Chapter 60

HE DIDN'T speak to Dallin for nearly the whole day, giving noncommittal grunts now and again at casual comments and one-word answers to actual questions. It didn't feel like anger. Withdrawal, perhaps. He'd even stopped the habitual patting of his horse's neck, concentrating instead on the sky, the trees, the landscape, but not with that continual interest Dallin had seen the first day's ride north. If Dallin had been feeling unkind, he might have even called it sulking.

Dallin gave him the day. There had been surrenders to sentiment too many times already on this journey--if it weren't for sentiment, Dallin would be on his way back to Putnam with a prisoner in shackles and not on the run with the Dominion's Chosen--and the matter of the horses was just more of the same. The matter of the horses, in fact, was damned important, and Dallin wouldn't even think of selling them if it weren't. Just because the maudlin broodiness was making him twitchy didn't mean he was wrong, damn it.