Trial by Desire (Carhart #2)(79)
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.
Most of the people in the room Kate could identify only by function. The back two rows were taken up by men, pencils at the ready. Gossip-columnists, caricature artists, no doubt all determined that his version of the most sensational trial to grace the police magistrate’s bench would appear in the evening paper. No doubt they would reach their verdict before the magistrate’s gavel even took up the matter.
Kate sat for them, properly polite, her spine straight, her stance relaxed. Nobody would write that she was in tears, or that she’d broken down under the weight of the matter. No doubt there was another set of wagers running about her in the gentlemen’s betting books, and she’d not give those idiots the satisfaction of showing fear.
Besides that, in the front rows sat several people she knew very well.
The Marquess of Blakely and his wife sat on the left. Lord Blakely watched Kate intently. He was not frowning at her—which was a good start. He was peering at her, as if there were something to see.