Free The Golden Swan by Nancy Springer Page A

enjoyed. I wanted to spook, to fling up my head and run, but I knew Frain would not have been able to deal with that. He was still very weak.
    When we camped at dusk I was pleased by the journey we had come. Frain did not have much to eat, but he seemed hopeful. I grazed distastefully. Horses are like humans, they need always to be filling their bellies.… I hoped I would not be eating grass for long. And indeed, the next day before noon we found the road that snakes up from Jabul. It was only a gravel track, really. We turned left on it, northward. By nightfall, I thought excitedly, we might be at my mother’s dwelling, at Maeve’s house in the haunt.
    I sped along eagerly with Frain nearly asleep on my back. We were careless, both of us. We should have known we would meet robbers on this main road. And I was a horse, yet! They wanted me.
    They were quite close before I scented them. I snorted to warn Frain and sprang into a gallop, hoping to run past them before they could attack us. But I felt Frain losing his seat. The proud fool, why would he not hang on by my mane? I had to slow down. The robbers blocked the road, six burly men of them with weapons. I wanted to rear and attack them with my forehooves, but I was afraid of throwing Frain. I could do nothing. One of them grasped me by the forelock, and two of them dragged Frain from my back. He had his knife out—that was why he had not clung to me. He struck at them. But they were used to knives and in no awe of a one-armed man, and perhaps his effort was not of the best—they laughed at him. Laughed, at Frain!
    Fear left me. With sudden, stormy force rage rushed through me instead. In an instant I was a wolf, and I turned on the man who held me and sheared off his hand above the wrist with one snap of my powerful jaws. The outlaws fled, screaming. My eerie change alone probably would have been enough to unnerve them, but in fact I was huge—as big as the horse, Frain told me later, whether from wrath or from haste in the changing. I bounded after my human prey, caught up with them in a single leap, slashing at their rumps and snarling as if they were so many deer.
    â€œDair!”
    It was Frain. I stopped at once and let the robbers run off, turned to see him standing in the pathway and looking down at an outlaw’s severed hand, his face ashen. One glance at him and I was myself again in human form at last—I could not have been otherwise.
    â€œThat does not help as much as you might think,” he said as if I had done it on purpose to reassure him. “There’s blood on your mouth, Dair.”
    That which is honorable in the wolf is less so in the man. I winced and turned away, trying to cleanse myself with my hands. All that happened was that the blood got on them, too.… Frain limped over to me, sticking his knife in his belt, walking shakily.
    â€œNever mind,” he said. “You were magnificent.”
    We had better get away from here , I said.
    I fetched our packs and we strode off at the best pace Frain could muster. The track soon turned to a trail and wound its way up a slope. I saw tall pines rising ahead.
    We’re almost there! I exclaimed. Frain probably heard it as an excited whimper.
    In another moment I sensed the haunt. I felt it as a heaviness in the air, a slight chill. Trevyn had told me about haunts. The souls whose silent presence I sensed were those whose passions bound them to earth, who for whatever reason could not fly. But passion itself was purged from them by death, and they in themselves were nothing, only formless reflections—
    Frain stopped where he stood with a gasp of terror, and I saw the fear-sweat running on him like rainwater.
    â€œWhat is it, what thing is here?” he cried wildly. “I cannot go in there, I can’t go on!”
    Why did the bodiless shades undo men so? Trevyn had told me about the panic fear, the blind eyes, the madly running legs. He had not