The Horsemaster's Daughter

A wave of resentment rose high, crested. “I don’t have one.”

“You’re all alone here?”

She didn’t answer. He drank more whiskey. Then, bending down, he fetched a long-barreled rifle. The scent of danger sharpened. Was he going to shoot her?

“What do you mean to do with that?” she asked.

He didn’t answer. Instead, he cocked the gun and lifted the barrel toward the latch of the pen. With horror, she realized his intent. “Stop it,” she said sharply. Animals were sacred to her, and she wouldn’t stand by and see one slaughtered. “Don’t you—”

“I’ve a mad horse aboard,” he interrupted. “You’d best move aside, because when I open the gate, he’ll escape, and I’ll take him out.”

Eliza stood her ground.

Scowling, Calhoun lowered the gun. “Without Mr. Flyte’s help, the beast is a mortal danger to anyone and anything. He’s got to be put down, and it’s best done here, in this godforsaken place.” His haughty glare encompassed the marsh. Ever-softening light spread over the low ground, the placid water reflecting the rise of dunes and the forest beyond.

He paused for another drink of whiskey. Eliza scrambled aboard and grabbed the gun, using her finger to pry the shot out of the pan. “This godforsaken place, as you call it, is my home, and I’ll thank you not to be leaving your carrion on the shore.”

He wrenched the gun away, elbowing her aside with a hard, impatient nudge. He lifted the heavy latch to the pen. “Stand aside now. This horse is a killer.”

Eliza burst into action, planting herself in front of the pen, her back flat against the gate. She could hear the heavy breath of the horse within, and she fancied she could feel its heat. The smells of hay and manure brought back waves of remembrance from the days when her father was alive. She let her emptiness fill up with fury.

“Who in God’s name are you, that you think you can simply do murder right here in front of me?”

“Who the hell are you that you think you can stop me?” As he spoke, he touched the barrel of the gun to her shoulder, where a long tangle of her hair escaped its carelessly done single braid.

Though she’d unloaded the rifle, she stood frozen with fear. In an obscenely gentle caress, he used the barrel of the gun to move aside the lock of hair and the edge of her blouse with it, baring her shoulder.

“Darling,” said Hunter Calhoun with a low, false endearment in his voice, “I’ve had a long, trying day. I’m armed with a deadly weapon. You don’t want to cross me, not now.”

She ignored him and battled the fear, closing her eyes as the sweet fecund aroma of horse and the sense of a big animal’s warmth reached her, entered her, plunging down to her heart. She hadn’t worked with a horse since her father had died, and she had sworn she never would again. But the magic was still there, the potency, the wanting.

She should walk away now, let him shoot this hapless beast and finish his whiskey flask. Her father’s magical way with horses, legendary on two continents, had got him killed. Ignorant, superstitious men had gone on a witch-hunt after him.

But there was something the world didn’t know. The magic had not died with Henry Flyte.

“Step aside, miss,” Calhoun said brusquely.

She opened her eyes, put her hands on the cool gun barrel and shoved it aside. Then she turned and peered through the gaps in the pen siding. She caught vague glimpses, obscured by the movement of the scow and by the twilight shadows, of a proud head, arched neck and a cruel iron muzzle. An old rag blindfolded the animal. Moist sores ran with pus that coursed down the horse’s cheeks, and he swayed with a sunken-ribbed hunger. The sight tore at her heart, and the pain she felt was the animal’s pain. Rage at Hunter Calhoun made her bold.

“Was this horse mad before or after you muzzled and starved him?” she demanded.

“Look, I came here hoping to save him.”

“Well done,” she said sarcastically.

“It’s no fault of mine he’s in this condition,” Hunter Calhoun said. “He came off the ship from Ireland crazed by a storm at sea. Killed a mare and nearly did in a groom before we were able to stop him.”

“What did you need a horse from Ireland for anyway?”

“For racing and breeding.”

The precise things that had given her father his start. Racing had elevated the horse, but it had also been responsible for unforgivable abuses.

“And you’re absolutely certain this horse is ruined.” Even as she made the comment, she realized his opinion didn’t matter to her. She sensed the horse’s fear—but she also knew that the fear could be penetrated.

“Look, I’m good with horses,” said Calhoun. “Always have been. I can ride anything with hair, I swear it.”

“Lovely.”

“Horses are my life. This is the first one I haven’t been able to handle.”

“So you’re going to shoot it. Do you deal with all your problems that way?”

“Damn it, I won’t stand around and debate this with you, woman.”

She turned away from him and peered through the slats of the pen. She saw the filth-caked coat shudder. An ear twitched, angling toward her. And then she felt it. An awareness. A connection. The stallion could feel her presence. He sensed she was different from the brute who had blinded and muzzled him.

She clutched the rough wood of the pen, battling her own instincts. Her need to reach out, to heal, was acute. For a moment, she felt very close to her father, who had taught her to respect all living things. The horse made a sound low in his throat, and in an odd way he seemed to be pushing her, forcing her toward a decision that could mean nothing but trouble.

The dilemma lay before her, demanding a course of action. If she healed this horse, she would unmask herself to the world. As they had in her father’s day, ambitious trainers and jockeys would come calling, begging her to rehabilitate their badly trained stallions, and in the next breath condemning her as a necromancer.

“Get away. Now!” Hunter Calhoun tried to shoulder her aside. “You think I like doing this? I just want it to be over—”

“I can help you.” The words rushed out of her, unchecked by reason. The sensible response would be to turn her back on this stranger and his abused stallion. But when it came to horses she had no will of her own.

Calhoun gave a short, sharp laugh, and in the pen the horse huffed out a startled breath.

“You can help?” he demanded.

Eliza felt torn. By revealing her secret ability, she would end her own self-exile. She would make herself vulnerable to the same ignorant prejudice that had killed her father. She wanted to curse this poor, damaged horse for forcing her to choose. Yet another part of her wanted to discover how the animal had been hurt, to bring him out into the light.

She took another look at the furious muzzled creature in the shadowy pen. Her special affinity, which had always been a part of her, gave her a glimpse of the tortured confusion that muddled the horse’s mind. A wave of compassion swept over her.

“Aye.” She used the old-country affirmative of her father.

“The horsemaster is dead. You said so yourself.”

“I did. But his craft is still very much alive.” She made herself look the intruder square in the eye. “I am Eliza Flyte. The horsemaster’s daughter.”

Three

Hunter didn’t know whether to laugh or curse. It was a minor wonder he had actually made it to this godforsaken place. Having grown up on a tidewater bay, he was a good seaman and knew the shoals and currents, but making the crossing to the barrier islands with a wild horse aboard a clumsy scow had not been easy.

Now that he had finally reached the island, this ragamuffin of a female claimed Henry Flyte was her father. Her late father. Unless Hunter wanted to go traipsing off around the island, he had no choice but to take her word for it.

“Eliza Flyte, is it?” He tasted her name, let it find its way over his tongue. It suited her, somehow. In her tattered brown smock and bare feet, she seemed wild and a bit fey, quite unlike anyone he had ever met before. A darkling girl, possibly of slave or Indian stock, she had a flawless complexion enhanced by the silkiness of her long eyelashes and the blue-toned sweep of her indigo-black hair. She had eyes of some indeterminate color beneath two dramatic slashes of eyebrow. The expression on the pale oval of her face was a mixture of annoyance and compassion—annoyance at him, and compassion for the murderous stallion in the pen.

When the breeze blew the dress against her legs, he saw that this was no girl. She lifted her face to the light, and he noted a woman’s maturity in the clear, fine-boned features. And in her strangely light eyes, eyes the color of mist on the water, he saw a look that was a thousand years old.