear, and the simple act of hanging upside