The Jack of Souls (Multi-award winner!)

Chapter 26 - Hope & Revenge

Love, like rain, does not choose on whom it falls. 

— Arkendian proverb

Chapter Twenty-Six

Harric led Idgit and Rag into the larger of the two barns, where he brushed their coats and cleaned their hooves as they munched the last of the oats he'd so fatefully sold Willard in Gallows Ferry. The memory drew a wry snort from him. How much simpler things would be if he'd kept the rings Willard paid with that day, instead of leaving them to Caris. Then in exchange for returning the rings he could have bargained for two apprenticeships and won Caris's regard without revealing a shred of the "trickery" she loathed.

As he piled hay for Molly onto a barrow and wheeled it from the barn into the dying light, he sighed. It was a false dream, of course. The only reason Caris had stayed in Gallows Ferry long enough to re-join with Harric at all was because the rings had changed her feelings for him. And if she hadn't stayed she wouldn't have been there to drag his unconscious self from the wreckage of Bannus's parlor wall.

Plus, he doubted whether tricking Caris by hiding his true nature as a trickster would work out very well in the long run. Such deception was how his mother taught him to seduce and manipulate, so it felt natural to him, but anything she taught him was clearly suspect. He doubted whether normal people customarily lied to each other when courting, and in any case seduction was a short term game and these rings did not appear to be coming off soon.

Better I show my true nature. It doesn't feel natural, but that's because of my mother's poison in my life. I'll win her regard on my terms, so the day we get those rings off she'll find she loves me all the same.

Love! He laughed at himself. What did he know about actual love? –Lust, gain, seduction, manipulation, all came as naturally as walking and breathing, trained and tested to the point they were unconscious habits. But what in the Black Moon was love?

And then it dawned on him that he was just as much a babe in the wilderness when it came to human love as Caris. 

He stopped in the middle of the trail, staring into nothing, astonished he hadn't seen it before. We're misfits, the two of us. She by nature, I by indoctrination, and neither knows if we can overcome it.

But you do feel something, another part of him countered. Yes, he did. But what? Lust? Desire? Protectiveness? Hope? Loneliness? Need? Are any of those love? Are some of them? How did anyone know?

The thought depressed him. Could they be a more hopeless cause? And those moon-blasted rings forced them together.

He looked up into the sky, half expecting to see the constellation of Fate's Web laughing down at him, but the canopy of blue was yet too bright for stars.

Molly's snort snapped him out of his reverie. He saw her ahead through the stately columns of the firecones, and resumed pushing the barrow to her. It wasn't until he'd dumped the hay before her that he realized Holly was nowhere to be seen; she'd pulled her picket and wandered off.

Shit. The ground had been too rocky and root-bound to sink the stake in deep enough, and the filly had pulled it loose. Willard would have a seizure if he knew.

It wasn't hard to guess where she'd gone. Back down to the garden and meadow to graze.

So much for rest. He'd have to walk back down the mountain to find her, and assuming he did find her, he couldn't ride her back up because Willard had forbidden it.

"Moons take you, Holly," he muttered. Everything conspired against him getting back to the tower where he could see how Abellia used her witch-stone.