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animal, her eyes were openly weighing.
    I turned my back on her to change, but I could not help wondering how she looked at me when I couldn’t see her looking.

    And then we rode.
    With somewhat more ceremony than he had granted his humans, Talis introduced me to the horses. The other three mounts were mares and were named Heigh Ho Uranium, Roberta the Bruce, and NORAD. NORAD was not only Talis’s horse, but clearly Talis’s favorite. She was a small, spark-eyed animal, black with white speckles, like a stone made soft with frost, and she looked at me as if considering my weaknesses. As we rode—or as the others rode and I clung helplessly—Talis discoursed on the proper name for a horse of NORAD ’s color (blue roan), the history of the name NORAD (steeped in acronyms and antiquity), and the virtues of mares (the Pony Express had used them exclusively).
    Virtuous as mares were, my horse was a gelded male: meant to be “steady.” Right. His name was Gordon Lightfoot. He was a paint horse, egg-white with red-brown splotches, including one in the shape of postflood England around one eye. The eye in the splotch was brown, and the other eye was blue. It gave him an air of comically wise skepticism, like a fool in Shakespeare. When we had to head down a slope and I misjudged my lean and ended up with a faceful of mane, he actually sighed and looked over his shoulder at me. The expression on his face said: What fresh hell is this?
    What fresh hell indeed.
    It was cruel to make a novice horseback rider go on for a second day at a stretch, let alone to go at a steady lope, but with Calgary at our (metaphorical) backs, not to mention the charming image of seizing in the grass , Talis and the Swan Riders did exactly that.
    Apparently the “refuge” was about forty miles away—a reasonable day’s journey for the others. But not for me. The muscles in my thighs trembled and twitched as we rode through the morning, and when it finally came time to eat lunch, I could not get down. Francis Xavier—by far the biggest of us—had to help me, fitting his hands around my waist and guiding me toward the ground. One hand was warm and the other was air-temperature, but they were both strong and careful. The day before, the mere touch of Francis Xavier’s shadow had made my skin shudder. Now I felt very little for him. I remembered that he had killed my friend, certainly—I had lost none of the data about the death of Nghiêm ThBhn. I remembered the exact sound of her fingernails breaking. But it was as if Talis’s exorcism had dipped my memory as a finger is dipped into candle wax, briefly sensitizing it, then sealing it off.
    So I did not shiver in horror as Francis Xavier touched me. But the numbness that Talis had left me in the place of that horror was . . . When my mind paused on it, it was as if the floor had fallen out from under my heart. As if I’d walked off a threshold, expecting there to be a step. A stagger in the very core of my human self.
    Francis Xavier backed off with a silent bow and I lurched a few steps and practically fell into the grass. With royal dignity, of course.
    The day had grown warm. The two Swan Riders set to work tending the horses, loosening cinches and pulling off saddles, rubbing them down where the sweat of their effort had gathered on their necks and backs and legs. Talis, though, plopped to sit in the grass beside me, disdaining anything so mundane as work.
    Or, possibly, monitoring me closely. I could feel his sensors. “Doing okay?” he asked.
    I was curled forward, stretching my back. I suppose it looked as if I were folded up in grief, but it was only pain. (It was mostly pain.)
    â€œWell,” I answered. “I’ll never walk again. And I hope you weren’t looking for an heir.”
    Talis snorted. “Nah, I’m good.”
    Francis Xavier lifted the ceremonial wings from the back of his horse,