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Logan nodded approvingly. “Good. Okay, let’s go. Follow my lead.”
He spurred his horse forward at a trot. The centaurs, meanwhile, were racing toward them at a much faster pace. Another minute, and they would be upon them.
CHAPTER 27
The desert air was hot, but the sweat lining Shannon’s skin felt cold as ice. She silently reminded herself to keep breathing, and she did her best to affect a calm, relaxed posture in the saddle, but such things were hard to do with a band of centaur warriors stampeding toward her.
She glanced around at her companions—Logan and Tanner on horseback, Rufus in wolf form—and she saw they were doing a much better job of pretending to be calm than she was.
Maybe they weren’t pretending.
A minute ago, Logan had asked her to trust him, and she’d answered truthfully that she did. But at the same time, she’d understood there was an unspoken reason for his words that went deeper than a simple desire to reassure her.
When Shannon was a girl, her father had often thrilled her with tales of his journeys and the many strange and fearsome creatures he had met along the way. Even as a child, she’d known those stories were heavily embellished for the sake of entertainment, but she knew they contained kernels of truth as well. Some of Shannon’s favorite stories had been the ones her father had told her about his encounters with centaurs. And the key lesson from those stories, which Shannon still remembered to this day, was that one must never display fear in front of a centaur.
If a centaur believed a person was courageous, they would show them respect. If, on the other hand, they sensed cowardice…
The sound of the galloping hooves grew louder, until it was like a roll of thunder, until Shannon felt it rumbling in the marrow of her bones. There were other sounds too, inhuman whoops and growls that brought a touch of winter to Shannon’s racing blood. She kept her eyes straight ahead, not daring to look at the warriors, who were coming toward them diagonally. If she looked, she might not be able to keep herself from crying out in fear—or worse yet, fleeing.
Oddly, Stormy did not seem to be the least bit concerned about the approaching centaurs. Shannon was well attuned to her horse’s moods and feelings, and right now the mare seemed every bit as relaxed as Shannon was pretending to be.
How strange.
Shannon tried to focus her attention on Stormy’s relaxation in the hopes that she might steal a bit of it for herself.
The thunder of hooves died out as the centaurs came to a halt, and Shannon had to squint her eyes against the cloud of dust that blew past. There were a few more sharp cries from the warriors, then nothing. Logan and Tanner brought their horses to a stop, so Shannon did the same. The silence was so great, she could almost hear the sweat squeezing out of her pores.
Slowly, she turned her head to look at the centaurs. She didn’t want to, but not looking would be interpreted as a sign of fear. When she finally laid eyes on them, her heart jolted with terror. She just hoped the emotion didn’t show on her face.
She’d seen centaurs before in Lamentation, but those were the so-called civilized horsemen. Some of them worked in town as blacksmiths, or they hired themselves out as cattle drovers. A few made their living as highwaymen, preying upon stagecoaches and wagons.
But the warriors she was now faced with were a different breed. These were mustangs, wild centaurs who lived their lives apart from any form of civilized human society. Their coats displayed a diversity of colors. Here was a chestnut, there a yellow dun, and there a white and chestnut pinto much like the stallion Logan rode. Their flanks were painted with handprints that appeared too small to have been made by the warriors themselves, and yet too large for children. Perhaps their females had put those handprints there, Shannon thought, and it suddenly occurred to her that she’d never seen a female centaur before.
All the warriors were armed. A few carried rifles, but most of them wielded simpler weapons. Some held bows and arrows. Others brandished long lances with gleaming blades of steel. The centaurs were known to be skillful forgers, though nobody was quite sure where they had acquired that skill.
One of the centaurs stepped forward from the center of the group, and Shannon immediately knew he was the leader. He was a blue roan with four white stockings. His long hair was also white, and his face was seamed with age, but his shoulders were as broad as any of the others, and his hard, ropey muscles showed beneath his lean and deeply tanned skin.
Logan rode forward to meet him. For what felt like an eternity, rider and centaur stared each other down in silence. Then the centaur leader spoke. His accent was strange, unlike anything Shannon had ever heard before.
“Why are you here?”
Logan tipped his head nonchalantly toward the ridge of stone in the distance. “We’ve heard rumors of ore in the mountains. We’ve come to try our luck.”
The leader’s cold gaze went briefly to Tanner, then Rufus, before finally fixing upon Shannon. She suppressed a shiver.
“You bring a woman for this task?”
“We rescued the woman from the desert,” Logan said. “She has consumption, and her husband was bringing her west because he believed the dry air would be good for her lungs. Along the way, they were attacked. The bandits killed her husband, and they raped the woman many times before we arrived and drove them off. We decided to bring her with us, because her body is small, and therefore good for mining. She can fit into places a grown man cannot.”
The leader frowned, and shifted his eyes away from Shannon. He gave Rufus another suspicious glance, then he made a dramatic sweeping gesture.
“You will give us your guns and your horses.”
Shannon felt a hot needle of anger pierce through her fear. She didn’t like the centaur’s harsh, demanding tone. Logan, however, seemed unfazed.
“Brother, if you take our guns and horses, we will die out here. The mountains are far, and a man without a horse is only half a man.”
“A man without a horse is half a centaur,” the leader said, punctuating the statement with a stamp of his hoof.
