Page 32 of The Horseman of Sleepy Hollow
A blanket draped across my shoulders, and I drew it close, looking up at the Horseman. Until now, I had only seen him by firelight. The sun turned his tan to rich bronze, and the wind ruffled up his already unruly hair so that it stuck out in spikes all over his head, like an inky, thorny halo. He wore a shirt now, loose like mine. A slow smile creased his cheeks and sparkled in his eyes.
"Warm enough?" he asked.
I let myself glow back at him, a smile neither coy nor cunning, but bursting with happiness. "I am warm enough."
"Then come. You shall meet Elatha."
His hand engulfed mine, and he led me down the knoll, to a pasture where wind scurried across the long grass. A massive black horse munched the green shoots, his tail swishing idly from time to time.
As Eamon and I approached the low fence, the stallion lifted his head and stared. Then he trotted toward us with a kind of dignified eagerness.
Eamon drew several chunks of carrot from his pocket. "Hold out your hand."
I spread my hand flat, as I would do when feeding any of my father's horses, and Eamon laid a piece of carrot on my palm. The horse greeted Eamon first, nuzzling against his shirt and chuffing gently, his long lashes slow-blinking over eyes as dark as Eamon's own. Then the horse turned to me, sniffing fastidiously at my hand before taking the carrot between his large lips. He looked away as he crunched it—a prince accepting the gift of a lowly vassal. I liked him at once.
"This is Elatha," said the Horseman. "Named after the Prince of Darkness, the Glory of Weapons, ruler of the Tuatha Dé Danann. My father's tales of him were always my favorite."
"The Tuatha Dé Danann are a mythical race, are they not?"
"The god-race of Ireland. Powerful beings. I have always yearned to be one of them, instead of this hellish thing." He tapped his collar. "But Fae like me are not of the Tuatha Dé Danann, nor do we have their power or their long life."
"Do any of them yet live?" Now that I knew dullahan existed, anything seemed possible. Goblins in holes, fairies in hollows—tall, beautiful gods with mystical powers and lives spanning centuries or more.
"A few may still exist. Most of them left Ireland generations ago, and the rest were slaughtered by humans. One human queen in particular, Queen Maeve, led a crusade against the Tuatha Dé Danann, and against all Fae in the land. Those that escaped her fled throughout Europe, and some came to these colonies—these states—for refuge. My ancestors were among them."
"You must tell me more about the Tuatha Dé Danann sometime." I stroked Elatha's smooth nose. His nostrils flared, but no flames or smoke issued from them as in the fireside tales of the Horseman. "Ichabod would have loved this—meeting you, discovering who you really are, learning your history." Grief knit itself tight in my throat, choking off the words.
"I am sorry for the loss of your friend." Eamon rubbed his horse's neck, his voice gruff with emotion. "But I am glad I did not have to slice off his head before your very eyes. I do not think you could ever have forgiven me for that."
"Perhaps not." I gave Elatha a final pat as he turned and trotted back into the pasture. "Can you tell me what it is like, when you change? How do you hunt down your victims?"
He braced his arms on the fence and looked down at his hands. "It is part of the magic. I am drawn to the one whose name I have been given, like a fox to the henhouse, or the tides to the shore. I simply know which direction to take, and where to find the target."
"Could they run from you? Could they simply keep running away, or fight you off somehow?"
"Unlikely. When I ride, I do not need sight to guide Elatha—he knows the lanes and forests now, so all I need to do is twitch the reins in the right direction occasionally, as I feel the tug of the magic. I usually send out my skull to survey the area, to discover the exact location of my prey and to identify any obstacles in my path." His tone turns hard and emotionless; he will not look toward me. "Once my skull is close enough to the victim, I call their name, and they are paralyzed by dullahan magic. So you see, they cannot defend themselves or flee again. Since I come upon them without warning, none of them get very far, or last very long, even if they do try to run."
I gripped the weathered rail of the fence, imagining the terror each victim must feel—helpless and frozen in place, watching their death approach. "Have you ever tried to resist the compulsion to kill?"
"A dullahan can resist for a long while if they are new to the change and have taken no heads. The more heads you have captured, the more powerful your compulsion becomes. So for someone like me, who has taken seven—"
"It is too hard to resist," I finished.
"Yes." He rubbed his forehead, still avoiding my gaze. "I did not fight Anika the first time, because she was justified in wanting her husband dead. She showed me the evidence of what he had done, and I was only too happy to help her destroy him." He sighed. "If I had known how quickly her power over me would grow, how many more she would ask me to slay—"
I laid my hand on his wrist. "You could not have known."
With another sigh, he moved closer, wrapping his enormous arm around my shoulders and pulling me to his side. I leaned gratefully into his solid warmth. "Can we stay out here all day?"
"I have work to do—firewood to chop, traps to check. And you should not be on your feet that long."
"We could bring blankets and pillows out here. I can relax under the sky, and when you're done with your work, you can come to me." I tilted my face up to his, biting my lip a little, knowing full well the effect of that expression, with my blue eyes and golden hair.
His face melted into the half-smile I loved. "Do you practice that in the mirror, Katrina?"
I let my lip go and frowned, turning away. "Perhaps."
"It is very effective, even with a 'cold-hearted eunuch' like me." The last words were delivered in a throaty male whisper right by my ear, and I could not suppress a shiver. "That was the phrase you used, wasn't it?"
