Chapter 13 - "Kelsey!"
I had known, intellectually, that Lyra was fast. I had seen her in sparring. I had watched her sprint with her peers within the village. I had observed the data available and formed a reasonable understanding of her physical capabilities.
None of that had quite captured what it felt like to be the person on her back.
She ran like the ground was an inconvenience she had decided to work around rather than something she needed to account for. Each stride was longer than it had any right to be. Her feet barely seemed to touch before she was already pushing off the next one. The wind came at us with real conviction.
Her sky-blue hair flew directly into my face with every stride, which was an experience.
"Augh!" I said. "Your hair!"
"Hold on," she said.
"It's in my nose!"
"Then breathe through your mouth!" She barked back.
The village approached faster than I had expected, which was a sign of how fast we were moving rather than a sign of the village relocating itself helpfully. The dirt road widened as it entered the village proper, the houses coming closer together on either side, and there, ahead, through the gap between two buildings, I saw Kelsey.
She was running through the village center.
The village center had a well at its middle and a roundabout dirt path around it, ringed by wooden houses and a handful of stalls. At this particular hour, there were also: one farmer returning from his fields with a substantial armful of harvested wheat, several younger children conducting an enthusiastic and dramatic sword fight with sticks, two men examining something next to the blacksmith's stall, and a dog sleeping next to the well that had specifically chosen that spot because nothing ever happened there.
All of these things were about to have their morning significantly altered.
The farmer heard the hoofbeats before he saw the source. He turned. This was technically the wrong decision in terms of self-preservation, as it placed him directly in the path of the view rather than to the side of it. Kelsey thundered past him with roughly the footprint of a small storm, and the proximity and speed and general dramatic scale of a horse moving at that velocity at close range performed its effect on him with perfect efficiency.
His arms went up along the wheat as he went down.
"SORRY, CAPTAIN JYROHH!" I shouted, as Lyra and I shot past him.
He groaned something back. It had the general shape of a response but the specific content was unclear.
The children with the sticks scattered in multiple directions. The dog opened one eye, assessed the situation, and immediately moved out of Kelsey's way. The two men by the blacksmith's stall turned in unison and watched us pass with the stunned expression of people who had not included this in their plans for the morning.
Kelsey rounded the well in a broad arc and came out the other side, heading toward the lane that led to the grain storage at the far end of the village.
"She's going toward the village storage!" Lyra said, putting on more speed.
"How do you know that?"
"Because I know where food is and she's a horse! Why else would she run that direction?"
This was, again, solid reasoning. I was riding a barbarian child through my own village at something approaching horse speed, yelling apologies at farmers, and the person underneath me was making more sense than I was.
Something about that felt like a summary of the morning.
"How do we stop her?" I asked.
"I'm going to get ahead of her and cut her off. She knows you, right? She likes you?"
"She licked my face for thirty seconds this morning."
"Good. So when I get in front of her, you talk to her. Use the voice you use when you're feeding her, y'know, the calm one."
I thought about it. "And if that doesn't work?"
Lyra was already accelerating, scoffing.
"Then we'll figure that out when we get there," she responded, which was not the most detailed plan I had ever been party to, but was at least honest.
I got my first clear look at Kelsey, her mane streaming and her pace just beginning to slow as the lane narrowed. Lyra cut left, came around through the gap between two houses at a speed that made the gap feel considerably smaller than it was, and emerged ahead of Kelsey on the lane.
She stopped.
Kelsey, faced suddenly with a ten-year-old standing in the middle of the lane with arms spread and an expression of absolute refusal to move, slowed. The hooves changed rhythm. She tossed her head, nostrils wide, eyes showing their whites for a moment.
I slid off Lyra's back.
"Hey," I said.
Kelsey's ears flicked toward me.
"Hey, Kelsey. It's okay."
She stamped one front hoof. Still tossing her head.
"I know. I know, that was exciting. You can calm down now." I walked toward her slowly, hands open, keeping my voice at the same level I used every morning in the barn. The tone that meant: here is your wheat, here is your water, here is a scratch behind the ears, everything is fine in this particular corner of the world.
The moment I came to arm's length, Kelsey yelled and jumped over us with ease. Time seemed to slow down as Lyra and I looked up as Kelsey's shadows covered our face for a brief moment, and she continued her way.
"Shit!" I gritted my teeth, I went to Lyra and hopped onto her back. We ran to chase Kelsey.
Suddenly, when we thought she'd make a run for the grain storage, she made a left turn to the dirt path.
"Wait.. She did not go to the storage!"
Lyra moved her eyes and already knew where Kelsey's going.
"She's leaving the village!" She yelled as she made a conclusion. My heart sank for a second, I wonder how we'll explain this to dad when he gets home, I thought grimly.
"T-then..."
"We'll stop here! We have to!" Lyra's voice was serious as she gritted her teeth.
But Kelsey had already reached the gate.
Two village guards were having a conversation while walking on the dirt-path of Ytval.
"I'm just saying," the guard from the left muttered, tossing the twig into the brush, "if the Jyroh expects us to keep this place secured, he could at least talk to the tanner about the quality of these straps. One good tug from a bandit and my chest piece is coming off like a loose sack of grain."
The right guard snorted, not breaking his stride. "Bandits? Boy, if a bandit ever comes to Ytval, it's because he lost a bet.. Besides, one of the strongest people in the world live here, not like this place is easy for a takeover."
Thump-thump-thump-thump.
The faint, rapid thunder of hoofbeats echoed from their rear. At first, it was just a low vibration through the dirt, but the volume increased exponentially in a matter of seconds. The moment both guards spun around, weapons half-drawn, Kelsey rocketed into view. With a wild yell, the beast launched herself a massive leap, and landing in a cloud of dust just ahead of them.
The guard stared at the horse in disbelief. "What the bloody—?"
Soon after our horse, we jumped over them, landed and chased after Kelsey.
The right guard's eyes widened, "They're Thorskil's children, wasn't it? The ones who nearly got kidnapped?"
"HEY!" The left guard's voice rang. "Where are you kids going?!"
"SORRY!" I called back, the word already stretched and thinning as the distance between us opened up. "We'll get her back, don't tell our pareeents~!"
The last syllable went so thin it barely existed.
Behind us, the sound of the guard making his feelings known, followed by something that sounded very much like his palm meeting his own forehead.
"By the gods," the right guard muttered in disbelief. "Thorskil is not going to like this."
We ran for quite some time. Eventually, we reached a part of the village we had never seen before—maybe we were even beyond the village this time. Lyra's legs were still pumping, but Kelsey was undeniably faster.
Jeez, kid! I thought, still in disbelief at Lyra's speed and endurance at the age of ten.
The road outside the village ran straight for a while and then curved up and over a long rise of green hill, the kind of hill that looked gentle from a distance and revealed its actual commitment to the concept of uphill only once you were already going up it. Kelsey was visible ahead the whole time, her dark coat against the green and the pale blue of the afternoon sky, the distance between us slowly and stubbornly not closing.
Lyra was breathing hard now. I could feel it in the rhythm beneath me, the way each stride was starting to cost more than the one before it. She hadn't said anything. She wasn't the type to say anything about something like that. But her pace was changing.
"Lyra."
"I'm fine! Hagh..!"
"We can slow down, It's fine. You don't have to push yoursel—"
"But she's right there!"
"And she's a horse." I emphasized. "An adult one at that."
"Rghh!" She gritted her teeth, "How am I be able to be the strongest if I can't catch up to a horse? No, I refuse to go down!" she said, which was apparently the end of the discussion.
We crested the hill, and expectedly, Lyra's legs gave out at the top.
Her knees hit the grass and we went down together, the hill doing the rest of the work, and for five or six seconds the world was green and spinning and the sky appeared and disappeared in rotation and the grass was cool on my face and I had no idea which direction was down.
"Oof!" I exhaled as both of us stopped at the bottom.
I lay there for a moment, looking up.
I heard Lyra groan next to me.
I sat up slowly, and turned my head. And there, maybe forty meters down the slope, standing in the grass with her head high and her mane moving in the breeze, was Kelsey.
However, she was not alone.
The herd had maybe fifteen horses, all of them different shades of brown and gray and one pale white, scattered across the grass at the easy distance of animals who had nowhere to be and were not worried about it. They moved slowly, grazing, occasionally lifting their heads to check the air. The kind of quiet that existed before it was interrupted.
Kelsey walked toward them.
One horse turned. The white one. It moved to meet her at an unhurried pace, the two of them coming together in the grass and going still, and then Kelsey lowered her head and the white horse lowered its head and they touched, nose to neck, in the specific silence of two things that recognized each other.
I stared at this.
Lyra appeared beside me. She was still breathing in the deliberate way of someone managing their breathing rather than just breathing, but she was standing, and she was looking at the same thing I was.
"She... knows that horse," I said.
"Uh-huh."
"She must have been part of this herd before Dad got her."
"Probably."
We were quiet for a moment, the two of us standing at the bottom of a hill watching a horse find something she'd lost. I didn't know what to do with the feeling that produced. It was too tangled to name quickly. Kelsey licked my face every morning and came to the front of her cell when she heard my footsteps and pressed her nose into my chest when she wanted comfort, and she was also this: an animal that had run through a village and over a gate and up a hill to stand in the grass beside a white horse and touch necks with her.
Both things were true at the same time.
"What do we do now?" Lyra asked.
The question arrived before I had an answer ready. I opened my mouth. Closed it. Looked at the herd. Looked at Kelsey, who had settled into the grass beside the white horse and appeared to have made a decision about where she was going to be for the foreseeable future.
"I don't know," I said honestly.
"Augh, we can't carry her back!" Lyra grumbled.
"Yeah... no."
"We can't outrun her.."
"We established that."
"And.. we can't leave her."
"Also, uh, established."
"This is such a pain." Lyra crossed her arms. Then she turned to me, "You are such a pain." She spoke again.
"Sorry.." I turned to her.
"Oh, Kelsey's out again?"
The voice came from behind us and to the left, from the direction of the road that curved over the hill and down toward the village, the road that a person returning from a day of selling crops at the city would take, the road that my father happened to be walking along at this particular moment with his blue hair catching the breeze and the easy posture of someone who had not yet seen what was at the bottom of the hill.
Then he came far enough over the rise to see it.
His eyes moved from us to Kelsey to the herd to us again.
Lyra and I turned around at the same time in the same slow way. The way you turned when you already knew what you were going to see and were just confirming the information. He was wearing his brown overalls, and white stained shirt underneath. Above his head, a wide-brimmed farmer's hat covered his face from the sun.
"Dad," Lyra spoke.
"D-dad," my eyes widened.
Thorskil looked at us. His expression was the one I had only seen a few times: not angry, which was important, because angry would have been easier to navigate. This was something quieter and in some ways harder to deal with. The calm of a person who had already understood exactly what had happened and was deciding how to feel about it.
"Kelsey escaped," he hummed. "That much explains itself."
"Dad, I can explain—" I started.
He held up one hand gently, and then he turned and looked at Kelsey, still standing with the white horse in the grass, unhurried and entirely at peace with her choices.
He was quiet for a moment.
Then he put two fingers between his lips.
"FTT~TH~!"
The whistle wasn't loud or anything, but It was short and specific, two notes that rose and then fell. Forty meters away, in the middle of a herd of wild horses, Kelsey's head came up.
Her ears went forward and turned to the sound of the whistle.
Without a moment of hesitation, she walked away from the white horse, away from the herd, and away from her sweet taste of freedom. She marched in a perfectly straight line toward my father. Her pace was unhurried but absolutely certain, as if she'd just been waiting for him to ask nicely.
When she reached him, she affectionately nudged her nose right into his shoulder.
Dad didn't even blink; he just casually placed a hand on her neck. For a second, nobody said a word.
Then, Lyra and I let out a sigh of relief so heavy it practically deflated us.
"I thought we'd lose her forever," I groaned. My legs turned to jelly, and both Lyra and I hit the grass in pure, exhausted defeat.
Thorskil let out a booming laugh. "You two did well trying to stop her, but she's a stubborn old girl when she gets it into her head to escape."
"Wait a minute..." Lyra's head snapped up, her eyes narrowing as she glared at him. "Have you been watching us this whole time?!"
"Yeah," Dad nodded, a massive grin splitting his face. "Honestly? It was highly entertaining."
"Darn you, Dad..." Lyra growled, burying her face back in the dirt.I looked up at Dad and Kelsey.
Watching the way she was happily rubbing her head against his shoulder, I felt a spark of curiosity. "How long have you been working with her anyway?"
"Since before either of you were born," he said. He didn't look at me; his eyes were fixed on the wild horses on the horizon. His hand moved in slow, soothing strokes down Kelsey's neck. "She used to be part of that herd. I rescued her when she was just a filly, after a pack of wolves cornered her."
Wow. He really means everything to her, I thought, watching them.
With a smooth, practiced motion, Dad swung himself up onto Kelsey's back and looked down at us. "Get up, you two. We're going home."
Suddenly, Lyra's nose twitched. She sniffed the air once. Twice. "Wait..." Her eyes lit up with sudden, manic energy. "I smell... sweets. Is that... candy?"
Thorskil smiled and reached into his overalls, pulling out a small brown paper bag. "Yup. But since you two caused a massive scene and nearly lost our best horse today, you're grounded for a few days. And as a punishment, no candy for you."
"WHAT?!" Lyra exploded, leaping to her feet.
Slowly, she turned her head toward me. I could practically see the steam shooting out of her ears. The raw, unfiltered fury radiating off her was terrifying.
"H-hey, now..!" I stammered, frantically back-pedaling on my hands and knees across the grass while letting out a high-pitched, nervous laugh. "W-we can talk about this! Communication is key, Lyra!"
"Kyro..." she hissed, marching toward me like a predator stalking its prey. "THIS IS YOUR FAULT!" With a feral yell, she lunged.
Before I could scramble away, her hands wrapped firmly around my neck.
"HEY! None of that!" Thorskil yelled, quickly sliding off Kelsey to drag a screaming Lyra off my windpipe.
From that day forward, I never so much as looked at that gate unless my father was standing right next to me.
Some lessons, it turned out, only needed to be choked into you once.
[End]