The Seer by Rowan McAllister (reading comprehension books .TXT) 📕

to the stallion, if he’ll let them. He doesn’t seem to be tired at all from the long night. I’ll take the saddle off the bay mare and put it on him. I’ll ride the bay and you ride the roan. The situation isn’t ideal, but they only have to make it a few more hours before they can have plenty of rest.”

Ravi swallowed and eyed the horse Daks pointed to warily. With a grimace, he said, “I, uh, don’t know much about horses.”

Daks stared at him blankly for a few beats before understanding dawned. “You don’t know how to ride?”

Ravi winced, and Daks shook his head. “Of course you don’t. I wasn’t thinking.”

From a few feet away, Shura cleared her throat. She pulled a familiar glass vial from her cloak and waggled it in the air with a rather terrifying smile on her face, and Ravi stumbled back in dismay.

“Put it away, Shur,” Daks murmured tiredly. “Stop teasing the poor man.”

“Just saying,” she replied with a shrug before tucking it back into her pocket.

Daks stopped messing with the saddle on the bay and walked over to where Ravi stood nervously eyeing Shura. “I told you no more drugs, and I keep my word. Besides, it didn’t exactly work last time anyway.” He stooped and offered his cupped hands. “Come on. I’ll give you a leg up and get you settled.”

Ravi held the man’s midnight blue gaze for a moment, though he couldn’t have said what he was looking for. With a final sigh of resignation, he set his worn boot in Daks’s hands and allowed himself to be boosted into the saddle.

“Keep your feet in the stirrups. Hold on to the pommel,” Daks ordered brusquely after he’d settled. “Try to move with the horse’s rhythm, not against it. Keep your back straight and use your thighs to save your butt from too much pounding. We won’t be going too fast to save the horses some, and I’ll hold on to the reins and lead her. All you have to do is stay on the horse. Think you can do that?”

“Yeah,” he replied a little breathlessly, grimacing at the stretch of his aching everything.

“Good, because we don’t really have time for more of a lesson than that. If you think you’re gonna fall, protect your head, tuck, and roll before you hit the ground.”

With that bit of oh-so-helpful advice, Daks stepped away to help the others while Ravi shot a sour look at the man’s broad back. His concern was heartwarming.

Daks had removed his cloak and jerkin despite the early spring chill in the air, leaving only a loose linen shirt tucked into brown leather breeches. Ravi eyed the leather-sheathed dagger at small of Daks’s back uneasily for a moment before his gaze inevitably drifted downward. The way the supple leather trousers clung to Daks’s ass may have been just a tiny bit distracting.

He closed his eyes and clenched his teeth. He would not notice how well the big idiot filled out those breeches or the way his back stretched the linen of his shirt. Nope. He would not. He was angry, really angry, and he had every right to be. Every time he thought Daks might be halfway decent, the big jerk would do or say something else to piss him off… or his crazy partner would. These were not good, kind people. He didn’t know what they were exactly, but he knew what they weren’t: trustworthy. Who knew what kind of contract he’d have to sign, what length of indenture they’d expect him to serve, to pay them back for their aid on the other side. He needed to remember he was just as much on his own now as he’d been when he left home the first time.

“You ready?” Daks called from the back of the other mare, and Ravi scowled but nodded.

Without another backward glance, Daks collected the reins of Ravi’s horse and then urged his own into a walk. Of course, Shura hadn’t waited for them, so they had to pick up the pace a little to catch her. Ravi simply gritted his teeth and tried to hold on as the two horses broke into a jarring canter. All the while, dark thoughts swirled in his head about what revenge he’d wreak on Shura… if the woman didn’t scare him nearly witless.

THE RIDE to Urmat passed agonizingly slowly, particularly for the insides of Ravi’s thighs, his ass, and his groin muscles. Any other time, he would have been fascinated and entranced by the gently rolling farmland and scattered copses of trees that provided tantalizing glimpses of the wide river beyond. He’d lived a long time within the walls of the city, and the town he’d grown up in was south of the capital, along the sea cliffs, so the landscape was quite different. He’d never been this far up the Matna before, and the rush of its waters would have been both calmingly familiar and awe-inspiringly new if he weren’t fleeing for his life.

But he was. And fatigue clawed at him, despite his forced periods of unconsciousness. His head ached, his stomach roiled, and he desperately wanted to curl up somewhere quiet, just for a little while. Instead, he gritted his teeth, clutched his bag to his chest, and endured.

From what he could see of the others and their general lack of conversation, he wasn’t the only miserable one in the party. The initial blame lay with the dumb brute in front of him, though, so no way would Ravi allow himself to feel guilty about it. He might’ve even taken some satisfaction from the misery of his “rescuers” if it didn’t mean their tense silence left him with nothing to distract him from his own discomforts… and his heartache.

He missed Vic and the others already. Their lives had been harsh and even dangerous in Rassat, but they’d had each other. At least one of their little family could be counted on to sing