(no subject)

[matt_doyle]

The writing portions of my brain are very slowly starting to wake again, a piece at a time, though I am still woefully behind.

Some excerpts:

“I could order you to tell me,” Jordan reminded him for the tenth or eleventh time, keeping her fingers laced together so they wouldn't clench in white-knuckled fists, and wondering again why she hadn't. If she trusted him with her life, shouldn't she trust him with everything else? But she didn't, and couldn't – and couldn't bring herself to go the other way again, and hedge him in with paranoid orders.

 

“I'm trying to dodge your biases,” Casimir said. “I can't lie to you. We should be safer here than anywhere else on the continent, as far as I know. But it's tricky. If you're too hostile going in, we're less likely to get the help we need.”

 

“Yeah,” Jordan said. “I'm much less hostile when I don't have a fucking clue what's going on. Good plan.”

 

He gave serious weight to the neat, ironic symmetry of buying a hunting-horse from the superb stables of Heatherdown. But his pride stuck in his throat at the notion, and besides, the little martinet-baronet-whatever would gouge his accounts till they bled. There were plenty of respectable stables in town which he had no personal ties to one way or the other.

 

He had Gram – his eyes reddened by smoke and drink – drive him outside the city as it woke to the dawn, some hours before he was due in Parliament, and had just enough time to return when he finally settled on the best of three stable yards worth of stock.

 

She was a proud-necked blood-bay with a striking star and narrow coronet stockings. Her dressage was less than perfect, but her gait was smooth, and she went through her paces obediently enough, with the joy and spirit of an unbroken horse.

 

Damarhis considered naming her Linn, after Drakesbury's rumored stablegirl mistress, but this weekend was about easing himself into Sabric's circle of friends, not baiting a hopeless fop.