CHAPTER 22
For the remainder of the afternoon and well into the evening, they traveled east together. Rhian let the deer set the route, but she kept the pace to a combination of walk and trot for the sake of the borrowed horse, to keep from exhausting it.
When she finally told the deer that the horse was tired, it stopped in a small clearing in the woods. A stream ran through it, and there was just enough new grass to satisfy the horse for a while.
She dismounted and stripped the tack off of the horse and rubbed it down with a wisp of last year’s grass.
She talked to the deer while she went about her work. “Will you stay with me, or will you be gone in the morning?”
The deer looked at her expressionlessly.
“George needs me,” she told it. “You’ve both been hurt.”
The deer snorted at
