Trial by Desire (Carhart 2)

“Stop!” he finally shouted.

As if the mare heard this command, her forward motion checked. It happened too fast for Ned to react, and yet it seemed to occur so slowly, he could see every leaf on the tree in front of him. There was a cracking noise; Ned felt a sudden sense of drunken vertigo as inertia slapped him against his mount’s neck. The beast stumbled. There wasn’t time to move as his mare fell, but still, Ned tried to kick free. His boot caught in the stirrup—he swung wildly—and the ground rushed up to slam into him. The next instant after that, the horse was rolling on him. Ned’s leg twisted underneath that crushing weight. He pulled away; his leg wrenched.

He pulled again, and his leg finally came free. He scrambled away, backward, his elbows digging into the cold mulch underneath him. It was over. He’d survived. His lungs burned and he fell back on the cold ground, expelling the breath he seemed to have been holding.

He was light-headed. He lay, a thousand little twigs poking his spine. He was a mass of cuts and bruises. Just beyond him, his horse let out one last panicked whinny before surging to its feet.

Ned felt a momentary flit of pleasure that whatever had caused the fall had done no permanent damage to his mount. But before he could clamber to his feet and rescue the reins, his mare raced off again. He heard her hoofbeats echoing into the distance.

Oh, yes. The evening had wanted just that.

This was not yet a total disaster. The beast was familiar with the area; he’d ridden her to Berkswift before. She’d go there now—and Ned would perforce need to walk behind. It would take him longer on foot, but he was no more than five miles distant at this point. Once his heart slowed down—once his breath ceased slamming into his lungs—he’d follow after. The schedule… He would make it work. Walking would mean delay, but there were more horses and a carriage at Berkswift. He would have needed them, in any event, to bring Louisa and her infant home. He’d be back in London hours before eleven in the morning. It was a delay, but it was only a delay. Just an unfortunate setback, not a catastrophe.

Ned took another deep, calming lungful of air. With that breath, he came to a very odd realization—his leg hurt. He noticed it as an intellectual curiosity before he truly felt the pain. And then it hurt like hell.

He vaguely recalled the twist of his hip as he’d fallen, the slam of his horse’s weight atop him. Now, with every last respiration, it felt as if his lungs were taking in acid in place of oxygen. It was a sharp pain, like a thousand shards of glass all stabbing his ankle with vicious glee. Beneath that, there was a dull, persistent throb, a pressure where his leg seemed to swell against his thick riding boot.

Deeper than any of the coruscating sparks of hurt, lay an exceedingly bad feeling in his gut. This was not good. It was so not good that he couldn’t even bring himself to think of what had occurred. He could only act.

His gloves had shredded when he hit the rocky earth. Slowly, he pushed himself to his knees. His breath caught against his ribs. From his knees, he pushed himself upright onto one foot. His ankle dissolved into a fire of pain from even that tiny amount of weight.

“Holy Christ,” he swore aloud.

Blasphemy didn’t make the pain any better. It sure as hell didn’t make the truth any more palatable.

He didn’t want to admit it, didn’t want to take off his damned boot to feel the telltale fracture. But he knew with a sick, sure certainty, knew it with the grinding pattern of pain he felt, pressing his foot into the ground.

Somewhere in that fall, he’d broken his leg.

The black despair that seeped into him was all too familiar. At least this time he actually had a reason to feel it. It felt like little tearing claws, that sure knowledge that he’d failed, that he’d made Kate another promise he couldn’t keep. He’d thought he was good enough. He’d imagined he could do anything. But that had been sheer pride. Reality now stripped him of his arrogance.

Failure settled about him like a lead cloak. He wasn’t good enough. Wasn’t strong enough. He was an idiot to have allowed Kate to rely on him, and now she—and Louisa—were going to pay the price of depending upon someone who was fool enough to think he could be a hero.

At that moment, Ned should have given up. Any reasonable man would have done so. He wanted to give up, to simply declare this task impossible so that he wouldn’t have to stagger through the pain that awaited.

But then, this wasn’t the worst thing to happen to Ned.

He shut his eyes. A privy, a dunking, a boat on the ocean. In some ways he felt he’d left a part of himself there on the water. The sun on that boat had scoured away so many of Ned’s illusions, all except one—when you needed to live, you kept on going, no matter how impossible the future seemed. And you didn’t stop.

Kate didn’t need a hero who could slay dragons. At the moment, she needed one who could stand up and walk.

And so Ned took the fear and pain yammering in his head and set them to the side.

“If I can do this,” he said aloud. “I can do anything.”

It could have been worse. Compared to that moment in the boat at sea, when his own will had betrayed him, a little thing like a broken leg was a picnic in the park, complete with beribboned basket. It was a baby dragon, belching tepid puffs of flameless smoke.

Ned didn’t want to stand—but then, he’d practiced doing what he didn’t want to do for a good long while. His leg hurt. Good thing he’d practiced pushing through physical pain before. When he shifted his weight, his breath hissed in.

On its own, he doubted his ankle could have supported him. But the stiff leather of his riding boot was as good as a cast. Well. He thought it would do. It was going to have to.

Before he put his full weight on it, however, he felt around the forest floor.

“Damn,” he said aloud, as if talking to himself would make the pain leach away. “I encountered enough branches on my way down. There has to be one here.” The leaves rustled around him in grim appreciation of the joke. He found a suitable piece a few feet away. It was crooked, and the bark rasped roughly against his skin. But it was long enough to lean on, and strong enough not to snap if he put his full weight on it.

He was going to make it to Berkswift.

One step was agony. Two steps sent shooting pains up his leg. Three… The pain didn’t get better as he went along; it got worse. It invaded his bones, his tendons; the strain of holding himself upright tested muscles he’d rarely used.

If he could do this, he could do anything.

He would never again need to flinch when he thought of his early years. He could win, step by step, yard by yard. Ned kept going. The first mile gave way to the second. The second, more slowly, gave way to the third. The third turned into a bone-jarring, fatiguing crawl uphill, where even the thought

of success couldn’t drive him on. By the fourth mile, the pain had deranged him enough that he imagined the sound of bone grinding against bone with every step.

He reached the top of the hill, much relieved. There was the fence of the old goat pasture where Champion was kept. Ned paused and grabbed for the rail. It supported his weight better than the battered branch he’d been using. He shut his eyes, and tried to remember if the fence wound all the way to the stables. It did—but unless he crossed into the pasture, he’d be diverted an extra half mile. If he could just cross this final acre, he might finally be within shouting distance of the house.

Climbing over the stile into the pasture was even harder than struggling uphill. He slipped on the last rung of the descent, and his bad leg slammed into the ground on the other side. His hands grabbed the splintered wood of the fence rail, just as his limb twisted underneath him. He barely kept from toppling over. Instead, he grasped the post and breathed in.

He could do this.

He could do this.

And perhaps the only reason he was muttering that he could do this in the gray of near dawn was that he couldn’t. The world swayed dizzily about him, even as he clung to the fence. He had no notion of balance any longer. He wasn’t sure which direction was forward. His mind was fuzzing around the edges, everything turning to uniform gray with the pain.

He wasn’t capable of taking another step. It really couldn’t get any worse.

And then, in the darkness of the night, he heard a sound. The stamping of hooves. A challenge, from an animal frightened because its sleep had been interrupted.

Stay away, that noise proclaimed. I am a dangerous stallion.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

KATE COUNTED close to a hundred unfamiliar faces in the courtroom just before eleven the next morning. Word of the trial must have spread overnight. Perhaps the drunkard had not been so drunk. Or more likely, the sergeants who had been on duty the previous day had boasted of the coming spectacle.