“He wants you to pet him,” Torin explains as he grabs me and pulls me in close, using his hand to press mine against the horse’s neck. “See? Look how happy it makes him.”
“I see no change in his expression,” I say.
“Watch his ears, look at the way his face relaxes. Look at how his face softens.”
I gaze at the beast, picking up on none of this, before Mickey returns with Tommy who is laden down with stuff. “How the hell did you get that so fast?”
“It’s because Tommy is the best,” Mickey says, wandering over and setting an apple in my hand.
“Hold it out to him. Put your hand flat and set it on top,” Torin instructs, but I decide I’d rather keep my fingers and toss it to him like a dog. It smacks the horse in the face, and then I decide that I will run back to the palace and lock myself in a room before he exacts his revenge on me.
Torin just nonchalantly picks up the apple that had rolled between the horse’s feet and slaps it back down in my hand. The horse stomps his foot, displeased he missed Torin’s face.
“He’s not a dog.”
“I was just testing,” I say.
Torin forces my fingers flat and slides the apple beneath the horse’s nose.
The horse takes a small bite of it a second before Quill perks up and rushes over, his lips quivering. When he goes in to take it, my horse pins his ears and bites at him.
“SEE! He’s evil!” I declare.
“He’s not evil,” Torin tries to reassure me while Mickey has to console Quill with a different apple.
Tommy is busy mixing soap with the water that’s in the bucket when Vero comes out to observe what’s happening.
“Finally stepping up in the world, I see,” Vero says.
“You can have him,” I offer.
“Nah, Vero’s the horse in this situation. I get to ride him,” Mickey says with a grin.
“How dare you speak to a god in such an undignified manner?” Vero growls.
“I do it because the look on your face brings me absolute joy,” Mickey retorts. “It’s the little things in life that really do it for me.”
“The more pressing issue here isn’t whether or not you’ll ever con Vero into carrying you, it’s that this horse is going to kill us all in our sleep,” I say.
Mickey rolls his eyes. “And he thinks I’m dramatic. Riley, it’s kind of embarrassing at this point. He’s such a cute pony.”
Vero apparently wants to offer his own input on this. “Both of you are embarrassments. Mickey is an embarrassment to the human race, and Riley is an embarrassment to sacred beings.”
I scowl at the man and give him a very flat, “Thanks.”
Torin is busy pouring water down the horse’s back before he hurries over and drags me to the bucket of soapy water. He fits me up with a death glove and parades me over to the horse that he forces me to begin scrubbing.
“He’s not made of glass, you can scrub him harder than that,” Torin says. “You need to get the dirt out. He’s quite filthy.”
The horse stands as still as a statue for the assault.
“He hates it.”
Torin’s eyebrow lifts. “He doesn’t.”
“He clearly does.”
“He very much doesn’t,” Torin says as he helps me scrub and then rinses out the soap. After that, he examines all the stuff Tommy brought before spraying detangler in the beast’s matted mane and tail.
