It is some weeks later. She wonders through the pine trees. The same blood crusted saddle strangling her girth, her sweat drying and itching under it, where she can never manage to itch no matter how much she has rubbed and bitten and bucked and run from it. The bridle is still there as well. She had stepped on the dragging reins long ago, snapping them. She tries to eat, but the grass wraps around the bite and chokes her.
The bullet holes, and the bullets themselves are still all implanted through out the entire length of her body. They are all puffed over with infection and flies, lapping at the juices which ooze out.
She looks like an abused nag to the marching redcoats that come across her.
Nothing like the demonic mare that rode the Assassin into battle. It's legendary, that man took down an entire platoon, he turned the tide from crippling defeat into crushing victory. That lone hooded man.
What about the strong beast that rode him fearlessly into battle? That carried him to the door?
They collect her and walk her back to their fort. Can always use an extra horse, and if she never equates to much then she can serve as food for the guard dogs and a nice, warming soup.
The horse boy dose not do much for her, he just takes off her tack and dumps buckets of brown muck water over her.
With the morning, comes the morning feed rations of a leaking bucket of water and hay she was sure belonged more on the floor of a stall than in a food box. And also comes the purple-pink-red-orange light, which highlights for the first time her wounds to the scrawly young boys of the stable yard.
And they gasp. She wishes they could find it in their day to do more than run their fingers over her and babble.
She should be dead.
She thinks she should be too. She thinks, maybe, she was for a short time there.
She was in a fight? The boys ask the men, like they would know.
No, she was in a revolution. She carried Satan into war so that he could show them how true horror and murder was done.
The doctor does not have time for a horse, but he comes to look (everyone comes to look) she is a side show, a wonder. How many more days will she last?
She lasts longer than them, for under the cover of the next morning's fog, Satan arrives.
She watches him scale the roofs and dispatch the guards silently, one by one, make a huge explosion, fight a pompous man, lower the flag. He heads out, flag replaced, duty done, taxes lowered, bodies sewn about the floor.
He is within meters of where she is roped, not in the stalls, the stalls are for the quality steeds, she is not even good enough for shade and a carpet of grass. He is walking, keeping his weight of his left foot now that she is close enough to see, when one of the young stable boys comes out of his hiding spot.
The gun is shaking uncontrollably in his young hands, she wants to tell the young foal to go home, to run home to his mother like he should. Why, he would be barely eleven.
Satan lunges and leans against her. She realises too late that she is serving as a shield yet again. The gun fires with a cloud of smoke and it burrows it's way into her back leg. She feels anger, burning seething anger, not at the boy, or the gun, or the bullet or the pain.
At Satan, how can he do this too her again? She never agreed to be his shield nor his sacrifice. She will shield on her terms, and run into death on her own command.
She snakes her neck around quick and bites into his arm, she hears him yell and she knows she has not only drawn blood, but bruised him, crippled that hand for many days to come.
The boy is clumsily loading the gun again, and Satan has a choice. Try and limp away as quick as possible, but die via gun wielded by child. Kill such child. Mount blood thirsty horse and see how fast she can run you away.
With a blade that came from nowhere, he slices her tether and volutes onto her back, grimacing through the pain. She grimaces through her own as well. She feels the weight, not of a man, but of Satan. He sit very differently upon her back. And like before, she knows, she does not want the man to kill the child, so she runs him away and out of the fort before the gun has time to aim.
And she runs.
Never stopping.
Never wondering how she learnt to read the man's ways. She was never taught how to understand a riding man's cues, but she did know that the sensation of the whip against one's side meant to pull the cart in that direction.
Somehow, her and Satan get along seamlessly. He leans or absently ghosts a palm over her walloping muscles. Through the morning, through the winding mountainous range, through the woods into a cluster of buildings.
Into Davenport.