Mindgames Ch. 28

Chapter 28: Learning to ride

Mariah hadn't considered how awkward it would be to tell Rose and Master Animal that Gabriel would be leaving, and that she would be going with him. But Rose just hugged her hard, and then demanded the whole story. So, in Gabriel's room, Mariah recounted her conversation with the Bearer. Master Animal listened silently while Rose broke in with exclamations.

When she finished, Gabriel added, his eyes moist, "You didn't tell them everything. You didn't tell them what you risked." Mariah hadn't realized that the Bearer had related to Gabriel his threat to her. She ducked her head, embarrassed. "If he had hurt you . . . " Gabriel said softly.

Master Animal's voice was not soft. "If he had hurt you, where would that have left Gabriel?" He was fuming. "What kind of stunt was that?"

"You weren't home," Mariah said, stung.

"That's right," Master Animal said, his fury rising. "I thought I could go out for an evening without worrying about whether you would get yourself killed." But he was looking at Rose, not Mariah.

They were interrupted by a knock at Gabriel's bedroom door. Mariah recognized the woman. She was a healer who had consulted with Gabriel once or twice. Gabriel had said that she knew more than anyone about diseases of the heart. Her name was Mistress Cecily. She was middle aged, dark skinned and green eyed, and she carried herself with the air of someone who had seen everything, and more than once. "Delarus sent me," she announced, not at all put off by the surprised stares she was receiving. "No one answered my knock, but I knew you'd be in here."

Mariah remembered that the Bearer had said he would send a healer today. Without thinking she placed herself between Mistress Cecily and Gabriel. Mistress Cecily looked at her without ire. "The Bearer sent me to heal," she said, "and that's what I intend to do."

Mariah reluctantly stepped away. "Go on, now, the three of you," Mistress Cecily said. "Find something to occupy yourselves for the next couple of hours. Gabriel and I need privacy." Mariah looked to Gabriel, and he reluctantly nodded.

Mariah started to follow Master Animal and Rose out the door. "Wait," Master Gabriel called after them. He fished in his bedside table for paper and a pen, and scribbled something quickly. "Take this to Stefan," he told Mariah. "It tells him that you need to learn to ride, and a horse of your own."

Mariah clutched the paper, overwhelmed.

"Get out, girl," Mistress Cecily said impatiently.

Master Animal looked speculatively at Rose, and took her arm. "We need some air," he said with a studied laziness. "We'll come with you."

∞ ∞ ∞

Master Stefan exhibited no surprise when Mariah arrived at his stable with Rose and Master Animal. "The Bearer sent for me this morning," he said, expressionless. Mariah should have expected that, she thought, but did the Bearer never rest?

"Your ribs are fully healed?" Master Stefan asked her. Mariah nodded. Master Stefan stalked into the tack room at the front of his stable and pointed at a saddle on a workbench. "Pick that up," he ordered Mariah, "and we'll get started with the basics."

"Wait," Master Animal said suddenly. He pointed at Rose. "Her too."

Master Stefan scowled. "Mariah needs to learn how to saddle a horse by herself. Your girl won't be there to help her on the trail."

"Yes she will," Master Animal said. "She's going too."

Mariah, Master Stefan, and Rose stared at him. "We're going with Master Gabriel?" Rose asked.

"Not we, Rose." Master Animal sighed heavily. "You. You're going with him. I'm staying here."

The expression on Rose's face slowly evolved, from bewilderment, to hurt, to anger, to a fixed determination. "No," she said, her voice low and firm. "I stay with you."

Master Animal matched her look with one of dogged stubbornness. "You're going," he said. "I can't come. I can't leave my mural."

"Your mural?" Rose sounded incredulous. "It's my mural too!" Master Animal gawked at her. Rose said, "It's your concept, and your art, and your . . . your genius." She paused. "But it's my blood! I took a whipping from the Bearer so you could get the revel room! Me, not you!" She glared at him. "And when was the last time you mixed your paints? Not for ages! That yellow in the girl's dress in your new panel? I invented that! Did you even know? And the red of the chair! And I brought you to the exercise room and showed you what to look at for your next panel! Even though my friends were angry at me, I did that! It's my mural too! And I won't leave it! Not until it's done -- no more than you!"

Two of Master Stefan's grooms had been oiling bridles near the entrance to the tack room. Mariah saw them look at each and start to quietly slip away. Master Stefan tilted his head as they left, contemplating. Would he exercise his right to punish Rose for acting uppity in his stable, in front of his slaves?

Rose saw too. She squared her shoulders and looked him in the eye, daring him.

Master Animal was oblivious to the interchange. He put his hands on Rose's upper arms. "Try to understand," he said brokenly. Rose turned her attention back to him. "I can't risk you staying here. If something were to happen to me . . . My father's girl, Daphne . . . She was sent to the dogs when he died, I've told you that." He closed his eyes for a moment and took a breath. "You have to go with Gabriel, where you'll be safe."

Rose wriggled out of his grasp and stamped her foot. It made only a muffled sound on the packed soil that made up the floor of the stable, but it nevertheless seemed to Mariah that it reverberated throughout the building. "I will not go." Rose's voice was deadly calm. "If you try to make me, I'll run away as soon as we're outside the gate." Master Animal shook his head helplessly.

"Perhaps I can offer some assistance." Master Stefan stepped between them, his smile only slightly sardonic. "I'll give Rose my bracelet. If anything should happen to you, she'll come to me."

Master Animal stared at him blankly for a moment as if he did not understand his words. Then he took a sudden step back, looking disgusted. "You'd make her a stable hand? And put her in a slave saddle? Never!"

"Rose would make an excellent groom, with proper training," Master Stefan said. "But no, that's not my interest in her."

"What, then?" Animal crossed his arms and almost spat the words at Master Stefan.

"You forget, Painter. I've tasted her cooking." Master Stefan smiled briefly at Rose, then turned back to Master Animal. "Being my housegirl wouldn't offer all the . . . benefits you give her, of course." His disdain was unmistakable. "But I would pledge to keep her as safe as any housegirl can be. Certainly safer than when she runs away from Gabriel straight to the hunters' dogs."

Master Animal narrowed his eyes. "How do you live?"

Mariah saw Master Stefan wink at Rose before he responded, "In a bach quad. Not a pansy among the four us, but we all have work assignments we care about, and an understanding that we ensure domestic harmony by not randomly torturing our girls."

Master Animal looked to Rose, who nodded. He hesitated a minute. "Very well," he said at last. "But Rose is under the Bearer's protection. He has to put his stamp on this."

"Oh, by all means," Master Stefan said. "We'll send Mariah in the dead of night to persuade him."

∞ ∞ ∞

Mariah had never worked harder than she did that morning. After Master Stefan sent Rose and Master Animal away, he had her carry the saddle to the yard. There were two horses there. A big gray mare was saddled and a tied to a post. Another beast, with a tan coat and a white mane and tail, roamed nearby. Master Stefan pointed at him. "That's Pal." He threw a blanket on his back and told Mariah to saddle him. "And mind Luna," he said, indicating the mare. "Don't step behind her." Master Stefan sat on a bench, leaned back, and watched her through half-closed eyes.

Mariah tried to fling the saddle onto the horse. The animal took a step just before the saddle landed, so its edge hit the side of the blanket and bounced onto the ground. Mariah tried again. The horse stepped away again.

The fifth time it happened Mariah looked to Master Stefan for help. He was dozing. She looked into the stable and thought she saw a head duck quickly behind the doorway. She was on her own.

Mariah took a breath to center herself, then stepped in front of the horse. He had big beautiful brown eyes. Mariah reached out and petted his muzzle. Remembering what Master Stefan had taught her the one time she had ridden with Master Gabriel, she put her hand on the horse's neck and stroked it. The horse took a step closer to her. "You like that, do you?" Mariah said, feeling foolish. She continued to pet the horse, finally wrapping her arms around his neck. "Do you think you could cooperate with me? Please?" She lifted the saddle of the ground and placed it on the horse's back. She grinned. "Thank you," she said to the horse.

"You planning on riding backwards?" Master Stefan drawled, not asleep after all. Mariah groaned when she saw the horn of the saddle was on the horse's rump. She lifted the saddle off and turned it around. "Be nice, one more time," she pleaded with the horse. To her relief, the horse stood still.

"Now cinch the belt like on Luna," Master Stefan said from the bench. "And mind you don't get stepped on."

Mariah examined how Luna's saddle belt went under her belly and through rings on the other side. Returning to Pal, she unfurled the leather strap from its hooks, stepped around the horse, and cautiously reached for it. She threaded it through metal rings and tightened it as best she could.

With a smirk Master Stefan grabbed the saddle by the horn and tugged on it. The saddle slid to the side. Mariah tried several more times without success. She couldn't understand it. She was tightening the strap as much as it would go.

In frustration she halfheartedly pulled on the strap while resting her other hand on the horse's side. To her surprise, as she started to pull on the strap the horse's side pressed gently against her palm, expanding. Mariah almost laughed. After months of listening to Master Gabriel talk about breathing techniques, she had just learned that a horse could manipulate its breath as well -- to keep a saddle loose. She kept her hand on the horse's side until she felt it move back in. Quickly she cinched the belt, feeling triumphant.

She bit back a groan when Master Stefan undid the belt, thinking he would make her do it again. But he said, "That's enough for today. Believe it or not, I have responsibilities other than watching a chit be outsmarted by a horse, as amusing as that is." Despite his words he smiled slightly and seemed well enough pleased with Mariah.

He lifted the saddle off the horse and carried it back to the tack room. Mariah followed him. "You'll spend several hours a day here from now on," he said to her over his shoulder. "My grooms will teach you to ride, and you'll muck out stalls for them." When Mariah protested that Master Gabriel needed her he looked at her without sympathy. "I'll not risk sending a horse on a long journey with someone who doesn't know how to take care of it," he said flatly. "Do as I say, or tell the Bearer to find another stablemaster to help you."

∞ ∞ ∞

Mariah met up with Master Animal and Rose in the revel room, and they returned to Master Gabriel's apartment together. Mistress Cecily was waiting for them in the living room, studying the medical text Gabriel had been looking at the night before. A slaveboy they didn't know was in his kitchen, setting food out on the counter.

Cecily marked her page in the book and stood up. "I've fed him," she said without preamble. "And given him a strong painkiller. He must eat five small meals a day. It's starvation more than anything that's making him weak now."

"No," Mariah whispered, stricken. "We did what he said. He didn't want to eat."

"You did well, girl," Mistress Cecily said kindly. "His internal wounds are almost healed, and you kept him hydrated. It's not your fault you lack the experience to know that healers make the worst patients." She sniffed. "My boy has organized food for the rest of the day. You will feed him every three hours. The painkillers are mixed in. If he voids, he can give himself an enema, or you can help him. Your formula was adequate." She snapped her fingers for her houseboy. "I'll be back tomorrow. Do you have any questions?"

Animal asked her roughly, "Will he be all right?"

Cecily nodded, and they all breathed sighs of relief. "He'll be fine. His wounds are almost healed. He wants to get better. It shouldn't be long now."

As Cecily started towards the door she turned back to Mariah. "You did well," she said again.

∞ ∞ ∞

Mariah returned to the stables the next day. Master Stefan informed her that she would be in charge of the care of Pegasus, until Master Gabriel took over that duty. Jordyn would show her how to see to her needs, but Master Stefan sternly told them that after today Mariah should do it without assistance.

When Master Stefan left them Jordyn furtively looked around to check if anyone else was about, then asked Mariah quietly about Master Gabriel. Mariah was uncomfortable answering at first, but Jordyn already knew basically what had happened. Whether she had heard it from Master Stefan or someone else, Mariah could not guess. Jordyn seemed mostly anxious to know if Master Gabriel was recovering. Mariah was happy to be able to set her mind at ease.

When they were done cleaning the stall, Mariah knocked on the door to Master Stefan's office as he had instructed her. He looked up from the chart he was reading and gave her a studiedly lazy smile. They returned to the yard, where Mariah attempted to saddle a speckled mare. To her relief, this horse was more cooperative than the animal she had worked with the day before.

Jordyn demonstrated to Mariah how to mount. Mariah imitated her as best she could, but flailed about a bit before finally getting her leg over the saddle. Jordyn led the mare around the stable yard in several large, slow circles, avoiding a group of boisterous humans waiting for their horses to be made ready for them.

Master Stefan returned to the yard after about fifteen minutes. Taking the horse's lead from Jordyn, he asked Mariah asked whether her knees hurt. At first she was puzzled by the question, but then she remembered the agony of her previous ride with Master Gabriel, and Master Stefan's disdain that she had not said anything. Since then she had daily done the stretches that Jordyn had taught her, almost forgetting their purpose. Now, she realized with relief, her knees did not bother her at all.

Master Stefan nodded his approval, and turned to Jordyn. "Teach her to ride," he said. "I'll expect a report on her progress." Mariah allowed herself to feel a surge of excitement, echoed in Jordyn's delighted grin.

∞ ∞ ∞

Under Cecily's supervision Gabriel rapidly gained both strength and weight. The haunted look left his eyes more and more frequently.

Rose repeated to Mariah the gossip she picked up in the exercise yard and at the food exchange: humans, and even some slaves, were openly calling Master Gabriel a pervert and discussing how he should be punished.

The Bearer responded with an official pardon to Master Gabriel, and, for good measure, to Mistress Pomona and Master Landon. That did little to calm the rising disgust Master Gabriel's very existence seemed to bring forth. Mariah worried that the Bearer's power would not be sufficient to protect him when he was well enough to wander the mansion. She redoubled her efforts in the stables, wanting to be competent to travel as soon as Master Gabriel was able.

∞ ∞ ∞

As Mariah and Jordyn raced their horses to the edge of the field Mariah laughed with the joy of it, and turned the stallion she was riding around to do it again. But Jordyn didn't follow. Instead, she pointed to the lowering sun. Mariah sighed, but trailed Jordyn back towards the stables.

Each evening Mariah returned to the mansion before dusk, and not only because the nightwatchers would be out soon. This was the time Master Stefan whipped his grooms. Mariah was never surprised to see the raw back of any stablehand who the day before had made the smallest error, or shown the slightest disrespect to a human. But often, it seemed to Mariah, Master Stefan was just a human whipping a slave because that's what humans did. Jordyn, who was tireless in her work and above reproach in her demeanor, sometimes appeared in the morning with her backside striped from her shoulders to her knees.

And then there were the slave saddles. Mariah didn't realize at first the extent to which the grooms used them, because anyone who rode out with her used a standard saddle. She gradually became aware that that was simply a courtesy accorded to Master Gabriel through her. Aside from their time with her, the grooms almost always had a dildo in the ass when they exercised their horses. Perhaps the thought of those saddles would not have made Mariah so queasy if she did not know how Master Gabriel had reacted to learning of them. She couldn't help seeing the stable through his eyes. Master Stefan's grooms, many of them her friends now, were punished and tortured daily merely because they had been born slave and not human.

None of them were pain sluts. They all hated the slave saddles and the lash. And yet, they were devoted to Master Stefan. Mariah could not understand it. Although they helped her learn horsemanship, and she helped them with their work, she could not dismiss her disdain of them.

Master Stefan sometimes rode out with her. When he did, he taught her skills he deemed she would find necessary -- how, and where, to light a fire, how to tie and hoist a bear bag to keep wild animals on the trail from eating her supplies, how to find the safest drinking water. His manner towards her, while often sardonic, was patient. He never touched her except to show her how to do something. He shrugged off mistakes that he would have punished his grooms for. In short, he was kind to her. But Mariah could never forget what he did to his own slaves.

One day Master Stefan brought Mariah to a pond in the woods on the far side of the arboretum. As they followed a trail around the pond Mariah thought he was in an odd mood. He pointed out commonplaces such as the blue shell of a broken robin's egg, and a cloud shaped like a man's hand. After a time they stopped to water the horses. When they had finished, Master Stefan squinted at Mariah. "Lead us home," he said.

Puzzled, Mariah backed her horse from the pond and steered him back the way they had come. Counting down the five paths they had passed, she turned off at the sixth. She rode straight until she came to the fallen oak tree. There she led them to the left, and then right at a crumbling fence. When they emerged from the woods Stefan stared at her with unmitigated amazement.

"You've been here before?" he asked.

"No, Master," Mariah said.

"How did you know your way out then? It wasn't the horse -- Cracker couldn't find her way out of an open gate."

Mariah shrugged. "I paid attention going in." Master Stefan cocked his head, appraising her. Mariah felt compelled to explain. "I spent my life plotting to run away. I always studied where I was, and where I had been, and where I was going. Now it's just habit."

Suddenly Master Stefan grinned. "Even when I was distracting you," he said. For once there was nothing sardonic about him, just sheer admiration of her.

Mariah understood then his grooms' dedication to him. With that grin he had made her feel as if he knew her and accepted her and liked her. She couldn't help grinning back.