Horses-Of Courses

"So much for the element of surprise," Renat lamented. He was filled with guilt. If not for his feral outburst, Ryse would have taken much longer to discover they were missing.

Dania seemed to read his thoughts. "It is not your fault. It's mine." For hadn't she chosen the room and the window?

"It is no one's fault." Alaron shut them both down. "Or at least we can argue about it when we are safe. We don't have long before the alarm is raised."

From behind the building, the trio began to move toward the edge of camp as nonchalantly as they could. "I'm shocked we haven't heard screaming already," Dania said as she tried to mask her fear behind an indifferent smile.

His gaze ever searching for danger as they passed through the tents, Alaron shook his head. "That girl wants to make sure of what has happened before she says that you are missing. She won't want to be wrong and look like a fool. So she will get someone she trusts to push open the door and then after that she will go and look for you in your laboratory. When she finds the guests we have tied up there...well...we need to be as far away from here when that happens as possible."

The Guardian wasn't exactly positive on how they were going to make that happen. His initial plan was to go to the edge of camp before splitting up, leave a false trail in the wrong direction for the abominations to find and then loop back to rejoin Renat, Dania, Mairwen and Eira back at the tree hideaway.

But with this little wrinkle, things would have to change. They needed to put distance between themselves and camp as soon as possible. The idea of splitting up now seemed a bad one after he saw Renat truly go feral. The brown wolf was not fully healed yet, and Dania was out of her breath-freshening rinse.

There was also the problem of Dania's scent. They needed something to help confuse the abominations. Perhaps they could kill two birds with one stone.

"The stables?" He asked Dania.

The woman raised her eyebrows. "Do you plan to steal three horses?"

Alaron shook his head. "Better. I plan to steal all of them."

The disbelief was written all over Dania's face. Mairwen had sent a crazy man to help free her. Of course no one else would have taken the job.

Her eyes turned to Renat. He did not seem to question the white-haired rescuer. Dania pressed her lips together. She had come this far. The lady would see it through.

"This way."

The stables were where Alaron had remembered, but he was still glad for the scientist's expertise. If she had known of a closer paddock, that would of course been preferable.

They slipped into the long barn just as the commotion outside was beginning to boil. Word was spreading quickly that Dania had gone missing, and descriptions of the last two creatures seen with her were circulating in distorted snippets. Quiet whispers eventually turned to shouts of alarm.

The trio ignored the rumblings as they unlatched each pen, letting stallions and fillies, geldings and mares of every pattern and breed loose from their assigned place. The horses were a mix of war and farm horses as well as some used purely for pleasure. It was truly a mix, which kept them from making a cohesive herd as they milled about in the middle of the building waiting for something to happen.

"Almost there..." Alaron continued down the rows, pressing each horse out into the main thoroughfare.

"Must we do this?" Dania could feel time slipping away. "We could have taken horses five minutes ago and been on our way."

"If we had left right away and anyone had heard or seen the horses, they would have been on us in a moment. This gives us a fighting chance," Alaron assured her.

Renat could not help but note nervously that no one was in the barn to tend the horses. The stable hands were missing either because it was break time or they, like the water tenders the day before, hated their job and did it poorly. 'Their foolishness is our boon, I guess,' the brown wolf decided.

Together, they finished their job unhindered.

Now hundreds of horses pressed up against one another, beating their hooves up against the ground. Alaron moved to the front of the group.

"Pick three," he told Renat as he cracked the barn door, "and hit their rears to make them run."

Having discarded the assistants' white smock and hat, Alaron now wore a brown canvas apron. He looked like a human stable hand.

The Guardian threw the doors wide and fell to the ground as three horses ran full tilt away from the barn.

"Help!" he wheezed to the nearest abomination. "Escapees!" With a desperate point towards the runners, Alaron pretended to pass out.

It took less than a moment for the closest lizard to take up the cry. "That way! They went that way!" The creature began to chase after the riderless horses. The scene had been a blur in the mind of the lizard, and he swore to all who would listen that he had seen Dania atop the white mare.

The camp began to move toward the three running horses, pulling away from the stable.

Rising from his 'faint,' Alaron smiled mischievously and returned to the barn. "Get two horses, please, Dania, and hold onto them. Renat, it is time for the rest to make their spectacular exit."

Suddenly a sound like thunder filled the air and the ground began to rumble with the force of pounding hooves. After the three had left, it took barely a nudge for the rest to stampede.

Moving to Dania's side through the trampling herd, Alaron pushed the woman up on the dark stallion and passed a lead and the second set of reins to a waiting Renat. The brown wolf immediately mounted the matching gelding.

"What about you?" Dania suddenly looked concerned. Was the strange man with the silver eyes planning to stay behind? Surely he wasn't planning to stall anyone who followed them like some one man army. Even he wasn't that insane, was he?

Alaron shed the apron and donned his black cloak once more. Then he climbed up in the saddle behind the female scientist. The worry quickly turned to frustration.

"I know how to ride a horse," Dania insisted. "You don't need to watch me." She was too polite to shove the man off of the saddle, especially since the horse was already joining the throng of the stampede, but the Guardian could sense that she did not like his proximity at all.

"You really don't trust me..." Alaron chuckled. "Do you even know who I am?"

"A crazy lunatic?" Dania did not mince her words.

"Even better." The man's silver eyes flashed. "I'm a Guardian."

He stretched out his cloak and somehow it seemed to grow, covering the saddle and landing lightly on the horse's rear.

Dania squealed as Alaron pushed her down against the seat and her world went dark. A strange warmth encompassed her entire body, including her legs, which were in their stirrups.

Before she could ask what he was doing, his body pressed against hers from behind and his hand came over her mouth. "Be quiet," he whispered, "we are outside now."

Through the cloth of the cloak, Renat's voice rang loud and clear, "Go that way! No that way, you fool! And then round up the horses! They are trampling the tents!"

The brown wolf kept one hand on the reins of his own gelding as he reared back, but still managed to hold the attached lead of the tenebrous stallion. The black horse remained calm, and kept alongside its brown counterpart. Its shape to the casual observer was somewhat strange, and its normally smooth back was misshapen with many ridges.

If one had even looked closer, they might even have seen an outline of two sets of legs down the stallion's side. But everyone was too busy to try to study where the horse ended and the strange woven fabric of the magical cloak began. As such, the anomaly led by a bossy brown wolf was ignored.

As Alaron suspected, the people of Taran's camp listened to anyone willing to take charge. They scrambled in every direction trying to carry out the nonsense which Renat was spouting.

"They went that way!...Get over there, someone says they saw them!...Don't be a fool, Sir Taran asked that we search all the tents!" The more he made his horse act erratically, the more the people of the camp skittered out of his way to obey 'orders'.

With precision, the two horses rode against the tide of motion, ready to make a mad dash southward as soon as they were out of sight of the camp.

They almost made it.